Did Max Weber's Agony and Ecstasy Influence His Scholarship?

When exploring the intellectual history of a discipline, one cannot help but wonder about the “real” person behind the scholarship. To what extent do personal life experiences influence a scholar's theories, conceptualizations, and expectations? Max Weber, the German scholar whose intellectual curiosity was, at least partially, inspired by strong personal anxieties, became one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. His own intellectual and personal obsessions, along with the efforts of his wife and colleagues to present his work to a larger audience, had much to do with who he was, as well as the body of scholarship that he created.     

A Pilot Assessment of a School‐Based Youth Court in a Resource‐Poor African‐American Urban School District: Lessons Learned From Youth Court Volunteers

This study assesses the benefits of youth court participation for volunteers (N = 14) serving as jurors in an urban school‐based youth court. Focus group and questionnaire data indicate that volunteers are capable of providing more effective sanctioning decisions than adults. Volunteers reported developing citizenship skills including learning about the law and decision‐making skills. The youth court leaders developed self‐confidence and maturity while learning the conflict resolution skills necessary for rendering dispositions and conducting trials. We interpret our findings within the context of the youth court literature, the issue of the school‐to‐prison pipeline, and Elijah Anderson's analysis of the Code of the Street.     

Whose Whales? Developing countries and the right to use whales by non‐lethal means

Abstract

While the clash between whaling and anti‐whaling interests in international fora, especially the International Whaling Commission (IWC), has escalated over the last two decades, very little attention, if any, has been paid to the active participation of developing country representatives and agencies (both governmental and non‐governmental) in the issues surrounding whale conservation, research and sustainable use. The failure to recognize the interests of developing nations in non‐lethal use of whales, as well as their marginalization in the IWC decision‐making process, has contravened their sovereign rights and thwarted efforts to develop a solid consensus on many critical issues.     

The Determinants of Vote Intentions in Portugal

This paper offers new insights on theinteractions between economics and politicsin Portugal. We use two unexplored datasets consisting of monthly polls on voteintentions for the main political partiesin Portugal and responses to a consumersurvey containing a battery of questions oneconomic evaluations. The analysis coversthe interval from 1986 to 2001. We findthat: (1) right-wing governments arepenalized for higher inflation while theleft-wing ones are not, (2) left-winggovernments are more penalized forincreases in the unemployment rate; (3)voters base their evaluations ofincumbents' performances on perceptions ofpast and current economic conditions,rather than on expected future economicoutcomes.     

Decontamination procedures for drugs of abuse in hair: are they sufficient?

This paper reviews the methods for decontaminating hair exposed to external solutions of drugs of abuse. Exposure of hair to cocaine at 1 μg/ml for 5 min is sufficient to contaminate hair, yet decontamination is a very slow process. Using externally contaminated hair, a number of decontamination procedures were attempted, and none removed all the contamination. The percentage of external contamination removed depended on the hair type, with thick black hair being the most resistant to decontamination. Hair treated by dying incorporated externally applied drugs differently, depending on the hair type. Thick black hair became more absorbent whereas thin brown hair became less absorbent. Kinetic wash criteria are evaluated for their ability/inability to determine if hair has been contaminated from external sources. A theoretical framework for the incorporation and removal of drugs from hair is discussed, and the hypothesis that inaccessible domains exist in hair which trap drugs is critically examined. The results presented in this paper strongly suggest that much more information on the decontamination of hair and the differentiation of exogenously and endogenously incorporated drugs is needed before hair analysis can be employed in most forensic applications. We propose that the radioactive tracer methods discussed herein are well suited for evaluating any new decontamination or extraction technique.