Fatalities associated with home-made pipe bombs in Northern Ireland

Pipe bombs are crudely constructed improvized explosive devices which are easily made at home. They are increasingly used by terrorists and others, and may inflict serious injuries and cause death. Four fatalities have occurred in association with their use in Northern Ireland between 1998 and 2002. In 2 cases, death was due to penetrating shrapnel injuries to the chest causing laceration of the great vessels, and a third fatality occurred due to a bomb fragment penetrating the cranial cavity. A pipe bomb exploded close to the back of the head of a fourth victim and this was associated with a severe brain injury. The pathologist was able to determine the position of the victim in relation to the explosion by interpreting the pattern of injuries. It seems likely that 2 of the victims had been involved in the construction, transport, or use of the devices. A third victim was entirely innocent and had been in the process of removing a pipe bomb, which had been thrown through the window of her home, when it exploded. The fourth victim was a member of the security forces who had been struck by a bomb fragment, in the region of the right eye, during a period of sectarian unrest.     

How Should We Estimate the Performance Effect of Management? Comparing Impacts of Public Managers’ and Frontline Employees’ Perceptions of Management

Many areas of public management research are dominated by a top-focused perspective in which emphasis is placed on the notion that managers themselves are usually the best sources of information about managerial behavior. Outside of the leadership literature, managers are also the typical survey respondents in public management studies. An alternative perspective on management can be provided by subordinates’ perceptions of what management is doing. Surveys of subordinates and of managers each pose potential advantages and potential disadvantages when it comes to measuring management, and each approach is likely to prove more fruitful for measuring certain management functions. Using a unique data set of parallel surveys on management with managers and their subordinates as respondents, we examine the differences and relationships between Danish school managers’ and teachers’ perceptions of management functions and the implications of such relationships for organizational performance. We find a surprisingly low correlation between manager and teacher responses regarding the same management functions. Teacher responses are better predictors of student performance for management aspects that are visible to and mediated by teachers. However, manager responses better predict performance for manager expectations that are less visible to employees.     

The Balance‐Sample Size Frontier in Matching Methods for Causal Inference

We propose a simplified approach to matching for causal inference that simultaneously optimizes balance (similarity between the treated and control groups) and matched sample size. Existing approaches either fix the matched sample size and maximize balance or fix balance and maximize sample size, leaving analysts to settle for suboptimal solutions or attempt manual optimization by iteratively tweaking their matching method and rechecking balance. To jointly maximize balance and sample size, we introduce the matching frontier, the set of matching solutions with maximum possible balance for each sample size. Rather than iterating, researchers can choose matching solutions from the frontier for analysis in one step. We derive fast algorithms that calculate the matching frontier for several commonly used balance metrics. We demonstrate this approach with analyses of the effect of sex on judging and job training programs that show how the methods we introduce can extract new knowledge from existing data sets.     

From Angels to Humans: Law,Coercion, and the Society of Angels Thought Experiment

Law and Philosophy - Whether legal systems are necessarily coercive raises normative concerns. Coercion carries a presumption of illegitimacy and a special justificatory burden. If legal systems...     

Symposium,Cannabis—Legal,Ethical, and Compliance Issues: Introduction

This introduction reviews six articles presented at the 2020 symposium, “Legal, Ethical, and Compliance Issues in Emerging Markets: Cannabis in the States.” Scholars from across the United States and Canada presented research using the lens of law and strategy, ethics, and compliance to focus on the U.S. cannabis industry. The articles are discussed within the framework of institutional voids common to emerging markets, which may include a lack of a fully developed regulatory system and issues related to financial markets. These institutional problems create complexity for consumers, producers, municipalities, and state governments in this industry, and make success for this market segment more challenging. The introduction contributes to the discussion by reviewing securities litigation involving the cannabis industry generally and specifically in light of some of the issues identified by authors in the special issue.     

SOUTH EAST ASIA

A brief account of the events leading up to the fall of the Shah, followed by an examination of how those events were seen and evaluated by the British government, especially the Foreign Office department concerned, of which Ivor Lucas was the head. Against this background he also provides an assessment of how far the British Government had realistic alternative policy options.