Ethyl glucuronide: unusual distribution between head hair and pubic hair

Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) is a minor metabolite of ethanol that can be detected in hair. In some specific situations, head hair can be missing, and therefore, alternative anatomical locations of hair are of interest. In this study, paired hair specimens (head hair and pubic hair) from eight social drinkers were analyzed for EtG. Each sample was decontaminated by two dichloromethane bathes (5 ml) for 2 min. After cutting into small pieces, about 50 mg of hair was incubated in 2 ml water in the presence of 10 ng of EtG-d5, used as internal standard and submitted to ultra-sonication for 2 h. The aqueous phase was extracted by SPE using Oasis MAX columns. The hair extract was separated on an ACQUITY BEH HILIC column using a gradient of acetonitrile and formate buffer. Detection was based on two daughter ions: transitions m/z 221-85 and 75 and m/z 226-75 for EtG and the IS, respectively. This laboratory is using a positive cut-off at 50 pg/mg. All eight head hair specimens were negative for EtG at a limit of quantitation fixed at 10 pg/mg. Surprisingly, EtG was identified at high concentrations in pubic hair, in the range 12-1370 pg/mg. It appears, therefore, that it is not possible to document the drinking status of a subject by simply switching from head hair to pubic hair.     

Modus Vivendi: Liberalism for the Coming Ages

Migration and the global media have mixed up all the old cultures into a hybrid brew. How will aging and shrinking societies that need immigrants to survive cope with this new culture? What political philosophy fits this new reality?     

People with disabilities working in the disability sector in Timor Leste: a study of ‘lived experience’ using PhotoVoice

Perspectives on disability originating from non-Western cultures are beginning to appear in disability literature, however discussions may become lost in rhetoric unless grounded in experiences of people with disabilities themselves. The purpose of this study was to investigate the lived experience of physical disability in Timor Leste with the assistance of a group of Timorese participants with disabilities who were employed in the disability sector. These participants recounted experiences of disability from their own lives together with their observations of people with disabilities living in remote parts of Timor Leste who often lived with stigma or deprivation. The participants thus described their own lived experiences against a backdrop of a non-Western culture. A picture emerged of a stigmatising culture where acceptance of disability is uncommon yet where significant attempts are being made to change attitudes to disability within the culture of Timor Leste.     

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt,inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.     

Perceptions of coercion in interrogation: comparing expert and lay opinions

ABSTRACT

When confessions are entered into evidence in criminal courts, issues of coercion and voluntariness are important and often contested matters. Occasionally, defense attorneys proffer expert witnesses to testify about the coercive pressures of an interrogation and the risk of a false confession. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it does not inform the jury beyond its common knowledge. In our effort to test this judicial assumption about common knowledge, we surveyed jury-eligible laypeople (n?=?67) and social scientists specializing in interrogation and confessions (n?=?54) regarding their opinions about the coerciveness of prohibited interrogation tactics, maximization techniques, minimization techniques, and suspect risk factors and compared their ratings with a set of independent t tests. Laypeople gave lower ratings to the coerciveness of all sets of items representing interrogation techniques, and lower ratings to the vulnerabilities associated with suspect risk factors, as compared to social science experts. The disparities between laypeople’s and experts’ perceptions of coercion in interrogations demonstrate that such issues are not fully within the common knowledge of prospective jurors, and suggest the need to provide jurors with expert witness guidance when tasked with evaluating confession evidence.     

Introduction: Global Processes, National Institutions, Local Bricolage: Shaping Law in an Era of Globalization

The articles by Carruthers and Halliday and by Hagan, Levi, and Ferrales in the present issue of Law and Social Inquiry provide a wonderful opportunity to carry out a brief reflection on the broader field of research on globalization and law. As the discussant and organizer/chair, respectively, of a panel on "Law between Globalization and National Institutions," from which these two articles emerged, we use the following pages to: (1) show how both articles exemplify, in two different ways, what we call the "process turn" in globalization research, (2) identify four theoretical themes these articles speak to, relating them to the broader literature, and (3) draw some lessons for future law and society scholarship in an age of globalization. ¹