AFTERWORD: CROSS-CULTURAL IMPLICATIONS OF JAPANESE HERITAGE LANGUAGE POLICIES AND PRACTICES

Scholars of regions where multiple languages are spoken have much to gain by considering heritage language education, individual identity, and state power through these ethnographic and historical cases that focus on Japan and the Japanese diaspora. The articles in this two-part collection offer insights into the interrelationships of linguistic hierarchies and political economy, the navigation of ethnic and racial subjectivities, and the ways children and adolescents claim belonging to various communities through their linguistic practices. The articles interrogate not only heritage but remembrance and the ways individuals may produce identity through language in everyday interactions and institutional settings.     

Genomic research and incidental findings.

The Human Genome Project showed that there is significant genetic variation within the population. Current research is accumulating large databases that may reveal genetic variations associated with disease or health risks, even if not intended as part of the study design. These incidental findings create legal, ethical, and financial challenges for researchers. Current federal and international guidelines are not adequate. Plans for dealing with incidental findings need to be established in the study design and reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board.     

The impact of the right to refuse treatment in a forensic patient population: six-month review

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found that 29 percent of patients already on psychotropic medication initially refused further treatment as opposed to 75 percent of newly admitted patients. Of refusers, 32 percent eventually resumed taking medication voluntarily; courts overturned the refusals of all the 51 percent who maintained their refusals, after an average delay of over a month. The length of procedural delays actually increased over the six months of the study as the courts learned of the decision. The authors compare their findings with other reported studies of implementation of right to refuse treatment decisions and discuss differences between the right to refuse treatment for civilly and criminally committed patients.     

Routes and paths of comparison and choice

This paper studies aspects of sequential choice (and elimination) through the ‘routewise’ application of choice. (A choice is a mapping of the subsets of a set X into their respective subsets.) This approach sheds some further light on the ‘path-independence’ of choice, as well as on the logical structure of several rationality criteria for choice, as expressed through the properties of the comparison (or preference relation) revealed by a choice. The results bear particular relevance to the theory of collective choice.