Capacity Building as an Instrument of Institutional Reform: Improving the Quality of Higher Education through Academic Audits in the UK, New Zealand, Sweden, and Hong Kong

As countries convert from state to market-centered public policies, there is increasing interest in new forms of public accountability. Capacity building initiatives that reform institutional frameworks are useful policy instruments during this period of transition. What are the impacts and implementation problems characteristic of this approach? This article reviews the experience with "Academic Audit," a capacity building accountability instrument for universities adopted in the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, and Hong Kong. Academic audits altered the incentives for cooperative behavior among faculty members to improve student learning. Identified implementation problems included: training for the new process, the uncertainty of capacity building benefits, and the central role of information.     

Political Parties,Australia and the U.S. Alliance: 1976-2016

ABSTRACT

What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.     

Back to the factory: the continuing salience of industrial workplace history

ABSTRACT

Factories remain significant sites of employment, crucial to capitalism. In the twentieth century, scholars registered achievements in documenting their history, but since the late 1980s, and for a generation, the field lost impetus within labour history although insights continued to accumulate through work in adjacent disciplines. The factory has not featured on the agenda of ‘transnational’ and ‘global’ labour history, but we suggest that it can and should contribute to that broader global project, reinvigorating labour history, not least by contributing a dimension close to workers’ everyday experience.     

Strangulation marks in homicides caused by choking ? On an irritant blood stain picture

Three homicides and one attempted homicide by choking in which apparent signs of throttling were present on the skin of the neck are described. The victims wore slender necklaces which were pressed against the skin by the hands of the perpetrator, causing transverse hematomas and cutaneous abrasions. The following criterious are typical for simulated signs of throttling: similarity to objects on the neck, incomplete course around the neck, absence of coarctation of the soft tissues, no lesions of subcutaneous structures.     

A new individualization marker of semen: deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I) polymorphism.

We describe a method for obtaining specific and reproducible deoxyribonuclease I (DNase I) typing from liquid semen. Isoelectric focusing of the enzymes on polyacrylamide gel (IEF-PAGE, pH 3.5-5) was accomplished using a 0.5-mm thick gel. The separated isozymes were visualized by a new activity staining method, dried agarose film-overlay (DAFO). Pretreatment of semen samples with neuraminidase markedly enhanced the isozyme-band resolution and sensitivity. The method was simple and reliable, with high resolution and sensitivity. The DNase I types in semen samples were correlated with the types found in corresponding blood and urine samples. DNase I typing could therefore provide an additional discriminant characteristic in the forensic examination of semen.