The upturned stone: Political scandals and their investigation processes in twenty democracies

This article considers the very considerable research problems facing any attempt at the logical definition, systematic classification and coding of the many varieties of political scandal. Examples of these difficulties are drawn from a new classification scheme devised by the author. This scheme is used to analyze a major new source:Political Scandals and Causes CélèbresSince 1945: An International Reference Compendium (Longmans, UK 1990). From it 146 narrative case histories from twenty democratic systems have been taken for analysis. More detailed notes on problems of processing scandal cases into such simple statistical form follow on. The cases themselves are listed in very brief coded form in the Appendix, and four tables set up the analytical scheme and its statistical product. The article concludes with a number of suggestions for future research, if academic analysis of this always-interesting, but horribly slippery, aspect of politics, government and social mores is to be pursued.     

The influence of economic factors on police crime recording behavior in the United States between 1960 and 1980

This study examines the influence of certain economic factors (inflation, unemployment, credit, competition, profit and inequality), total social welfare expenditures, and total number of full-time officers, derived from a radical theory of police behavior, on police crime recording behavior in the United States between 1960 and 1980. In contrast to previous research, which has failed to provide a single model that explains over fifty percent of the variance in the dependent variable (Sherman, 1980), this study found three models that explain over fifty percent of the variance in police crime recording behavior.     

Homo machinus versus Homo sapiens: A knowledge management perspective of virtual communities in cyberspace

Abstract

Amidst debates on whether virtual communities can exist as a solution to technological developments, evidence suggests that knowledge creation and sharing are symptomatic of Home sapiens which may develop into idiosyncratic Homo machinus in cyberspace. According to Geyer (1996, 60), the communication revolution, backed up by accelerating technological development, has created a substructure for the emergence of virtual communities. Recent writings on virtual communities acknowledge Knowledge management as the most often used strategy to bring the human side into the equation. Enabled by online interactive communication technologies, this strategy allows virtual communities to create and share knowledge across the globe, thereby creating a global knowledge-based virtual reality in cyberspace. This article is essentially a theoretical discussion of virtual communities in cyberspace from a knowledge management perspective.     

Barriers to Efficiency and the Privatisation of Township-Village Enterprises

Qian (2000 Qian, Y. 2000. The process of China's market transition (1978–98): the evolutionary, historical, and comparative perspectives. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 156(1): 151–171. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and others suggest that post-1994 tax and banking reforms in China, combined with the development of markets for allocating resources, influenced the economic performance of township-village enterprises (TVEs) and private enterprises (PEs). This paper uses Chinese provincial level data to search for evidence of advantages and/or disadvantages offered to TVEs and PEs before and after the 1994 reforms. We define a sectoral net income-based measure of overall efficiency and decompose the measure into components that highlight the existence of credit constraints, output target constraints and labour hiring constraints. The results offer empirical support for Qian and others explanation of why private enterprises eventually emerged as the dominant institution for allocating resources in post-1994 rural China.     

Qiagen's Investigator™ Quantiplex Kit as a Predictor of STR Amplification Success from Low‐Yield DNA Samples,

Qiagen's Investigator? Quantiplex kit, a total human DNA quantitation kit, has a 200‐base pair internal control, fast cycling time, and scorpion molecules containing a covalently linked primer, probe, fluorophore, and quencher. The Investigator? Quantiplex kit was evaluated to investigate a value under which complete short tandem repeat (STR) failure was consistently obtained. Buccal swabs were extracted using the Qiagen QIAamp^® DNA Blood Mini Kit, quantified with the Investigator? Quantiplex kit using a tested half‐volume reaction, amplified with the ABI AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler kit, separated on the 3100Avant Genetic Analyzer, and data analyzed with GeneMapper^® ID v.3.2. While undetected samples were unlikely to produce sufficient data for statistical calculations or CODIS upload (2.00 alleles and 0.82 complete loci on average), data may be useful for exclusionary purposes. Thus, the Investigator? Quantiplex kit may be useful for predicting STR success. These findings are comparable with previously reported data from the Quantifiler? Human kit.