Investigation of nocturnal oviposition by necrophilous flies in central Texas

The need to accurately estimate the postmortem interval (PMI) has prompted research into factors affecting fly oviposition (i.e., oviposition and/or larviposition) on a corpse. Research efforts have focused on whether or not diurnally active flies oviposit during nighttime hours. This study reports that nocturnal oviposition (defined as occurring between 2100-0600 h CDST (Central Daylight Savings Time)) did not occur on freshly killed white rats or mice, on beef (fresh or aged up to 48 h), on freshly thawed pigs, nor, usually, on thawed pigs that were aged for up to 48 h. Limited oviposition did occur between 2100 and 2120 h on one bloated pig at a lighted rural site. Necrophilous flies were present and active at lighted and dark sites (urban and rural) before and immediately after sunset, but fly activity on the bait ceased within 50 min postsunset and did not resume until after 0600 h. These observations support other studies reporting that diurnally active flies do not oviposit during the nighttime.     

Performance: Promises to Keep and Miles to Go

In July 1995, the American Society for Public Administration's Endowment Board established the Donald C. Stone Fund to honor the memory of this public administration legend. Income from this fund is used to sponsor a lecture or symposium at ASPA's national conference, which reflects Stone's varied interests and contributions to the field. This year marked the tenth Donald C. Stone Lecture. On April 4, Patricia Wallace Ingraham was ASPA's Stone Lecturer and gave the following speech     

Regional politics: The European union and citizenship

This article examines the development of citizenship within the European Economic Community as a model for citizenship as such, within a global environment. In historical terms, citizenship evolved within the nation‐state, but the nation‐state, which is no longer valid as the exclusive model of economic development, may be inappropriate as a framework for social rights. The fluidity of labour within the European community means that traditional means of political representation within the nation‐state are irrelevant. Within a global context, the economic barriers which are required by nation‐states constitute political barriers to social rights through the vehicle of citizenship. The article considers the European experience of regional politics as lessons for citizenship reform in a global system.     

Reviews

Gilbert Rozman, Seizaburo Sato & Gerald Segal, eds, Dismantling Communism: Common Causes and Regional Variations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, x + 405 pp., £28.50. Ben Fowkes, The Rise and Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, xv + 228 pp., £40.00

Stephen Whitefield, Industrial Power and the Soviet State. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 279 pp; £35.00

Steve H. Hanke, Lars Jonung & Kurt Schuler, Russian Currency and Finance: A Currency Board Approach to Reform. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, xvi + 222 pp., £35.00.

Gregory S. Alexander & Grazyna Skapska eds, A Fourth Way? Privatization, Property, and the Emergence of New Market Economies. New York, London: Routledge, 1994, xxiii + 336 pp., £40.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

John and Carol Garrard (eds), World War II and the Soviet People. Selected Papers from the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, Harrogate, 1990. New York: St Martin Press, 1993, 268 pp. $45.00.

John Barber & Mark Harrison, The Soviet Home Front: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II. London and New York: Longman, 1991, xiii + 252pp

Richard Debo, Survival and Consolidation: The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, 1918–1921. Montreal: McGill‐Queen's University Press, 1992, xiii + 502 pp., £42.00.

Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, xvii + 312 pp., $24.95, ;19.95.

Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993, xi + 289 pp. £32.50 h/b, £12.99 p/b.     

Vladimir Iowa Lenin,Part 1: A Bolshevik Studies American Agriculture

A busy year for Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, 1917 also marked the publication of his study of American agriculture. The report reads as more than a historical curiosity, offering insights, however era-bounded, on a variety of topics of substantive and epistemological interest today. Lenin writes of the history of American agriculture, its dynamic regionalism, and its sector-specific class conflicts. Along the way, despite his obvious structural tendencies, we meet an anti-foundational author who, while upbraiding bourgeois economists for their expedient technicism, often in scathing terms, also warns that sweeping conclusions about the sizes of farm and capitalization are problematic in the face of historically dependent and contradictory trends. Here, in the first of the paper’s two parts, we begin to place Lenin’s project in the broader stream of critical agrarian studies, including the classic contrast with agricultural economist Alexander Chayanov, but also the diseconomies of modern agriculture, the biological limits on industrializing food production, and Stalin’s “dekulakization” campaign. Our aims here are more than academic. The exploration is framed by the roles the structure of agriculture and its impacts on its participants play in political change, from elections to revolution.     

People and Performance: Challenges for the Future Public Service— the Report from the Wye River Conference

What are the key challenges for the public sector at present, and what will the future public service look like if it is to meet these challenges? These questions were put to public‐sector leaders at a conference at the Wye River Plantation in June 1999. The leaders agreed on aspects of a broad vision for the future and the urgent need for a detailed debate on the transition questions that arose.     

Policy analysis in the presence of distorting taxes

This article first describes the new literature in environmental economics on the so‐called “double‐dividend” and then explores its implications for a broad range of economic issues. This literature reveals that in a second‐best, general‐equilibrium setting, environmental measures raise costs and prices and thereby reduce the real wage. This rise in the cost of living reduces slightly the quantity of labor supplied in an already highly distorted labor market, giving rise to losses in social welfare that can be large relative to the basic gains from a cleaner environment. These losses can be offset to some extent by using revenues (if any) from the environmental programs to reduce existing taxes on labor. This same line of analysis applies to many programs and institutions in the economy that raise the cost of living: tariffs and quotas on imports, agricultural price‐support programs, monopoly pricing, programs of occupational licensure that limit entry, and many others. Thus, traditional, partial‐equilibrium benefit‐cost analysis appears, in many instances, to have unwittingly omitted from the calculations a potentially quite significant class of social costs. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy and Management.