PREVENTION PROGRAMS FOR DIVORCED NONRESIDENT FATHERS

Divorced nonresident fathers are a promising target for preventive efforts to assist families after divorce. The research literature suggests that such programs should focus both on the frequency and the quality of the child's contact with the father, as well as the quality of postdivorce mother–father relations. Dads For Life (DFL) is the program for this target group with the most convincing evidence of preventive effects. This eight-week program centers on professionally made videos. It was tested in a randomized trial with 214 families. In comparison to control families, children in families in which the father participated in DFL had significantly lower internalizing problems. The preventive impact of DFL was strongest for the most troubled youngsters.     

Democracy and Diversionary Military Intervention: Reassessing Regime Type and the Diversionary Hypothesis

This article concentrates on two limitations in the literature on diversionary force. First is the common assumption that major powers are the only actors capable of diversion. Second is the narrow conceptualization of regime type prevalent in the literature. Instead of dichotomizing regimes, we distinguish mature democracies and autocracies from consolidating variants of these regimes. We draw hypotheses from the institutional approach and test them with time series cross-section negative binomial first-order autoregressive process estimates of 140 countries from 1950 to 1996. We find that not all democracies and not all autocracies divert. Mature democracies, consolidating autocracies, and transitional polities are the only regime types prone to this type of force. Our results suggest that the diversionary literature would benefit from more discriminating operationalizations of regime type and by looking beyond major powers to the actions of less powerful states.     

On the strategy of social planning

Social planning deals centrally with human values—values which are important even though they do not appear as explicit factors in the classical problems of social welfare.The philosophical question as to whether facts can provide a logical basis for values need not be considered by the planner. He focuses, rather, on the specific interplay of values and facts in the concrete context of his concern.In the analysis of this interplay we can distinguish a number ofprinciples, criteria for the specification of social ends; for instance, the maximin principle, that improvements in a value distribution consisting in cutting off the bottom of the distribution have priority over raising the top.Social ends, in turn, are analysable intoideals, goals, andobjectives—directions, regions and points, respectively, in the value space.Cutting across these are the desiredqualities of the experience of pursuing those ends, qualities allowing for the assessment of planned alternatives by configurational judgment, rather than by a presumed summation of component values.A report submitted to the Social Planning Group of the Planning Board of Puerto Rico in 1958, not previously published.     

Visions of Reality

John Clare: A Biography , by Jonathan Bate
W. B. Yeats: A Life, Volume 2: The Arch Poet , by R. F. Foster     

The ongoing design duty in Universal Music Australia Pty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd Casting the scope of copyright infringement even wider

The Australian Federal Court case of Universal Music AustraliaPty Ltd v Sharman License Holdings Ltd (‘Sharman’)¹is the latest in a series of peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharingcases from various jurisdictions that has found the softwaredistributor/technology provider liable for copyright infringement.² Sharman followed a few months after the groundbreaking US SupremeCourt case of MGM Studios v Grokster Ltd ³ (‘Grokster’)that had acknowledged the Sony safe harbour for technology providersbut also introduced an inducement of infringement doctrine todeal with reprehensible conduct of infringers. While both cases involved similar technology and shared a numberof similarities on the facts and legal principles⁴, a closerexamination of Sharman shows that the net of copyright infringementin P2P filesharing is cast wider than that in Grokster. The effect of Sharman is an increased burden on the technologyprovider and the potentially tremendous consequences on innovationdue to the lack of a clear safe harbour as well as the wideningof the design obligation.