The Future of the Study of Public Administration: Embedding Research Object and Methodology in Epistemology and Ontology

What should be done to advance the study of public administration? A strong argument is advanced by outgoing PAR managing editor Jos C. N. Raadschelders that the field benefits significantly from greater attention to ontology and epistemology. To be sure, empirical, evidence‐based research has its place, but its basis and the meaning of findings seldom are questioned. Why? Many public administration scholars seek “scientificness” through a disciplinary type of methodology. However, working within an inherently interdisciplinary field, public administration scholars cannot reduce the complex, wicked problems of society and government to mere empirical measurement. The author lays out five critical challenges confronting today’s public administration—both its study and research—requiring the field’s urgent attention in order to meet the comprehensive and rapidly expanding needs of specialists and generalists, practitioners and academicians, as well as the general public.     

Contracting for Indigenous Health Care: Towards Mutual Accountability

In Australia and other industrialised countries, governments contract with the non‐government sector for the provision of primary health care to indigenous peoples. Australian governments have developed policies and funding programs to support this health sector, but the current arrangements are unduly complex and fragmented. The results of our study show that the complex contractual environment for Aboriginal Community‐Controlled Health Services (ACCHSs) and their funders is an unintended but inevitable result of a quasi‐classical approach to contracts applied by multiple funders. The analysis in this article highlights potential policy and program changes that could improve the effectiveness of funding and accountability arrangements, based on the use of an alliance contracting model, better performance indicators and greater clarity in the relative roles of national and jurisdictional governments.     

Criminal Violence and Democratization in Central America: The Survival of the Violent State

Why does Nicaragua have less violent crime than Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras? All these countries underwent political transitions in the 1990s. Many explanations point to the legacies of war, socioeconomic underdevelopment, and neoliberal structural reforms. However, these arguments do not fully explain why, despite economic reforms conducted throughout the region, war‐less Honduras and wealthier Guatemala and El Salvador have much more crime than Nicaragua. This article argues that public security reforms carried out during the political transitions shaped the ability of the new regimes to control the violence produced by their own institutions and collaborators. In the analysis of the crisis of public security, it is important to bring the state back. The survival of violent entrepreneurs in the new security apparatus and their relationship with new governing elites foster the conditions for the escalation of violence in northern Central America.     

Why is methenamine detected in Goma-2 dynamites originally methenamine free? An interpretation of relevant forensic results

After the train bombing in Madrid (Spain) on 11 March 2004, methenamine was detected in some of the specimens of Goma-2 ECO dynamite submitted to the forensic laboratories when analyzed by gas chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry detection (GC-MS). Methenamine is synthesized from formaldehyde and ammonia through a condensation reaction. However, neither methenamine nor any of these compounds were used to manufacture Goma-2 ECO dynamite. Four different experiments were designed in order to explain the presence of methenamine detected in the dynamite samples analyzed. In the first one, GC-MS was used to analyze the individual components of Goma-2 ECO provided by the manufacturer and the components mixed in a raw paste. Methenamine was detected in the manufacturer's ammonium nitrate and in the raw paste. The other experiments were designed to find the precursors sources for methenamine generation in Goma-2 ECO. Results revealed that these sources could be ammonium nitrate for ammonia and sawdust for formaldehyde. Under heating conditions, dynamite could produce these precursors, which could condense in the injection port of the GC-MS system and generate methenamine. However, methenamine was not always detected in these dynamites. This was explained by the existence of two opposite effects: (a) dynamite stability makes difficult that ammonium nitrate releases ammonia and (b) there is a gradual loss of formaldehyde in sawdust along the time. Both effects can prevent the formation of an amount of methenamine large enough to be detected.     

Severe necrosis of oesophageal and gastric mucosa in fatal methanol poisoning

Methanol is a potent neurotoxic substance that causes severe metabolic acidosis and serious neurological disorders. Most of the cases are accidental exposures to drinking beverages contaminated with methanol. There are few articles reporting pure methanol intoxication; however, it is well known that small quantities of pure methanol causes blindness and death, the minimum lethal dose being 50-100 ml.A case report is presented of a 67-year-old woman, who committed suicide by ingestion of 500 ml of absolute methanol. Despite symptomatic and supportive intensive care, the woman died 23 h after hospital admission due to metabolic acidosis and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome. A complete medico-legal autopsy was performed. Grossly, there was complete detachment of the oesophagus mucosa and brownish discolouration of the gastric mucosa. Histological findings showed diffuse haemorrhagic necrosis of the stomach mucosa and intense acute inflammatory infiltration of the lamina propria. To our knowledge, this is the first autopsy report of such severe digestive injuries. A discussion and review of the recent literature on the subject are given.     

Law’s Cultural Project and the Claim to Universality or the Equivocalities of a Familiar Debate

Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between ?legal rules?, ?moral claims? and ?democratic principles? which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an ?acultural? experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visée of a plausible reinvention of Law??s autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law??s constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a ?limit-situation? such as our own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism??namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)??this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as ?obstacles? to recognising Law??s demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law??s project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality).     

Are there population differences in minutiae frequencies? A comparative study of two Argentinian population samples and one Spanish sample

In recent years, both scientific and judicial sources have highlighted the need for more knowledge about minutiae variability, in order to improve their statistical application to fingerprint identification. In line with this trend toward improving our knowledge of this subject, the aim of the present study was to calculate the frequency with which 20 types of minutiae appeared in 2780 fingerprint impressions obtained from 278 individuals from two Argentinian population samples (100 individuals from Ramal and 178 from Puna-Quebrada). The different types of minutiae were located, identified, and quantified visually in two areas on the fingerprint, the inside and outside of a circle, the radius of which cut fifteen ridges perpendicularly, starting from the center cut of the axes defining the sectors. The non-equiprobability found in both population samples for the different minutiae types studied demonstrated that the evidential weight provided by these characteristics is not the same when applied in identification processes, whether used quantitatively (numerical standard) or qualitatively (holistic method). The results obtained for both populations were compared statistically with those published previously for a Spanish population sample, which had been collected using the same methodology. This comparison has enabled us to demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of significant differences between populations in minutiae frequencies, independently from the main pattern type.