Automobile theft: Estimating the size of the criminal population

Animal abundance estimation procedures including a new method of Zelterman are applied in the criminological context of auto theft in the Australian Capital Territory. Using goodness-of-fit statistics and comparing the estimates with known clearance rates, it is estimated that during 1987 about 39% of offenders were charged with at least one count of auto theft. The results also indicate the extent of overrepresentation of juveniles in court statistics compared with their relative participation rate in auto theft.     

Case involving differentiation of deer and human bone fragments

In a recent Louisiana forensic anthropology case, it was necessary to attempt species identification of six small bone fragments. The primary concern was whether or not they matched the fractured humerus of a woman killed by two shotgun blasts and then disposed of in the Mississippi River. These tiny fragments were recovered by law enforcement officers inside a jeep pickup and at the gas station where the vehicle had been cleaned. The police suspect claimed that these fragments were from a deer that he had recently killed. The small size of the pieces precluded positive recognition of human versus nonhuman origin based upon gross morphology and cortical thickness. Microscopic examination was possible. This analysis involved comparison of the unknown specimens to reference deer and human thin sections including bone recovered from the woman during autopsy. Examination of the jeep and gas station fragments revealed no plexiform bone, secondary (not primary) osteons, and variability in size and shape of the osteons and Haversian canals. These and other variables identified the bone fragments as human.     

LOCAL IMPLEMENTATION OF NATIONAL POLICY

This article is an examination of failures in implementing intergovernmental programs. The programs were failures in the sense that actions to implement programs were delayed far beyond the expected dates of completion. Two such failures in cities implementing two different programs (wastewater management and Section 8 housing programs) are contrasted with one instance of success (in Section 8 housing). If a Sharkansky's discussion of political and policy routines is found to be a useful explanation of the different results. When local government routines must be broken to comply with the goals and objectives of federal programs, local actors will do all they can to resist the federal program. This finding demonstrates the importance of varying local political environments in explaining varying patterns of implementation of federal programs.     

Building successful technology transfer teams: A theory of cascading commitment

The attempt to transfer a technology from a publicly funded laboratory to a profit-oriented manufacturer can be a lengthy and complex process, involving several organizations and several key individuals within each organization. For example, a product technology transfer team may include the public lab itself, one or more end user organizations during product development and trial, a transfer agency, a public funding agency, the receptor manufacturer, and a private funding agency. Studies of such multi party transfers have suggested many factors that have contributed to their success or failure. We feel that most of these factors can be organized under the rubric of a more general theory of cascading commitment. Specifically, in this paper we propose that the likelihood of a transfer's success can be substantially affected by excellent management of the team building process by the public lab's R&D manager/director. Successful teams are built by gaining the commitment of appropriate individuals from appropriate organizations in a sequential cascading effect, by insightful and customized solicitation of each new team member to join at the appropriate stage of commercialization. To do this, the manager must be cognizant of, and individually appeal to, each new team member's perceptions of three sets of variables: evidence of the prior members' credibility, evidence of the prior members' commitment, and the set of personal benefits to be gained from participation.     

Party finance in Russia: Has the 2001 law ‘on political parties’ made a difference?

The 2001 law ‘On political parties’ instituted several substantive changes to party finance in Russia. This article examines these elements of the law on parties, which have so far received little attention, to ascertain the aims of this party-funding reform, the extent to which these aims have been realised, and what impact—if any—the financial terms of the law have had on party finance. The article draws on new sources, namely parties' annual financial accounts, to shed fresh light on party funding in Russia and on the presidential administration's attitude to party finance.     

Modernisation and clean government: Tackling crime, corruption and organised crime in modern Taiwan

Taiwan's formal title is the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan because it is the continuation of the government of mainland China that fled to Taiwan in 1949 and has survived there ever since. The rulting party in the ROC is the Kuomintang (KMT, the Nationalist Party of China). The ROC government on the mainland was plagued with problems of corruption at almost all levels, while the regime on Taiwan successfully reinvented itself and oversaw a remarkable economic transformation of that island. This article considered the ROC's corruption problems on the mainland and attempts to explain why these problem shave proved to be so intractable. Corruption played a major part in undermining the Kuomintang's rule on the Chinese mainland. Once the ROC moved its seat of government to Taiwan in 1949, it was forced to take a very different approach to crime and corruption. The next section deals with the evolution of the KMT on Taiwan while the final part of the discussion looks at the problem of organised crime on the island. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.