Post-mortem cooling of the human head: an infrared thermology study

The post-mortem cooling of the human head, over the first fifteen hours after death, was measured by infrared thermology. A detailed temperature map of the head and face was obtained by the use of image processing techniques and the cooling behaviour of twelve preselected facial features was observed. The two main findings of the study were a difference in cooling pattern between the upper and the lower part of the head, and a consistency in the cooling pattern of the lower part of the head in all the cases studied. A comparison of various model fits to the raw data was undertaken and the "best" bodies, models and features were determined on a statistical basis. The formula that best fitted the raw data was a novel double application of Newton's law. The features with the least error in data fitting were the chin and zygoma; that with the most error was the mouth.     

Gender Differences in Self-Perceptions and Academic Outcomes: A Study of African American High School Students

There is increasing divergence in the academic outcomes of African American males and females. By most accounts, males are falling behind their female peers educationally as African American females are graduating from high schools at higher rates and are going on to college and graduate school in greater numbers. Some have suggested that school completion and performance is associated with how students feel about themselves. The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in the relationship between self-perceptions and 2 academic outcomes among a sample of 243 African American high school sophomores. The results suggest that, overall, females are more favorably oriented toward high school completion. Both male and female students with more positive self-perceptions have stronger intentions to complete the current year of high school. Higher grade point averages were more strongly associated with greater self-efficacy for females than for males. Given these findings, increased attention to educational programming, societal messages, and future research is warranted.     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Historicising the Women's Liberation Movement

ABSTRACT

The Women's Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s emerged out of a set of economic and social circumstances where women collected together in disparate groups and contexts to express their dissatisfaction with their role and position in society. Through consciousness-raising and activism women raised their voices, profiles and visibility. This important moment of women's history is revisited in this collection of essays, which look afresh at the diversity of the movement and ways in which we might historicise the feminism of the time.     

Mt. Laurel: A Major Transition in American Planning Law

American land use law in the late 1960's and early 1970's has been in a period of major and fundamental transition. It has seen a change in the basic policy of the law on one of its most important points as concerns exclusionary zoning, i.e., the attitude towards the three principal parties in interest in land use litigation-developer, neighbor, and excluded party. This entire change has been initiated not by the legislatures, but by the courts. The net result of this transition has been to strengthen the government's ability to impose (under the police power) certain types of regulations, primarily environmental in nature—while at the same time drastically reducing the power to impose regulations deemed exclusionary.