Measuring human remains in the field: Grid technique, total station, or MicroScribe?

Although three-dimensional (3D) coordinates for human intra-skeletal landmarks are among the most important data that anthropologists have to record in the field, little is known about the reliability of various measuring techniques. We compared the reliability of three techniques used for 3D measurement of human remain in the field: grid technique (GT), total station (TS), and MicroScribe (MS). We measured 365 field osteometric points on 12 skeletal sequences excavated at the Late Medieval/Early Modern churchyard in V?eruby, Czech Republic. We compared intra-observer, inter-observer, and inter-technique variation using mean difference (MD), mean absolute difference (MAD), standard deviation of difference (SDD), and limits of agreement (LA). All three measuring techniques can be used when accepted error ranges can be measured in centimeters. When a range of accepted error measurable in millimeters is needed, MS offers the best solution. TS can achieve the same reliability as does MS, but only when the laser beam is accurately pointed into the center of the prism. When the prism is not accurately oriented, TS produces unreliable data. TS is more sensitive to initialization than is MS. GT measures human skeleton with acceptable reliability for general purposes but insufficiently when highly accurate skeletal data are needed. We observed high inter-technique variation, indicating that just one technique should be used when spatial data from one individual are recorded. Subadults are measured with slightly lower error than are adults. The effect of maximum excavated skeletal length has little practical significance in field recording. When MS is not available, we offer practical suggestions that can help to increase reliability when measuring human skeleton in the field.     

Reporting violence to the police: Predictors through the life course

Scholarship focused on factors that influence police reporting has a long history in the literature. Yet we lack a complete understanding of how these factors differentially influence reporting by age.

Purpose

This paper aims to enhance our understanding of underreporting by investigating the relationship between reporting and age, and how this relationship differs by crime type. The study further investigates whether a variety of characteristics differentially influence reporting across the life course. Finally, the study asks how the nature of reporting varies by the victim's age.

Methods

National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data were used to assess whether there are age-related differences in the factors influencing the rate and nature of police reporting.

Results

The findings suggest that the rate of reporting differs by crime type but that it generally increases throughout the life course. The influence of incident, victim, and offender characteristics on police reporting varies, not simply between juveniles and adults, but also between young and older adults. The proportion of incidents reported to police by the victim his/herself also continues to increase with age.

Conclusions

This suggests that disparities in police reporting cannot be reduced to juvenile-adult comparisons and should be studied across the full life course.     

Nuclear DNA typing from ancient teeth

Because of the adverse effects that diagenesis exert on ancient skeletal remains, DNA from these samples is often compromised to the point where genetic typing can be challenging. Nevertheless, robust and reliable methods are currently available to allow successful genotyping of ancient specimens. Here we report nuclear DNA-based methods and typing strategies used to analyze 2 human skeletons from a medieval burial. Reliable DNA nuclear profiles were obtained from teeth, whereas mitochondrial DNA analyses in bones were inconclusive. A complete nuclear mini short tandem repeat profile was obtained from a well-preserved premolar, but only a partial one from the femur. Increasing the sensitivity of the polymerase chain reaction system allowed a full profile from the latter, but the presence of artifacts reinforced the idea that the interpretation of this kind of analysis must be performed with caution. The results presented here also indicate that DNA from dental pieces can be better preserved than from bones, even in the case of well-preserved long bones with thick cortical tissue such as the femurs, and have a better chance of successful genetic typing, probably because of the high degree of protection conferred to the DNA by the enamel.     

Public opinion on media presence in the courthouse

Very little attention has been devoted to the public's opinion of media coverage of court cases despite extensive research on pretrial publicity (PTP). Following a provincial judgment to restrict media access in Quebec courthouses, a preliminary unpublished study found that the public was largely in support of these restrictions. The present study sought to expand on this finding in a more widely generalizable sample. Subjects were recruited from continuing education classes and completed a questionnaire that assessed their support for restricting journalists in courthouses. Nearly 80% of the 243 participants supported media restrictions. Although participants in the four experimental conditions and one of the control groups were largely in favor of the restrictions, one control group was opposed to the restrictions. The results suggest that the public prefers that journalists have restricted access to courtroom participants, resonating research on PTP and the Supreme Court's decision on the case.     

Significance of hemorrhages at the origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscles in hanging

Hemorrhages at the periostal-clavicular origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscles are part of the indirectly induced autopsy findings in death by hanging. In a prospective study of 178 cases of hanging, clavicular hemorrhages were found in 110 cases (a relative frequency of 62%). A statistically significant association between occurrence of hemorrhages and completeness of the victim's body suspension was discovered (P = 0.046) as well as a significant association between the occurrence of hemorrhages and the location of the ligature knot on the neck (P = 0.008). The occurrence of hemorrhages at the clavicular origin of the sternocleidomastoid muscles was independent of age, sex, and weight. This article renews the knowledge of this important vital sign described mainly in the German medicolegal literature.     

The Transcendence of Violence Across Relationships: New Methods for Understanding Men’s and Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence Across the Life Course

The notion of transitions is an increasingly central concept in contemporary criminology and such issues are particularly significant in the study of intimate partner violence (IPV). Here, attention focuses on relationship dynamics and movement into and out of relationships for understanding long-term patterns of victimization over the life course. Still, a focus on transitions raises questions about how IPV is patterned over time and across relationships and how this contributes to stability and change in victimization risk over the life span. Our study examines this issue using data from the National Violence Against Women Survey. Findings from latent transition analyses reveal strong evidence for change in victimization experiences across the life course. Among women, those who experienced serious, multifaceted violence are most likely to transition out of relationships followed by transition into subsequent relationships characterized by conflict and aggression and a similar pattern is observed among men. At the same time, men who experience physical aggression in previous relationships are most likely to transition into non-violent relationships, while women with similar experiences are much less differentiated in the types of relationships they enter into. When we account for background characteristics (e.g., respondent’s race, education, and age) and childhood experiences of parental violence, the latter is particularly significant in accounting for exposure to serious IPV in later adulthood. Such findings extend our understanding of how life course transitions connect to violence and offending and highlight processes of continuity and change beyond the traditional focus on criminal offending.     

Bending the health cost curve: the promise and peril of the Independent Payment Advisory Board

Underlying today's and the future's health-care reform debate is a consensus that America's health-care financing system is in a slow-moving but deep crisis: care appears substandard in comparison with other advanced industrial countries, and relative costs are exploding beyond all reasonable measures. The Obama Administration's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) attempts to grapple with both of these problems. One of ACA's key instrumentalities is the Independent Payment Advisory Board-the IPAB, designed to discover and authorize ways to reduce the rate of growth of Medicare and other categories of health spending. The IPAB is a peril. Expert boards to perform regulatory tasks in the interest of efficiency and social goals always run a high risk of being captured by the industry they are supposed to regulate. Even should it succeed at its task of reducing the rate of growth of Medicare spending, who is to say that the reductions will not come at a heavy cost in reduced quantity and effectiveness of medical care? But the IPAB also has promise. The need for a better process than our current specialist-driven one to assign value to the medical services provided by Medicare is great. The bellwether status of Medicare payment systems means that commercial insurance consumers and payors would also benefit mightily from bringing more coherent, technocratic, and cost-effectiveness oriented logic to this process. And the current system of relative Medicare reimbursement rates is, in the judgment of many, currently well out of whack. We quail when we consider the magnitude of the tasks the IPAB faces--even its initial task. Nevertheless, we remain optimistic that this administrative agency will manage to bend the long-run healthcare cost curve and moderate future price increases.     

The Ideological Effects of Framing Threat on Immigration and Civil Liberties

Assuming that migration threat is multi-dimensional, this article seeks to investigate how various types of threats associated with immigration affect attitudes towards immigration and civil liberties. Through experimentation, the study unpacks the ??securitization of migration?? discourse by disaggregating the nature of immigration threat, and its impact on policy positions and ideological patterns at the individual level. Based on framing and attitudinal analysis, we argue that physical security in distinction from cultural insecurity is enough to generate important ideological variations stemming from strategic input (such as framing and issue-linkage). We expect then that as immigration shifts from a cultural to a physical threat, immigration issues may become more politically salient but less politicized and subject to consensus. Interestingly, however, the findings reveal that the effects of threat framing are not ubiquitous, and may be conditional upon ideology. Liberals were much more susceptible to the frames than were conservatives. Potential explanations for the ideological effects of framing, as well as their implications, are explored.