The Richard Cory phenomenon: suicide and wealth in Kansas City, Missouri

This case-control study investigates the relationship between suicide and wealth in Kansas City, Missouri. House and personal property appraisal data on all victims of suicide from 1998 and 2002 and victims from a control population of deaths reported to the Jackson County Medical Examiner during the same time interval were obtained from the Jackson County Government website. The controls were matched to suicide cases by race, gender, year of death, and age at death (+/- 1 year). Data from the 426 members of each group of suicides and controls indicate that suicide victims were: 1) 77% more likely than controls to have lived in houses rather than in apartments or trailers, 2) more likely than controls to have lived in more expensive houses (mean values dollar 70,143 versus dolllar 61,513 respectively, p = 0.04) and 3) more likely to have killed themselves because of factors other than financial strain (8.0% of suicides showed financial strain).     

Ethical Considerations in the Conduct of Electronic Surveillance Research

The extant clinical literature indicates profound problems in the assessment, monitoring, and documentation of care in long-term care facilities. The lack of adequate resources to accommodate higher staff-to-resident ratios adds additional urgency to the goal of identifying more cost-effective mechanisms to provide care oversight. The ever expanding array of electronic monitoring technologies in the clinical research arena demands a conceptual and pragmatic framework for the resolution of ethical tensions inherent in the use of such innovative tools. CareMedia is a project that explores the utility of video, audio and sensor technologies as a continuous real-time assessment and outcomes measurement tool. In this paper, the authors describe the seminal ethical challenges encountered during the implementation phase of this project, namely privacy and confidentiality protection, and the strategies employed to resolve the ethical tensions by applying principles of the interest theory of rights.     

The Role of the Inter‐American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD): Confronting the Problem of Illegal Drugs in the Americas

The illegal drug trade has become a serious threat for the Americas. Is a multilateral approach to combat it possible? This article proposes that the United States and Latin America are finding ways to use multilateral organisms to confront this threat and examines as an example the role of CICAD in setting a cooperative agenda to develop an antidrug regime. CICAD has established common ground for long‐term cooperation in certain areas. But common drug strategies in the Americas require the support of the United States and the cooperation of Latin American states, both of which are still works in progress. Therefore the future of the CICAD‐inspired antidrug regime will depend on whether the United States and Latin America will cooperate to define the illegal drug threat in the same way and bestow on CICAD the authority necessary to address it.     

Collective Bargaining in the Twenty-First Century: A Negotiations Institution at Risk

Collective bargaining, a core social institution, faces a fundamental transformational challenge. National survey data provide unique insights into the current status of the bargaining process — revealing challenges and opportunities. Awareness and use of interest-based bargaining principles is widespread but complicated by underlying tensions between labor and management. The findings illustrate the value of conducting an institutional-level analysis of a negotiations process.