EU–Japan “Structured Cooperation” and energy efficiency for Asia

The paper argues that for EU–Japan cooperation the time has come to move from declarations of intent to action. It is suggested that in order to function and to last the cooperation needs a framework that pulls together and organizes different cooperation areas and concrete projects. The framework, it is suggested, should be a flexible “Structured Cooperation” in and under which cooperation would be treated as a negotiating project, in which the advantages and benefits of individual projects would lead to an agreed BoB—balance of benefits. To ensure delivery and allow for adjustments, adding and adjusting of subjects etc. a management and surveillance structure would be required to ensure an enduring interest of both sides in continuing cooperation. The individual cooperation projects, it is suggested, should be organized around common themes—the pillars—for better coherence and management. In a second part the paper suggests a practical and feasible cooperation project for improving the energy efficiency of some products widely used in Asia. That proposal uses the main elements of a relatively easy to implement approach that has been successfully applied in Europe. This approach has the advantage over others to make harmonization of efficiency requirements for energy using products in Asia possible, without the need to engage in time consuming and potentially controversial mutual recognition negotiations of national standards or the need to harmonize national Asian standards.     

An Interactional Perspective of Intimate Partner Violence: An In-depth Semi-structured Interview of a Representative Sample of Help-seeking Women

This article reports a study of women victimized by intimate partner violence (IPV). We describe three interactional aspects of IPV: (1) responses and conduct before, during, and after IPV episodes, (2) impact of alcohol and drug intoxication, and (3) Predictors of risk for IPV victimization in more than one partnership. A representative sample of 157 help-seeking women, recruited from family counseling offices, the police and shelters, were interviewed about physical, psychological and sexual IPV. The nature and characteristics of the IPV interactions were complex and heterogeneous. There were significant interactional differences between the IPV categories concerning the women’s responses and conduct before, during and after the IPV. The impact of alcohol and drug intoxication was relatively small on the occurrence of IPV. About 75% reported that neither the perpetrator nor the female victim had consumed alcohol or drugs before the index IPV exposure. Only 23% of the women had experienced IPV by previous partners. Women who had been subjected to sexual abuse in their family of origin were at almost 25 times increased risk of IPV victimization in more than one partnership. Childhood exposure to physical IPV between parents increased the risk of IPV victimization in more than one partnership significantly more than if the woman had been subject to childhood physical victimization.     

The weight of history: child protection and parenting with a disability in 20th Century Iceland

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on four periods in Iceland, from the early twentieth century until the time of writing, in order to document and analyse the struggles of people with intellectual disabilities to marry, have a family and maintain custody of their children. Each period is linked to specific pieces of legislation that governed the bodies and lives of disabled people and reflected larger social norms concerning issues of family life and parenthood. An emphasis is placed upon the perspective of contemporary critical disability studies in analysing the historical development of this struggle, and the voices of those who experienced this struggle first-hand, drawn from a number of research projects conducted in Iceland. Our main contention is that the weight of history still comes to bear upon matters of parenting and family life, even in the most recent shift toward a human rights approach to disability. There remains a strong socio-cultural resistance toward parenting with an intellectual disability, rooted in the ideology of early twentieth-century eugenics. Our goal is to document the development of these phases throughout the twentieth century in Iceland in order to illustrate how older ideas and prejudices still inform contemporary child protection practices concerning parents with disabilities.     

Corrupt reciprocity - Experimental evidence on a men's game

Why are women regarded to be more resistant towards corruption? We address this question by letting students allotted the role of public servants receive a bribe and choose between reporting (whistleblowing), opportunism and reciprocity (delivery of a contract to the briber). Those acting as businesspersons choose whether or not to publicize at the end of the game. Male businesspersons more often depart from maximizing payoffs and allocate resources to punishing opportunistic public servants. Instead of acting opportunistically, some public servants tend to reciprocate or report. We find that female public servants are less inclined to reciprocate. Their resistance towards corruption is found to relate less to a willingness to report. Survey data from international households shows that men are more confident that bribes will be reciprocated, supporting our results.     

Law and ethics of deep brain stimulation

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a non-destructive, adjustable, and mainly reversible method of continuously giving electrical impulses into a small area of the brain via implanted electrodes. It has been established as a standard form of treatment for specific cases of Parkinson's disease, essential tremor and dystonia. It is currently being evaluated for several mental disorders, dementia and even alcoholism. In spite of its growing practical importance, the legal issues have so far undergone almost no analysis. The article outlines both the essential legal questions of DBS from the perspective of German Law as well as major issues of the current ethical debate, and the correlation of both fields.     

Post-release Employment and Recidivism in Norway

Objectives

Investigate the transition from prison to employment and the relationship between post-release employment and recidivism.

Methods

We use a sample of every person released from Norwegian prisons in 2003 (N?=?7,476), and they are followed through 2006 with monthly measures. We estimate the time to recidivism using discrete time survival models, conditioning upon both pre-release characteristics and post-release time-varying covariates (employment, educational enrollment and participation in labor market programs).

Results

The majority of former inmates were employed at some point in our data window, but it took approximately 30?months for 30% of them to become employed. The hazard of recidivism is substantially lower (0.12, p?<?.001) when former inmates are employed compared with unemployed, although observable individual characteristics can account for a large share of this association (0.50, p?<?.001, after adjustment). The negative association between employment and recidivism remains when controlling for other post-release statuses. Although post-release employment periods are associated with a lower risk of recidivism for all categories of principal offence, the magnitude of the association varies. The association is smaller for those receiving social benefits.

Conclusion

The findings are consistent with theories suggesting that employment reduces the risk of recidivism.     

The demand for transparency: An empirical note

By encouraging socially wasteful rent seeking and corruption, natural resources abundance might not be a blessing but a country’s curse. A recent attempt to impede these practices of corruption with theft is the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The purpose of this organization is to verify and fully publish company payments and government revenues from oil, gas, and mining. Using a probit estimation technique the paper analyses empirically the political and socio-economic factors which determine a country’s participation in EITI, which can be interpreted as revealed willingness to reform.     

The Swedish jury system in press cases: An offspring of the English trial jury?

In the area of press freedom the English influence has for more than 200 years been strongly felt in Sweden. The introduction of a jury system in press cases in 1815 was clearly inspired by the English example. The Swedish variant had, admittedly, some strange features but it was nonetheless, in essence, a jury. Thus it should, historically and systematically, be looked upon as an offspring of the English trial jury.

Since 1815 the Swedish jury has grown more ‘English’ in some respects. Those greater similarities notwithstanding, there are still important differences between the two systems. At least two of the differences are the result of Swedish innovations.

In 1949 the Swedes in the new Freedom of the Press Act included a provision, stating that the court of first instance not only may but must review a verdict of conviction. If also the court convicts and, consequently, fixes the penalty, the defendant can always take the case at least to the appropriate court of appeal. Thus, there is a double‐check or even a triple‐check against an unwarranted conviction. From the defendant's point of view the Swedish jury system can be described as fool‐proof.³⁵

In 1949 the Swedes also introduced a new method of choosing the jury. The jurors are drawn by lot but not, as in England, with the electoral register as the starting point but from a panel chosen by politically elected councils. Furthermore, one third of the jurors must be present or former lay assessors. Through that method of selecting the jurors the Swedes have reasonably counteracted the traditional charges that juries are ignorant or confused or both. On the other hand, the Swedish system may be sensitive to political influence on the administration of justice since the composition, not exactly of this or that jury but of the whole panel, is the indirect result of political elections. However, once more, unwarranted convictions are almost certainly reversed by the courts.

With their method of choosing the jurors the Swedes also avoid a problem which has, in recent years, caused considerable disquiet in Great Britain ‐ jury vetting. The ancient practice of ‘Stand by for the Crown’ is still a reality in English courts. How often the prosecution uses its right to influence the composition of juries by vetting proposed jurors is not known. However, the practice has caused serious concern among lawyers. ‘The fear of “packed” juries is still with us’, to quote an expert in the field, John F. McEldowney.³⁶

The Swedish jury in press cases is certainly not the most important or the best known offspring of the English trial jury ‐ that is, of course, the American jury. However, the Swedish jury has survived for more than 165 years and is still going strong. It is quantitatively of modest significance ‐ there are in ‘normal’ years no more than a dozen cases in the country. However, the jury has an umbrella effect outside the printed media, i.e. what you are allowed to say in a newspaper or in a book you can almost certainly say at a public meeting or on a stage.

In recent decades the Swedish jury has shown a considerable capability of development. It has approached the English model on some points while, at the same time, making innovations on others. It is possible that Sweden during the 1980s may somewhat expand the jury system within the area of free speech, i.e. outside the printed media.     

The extent of postmortem drug redistribution in a rat model.

The aim of this study was to investigate the postmortem redistribution of several drugs in a rat model and to examine if any of the pharmacological properties was related to the extent of this phenomenon. One of the following drugs: phenobarbital (phenobarbitone), acetaminophen (paracetamol), carbamazepine, codeine, verapamil, amphetamine, mianserin, trimeprazine (alimemazine) or chloroquine was administered together with nortriptyline orally to rats 90 min prior to sacrifice. Heart blood was sampled immediately before sacrifice and after 2 h postmortem, as it has previously been shown that this is sufficient time for postmortem concentration changes to occur in heart blood. Blood was also sampled from the clamped abdominal inferior vena cava (representing peripheral blood) and tissue samples were taken from lungs, myocardium, liver, kidney, thigh muscle, forebrain, and vitreous humor together with a specimen from the minced carcass. Drugs were analyzed by high performance liquid or gas chromatography. For phenobarbital, acetaminophen and carbamazepine the postmortem to antemortem blood drug concentration ratios were close to 1.0 and tissue concentrations were low. The postmortem to antemortem heart blood drug concentration ratio for chloroquine (6.9 +/- 1.5) was higher than for nortriptyline (3.5 +/- 0.3), and the remaining drugs (codeine, verapamil, amphetamine, mianserin, and trimeprazine) showed ratios of the same magnitude as nortriptyline. The postmortem to antemortem blood drug concentration ratios for both heart blood and blood from the vena cava and also the lung to antemortem blood drug concentration ratio were closely related to the apparent volume of distribution for the drugs studied (p < 0.001). Accordingly, an apparent volume of distribution of more than 3-4 L/kg is a good predictor that a drug is liable to undergo postmortem redistribution with significant increments in blood levels. The postmortem drug concentration in blood from vena cava was closely related to the antemortem blood level, confirming that among the postmortem samples, the peripheral blood sample was the most representative for the antemortem blood concentration.