AMPFlSTR Identifiler STR allele frequencies in Tanzania, Africa

POPULATION:  Identifiler—Employees and students of Muhimibili University College of Health Sciences in Dar es Salaam representing 19 widely distributed administrative districts and 42 tribes within the country.     

Making the Case for Evaluation Partnerships in Child Protection Mediation Programs: Insights from a Case Study

Many jurisdictions have instituted child protection mediation programs (CPM) for the purposes of reducing the length of children's stays in out‐of‐home care and decreasing court system burden, and numerous studies have shown promising results. However, important implementation and sustainability problems persist. This article presents a case study's findings and retrospectively interprets underlying reasons for challenges the program faced in implementation. Study implications call for a more structured planning process, including early partnership with experienced court‐based evaluators to develop successful marketing and recruitment strategies that may encourage stakeholder endorsement and foster sustainability.     

Dynamic Characteristics of Signatures: Effects of Writer Style on Genuine and Simulated Signatures

The aims of this study were to determine if computer‐measured dynamic features (duration, size, velocity, jerk, and pen pressure) differ between genuine and simulated signatures. Sixty subjects (3 equal groups of 3 signature styles) each provided 10 naturally written (genuine) signatures. Each of these subjects then provided 15 simulations of each of three model signatures. The genuine (N = 600) and simulated (N = 2700) signatures were collected using a digitizing tablet. MovAlyzeR^® software was used to estimate kinematic parameters for each pen stroke. Stroke duration, velocity, and pen pressure were found to discriminate between genuine and simulated signatures regardless of the simulator's own style of signature or the style of signature being simulated. However, there was a significant interaction between style and condition for size and jerk (a measure of smoothness). The results of this study, based on quantitative analysis and dynamic handwriting features, indicate that the style of the simulator's own signature and the style of signature being simulated can impact the characteristics of handwriting movements for simulations. Writer style characteristics might therefore need to be taken into consideration as potentially significant when evaluating signature features with a view to forming opinions regarding authenticity.     

A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis

We examine regularities and differences in public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made. We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many Western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the power function. This implies that budgets are highly incremental, yet occasionally are punctuated by large changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of political system—parliamentary or presidential—and for level of government. By studying the power function's exponents we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the former are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated). Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law correspond to differences in formal institutional structures. While the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law's basic parameters are country- and institution-specific .     

Citizenship,reproduction and the state: international marriage and human rights

The relationship between citizenship, marriage and family has often been overlooked in the social and political theory of citizenship. Intimate domestic life is associated with the private sphere, partly because reproduction itself is thought to depend on the private choices of individuals. While feminist theory has challenged this division between private and public – ‘the personal is political’ – the absence of any systematic thinking about familial relations, reproduction and citizenship is puzzling. Citizenship is a juridical status that confers political rights such as the right to carry a passport or to vote in elections. However, from a sociological point of view, we need to understand the social foundations and consequences of citizenship – however narrowly defined in legal and political terms. This article starts by noting the obvious point that the majority of us inherit citizenship at birth and in a sense we do not choose to be ‘Vietnamese’ or ‘Malaysian’ or ‘Japanese’ citizens. Although naturalisation is an important aspect of international migration and settlement, the majority of us are, as it were, born into citizenship. Therefore, the family is an important but often implicit facet of political identity and membership. In sociological language, citizenship looks like an ascribed rather than achieved status, and as a result becomes confused and infused with ethnicity. This inheritance of citizenship is odd given the fact that, at least in the West, there is a presumption, following the pronouncements of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, to think of citizenship in universal terms that are ethnically ‘blind’, but it is in fact closely connected with familial or private status. These complex relations within the nation-state are further complicated by the contemporary growth of transnational marriages and this article considers the problems of marriage, reproduction and citizenship in the context of global patterns of migration.     

Direct and Indirect Xenophobic Attacks: Unpacking Portfolios of Identity

Political Behavior - Political threats are typically conceptualized by scholars as targeting particular groups of people. We call for also conceptualizing threats as political attacks directed...     

A CROSS-PACIFIC BRIDGE

<正>Sino-American educational relations need more impetus Despite mounting tensions in geopolitics and the global economic arena,Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent meeting with U.S.President Donald Trump was not just a boon for the leaders of the world’s largest economies,it also signaled a tailwind for students who are investing time in forming links between the two countries.     

Estimating Environmental Costs

A database of environmental remediation costs is described as the response cost database (RCD). The database, which contains both capital and operating costs, includes 220 entries for complete activities ranging from studies to remedy components, such as caps, dredging, and pump and treat systems. Information and data sources for the RCD included actual costs from the literature, construction handbooks, and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency-approved software such as RACER. Costs were compared to benchmarks, such as from actual projects, when possible. Guidance on assumptions and scaling is provided with unit costs. The database was developed by environmental engineers experienced in the activities included and thus represents insightful estimation. The RCD may be useful for valuation of environmental portfolios or projects for planning, financial reporting, project management, financing, or mergers/acquisitions.