The growth and gaps of genetic data sharing policies in the United States

The 1996 Bermuda Principles launched a new era in data sharing, reflecting a growing belief that the rapid public dissemination of research data was crucial to scientific progress in genetics. A historical review of data sharing policies in the field of genetics and genomics reflects changing scientific norms and evolving views of genomic data, particularly related to human subjects’ protections and privacy concerns. The 2013 NIH Draft Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) Policy incorporates the most significant protections and guidelines to date. The GDS Policy, however, will face difficult challenges ahead as geneticists seek to balance the very real concerns of research participants and the scientific norms that propel research forward. This article provides a novel evaluation of genetic and GDS policies’ treatment of human subjects’ protections. The article examines not only the policies, but also some of the most pertinent scientific, legal, and regulatory developments that occurred alongside data sharing policies. This historical perspective highlights the challenges that future data sharing policies, including the recently disseminated NIH GDS Draft Policy, will encounter.     

Does New Book on Beauty Go Only Skin-Deep Into the Issue?

Wang Yajun, a security guard at the Central Academy of Drama, one of China’s top art institutions, from which many of the country’s renowned actors and actresses have sprung, unveiled a book on people’s outer appearances in April. The book,which sets out criteria for judging looks, points out that good-looking people tend to acquire more social resources and thus looks can help secure job promotions, wealth and increased social status.     

Assessing the Effects of Medical Marijuana Laws on Marijuana Use: The Devil is in the Details

This paper sheds light on previous inconsistencies identified in the literature regarding the relationship between medical marijuana laws (MMLs) and recreational marijuana use by closely examining the importance of policy dimensions (registration requirements, home cultivation, dispensaries) and the timing of when particular policy dimensions are enacted. Using data from our own legal analysis of state MMLs, we evaluate which features are associated with adult and youth recreational and heavy use by linking these policy variables to data from the Treatment Episode Data Set (TEDS) and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). We employ differences‐in‐differences techniques, controlling for state and year fixed effects, allowing us to exploit within‐state policy changes. We find that while simple dichotomous indicators of MML laws are not positively associated with marijuana use or abuse, such measures hide the positive influence legal dispensaries have on adult and youth use, particularly heavy use. Sensitivity analyses that help address issues of policy endogeneity and actual implementation of dispensaries support our main conclusion that not all MML laws are the same. Dimensions of these policies, in particular legal protection of dispensaries, can lead to greater recreational marijuana use and abuse among adults and those under the legal age of 21 relative to MMLs without this supply source.     

Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives about Work as Sites of Struggle

ABSTRACT

With the introduction of capitalist labor relations into China certain attitudes, competencies, and values associated with global capitalism seem to be increasingly valorized. This article analyzes the values and principles ascribed to migrant workers as part of practices linked to modes of government. The author confronts the dominant form of cultural construction of migrant workers through the Shenzhen official press with migrant workers' own narratives about their experience of work (dagong) in the city as the narratives are mediated through two different sites, namely, participant observation, interviews with rural migrants, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor acquired from several magazines dedicated to migrant workers. The article sheds light on the ways in which migrant workers' narratives confirm or, on the contrary, contest the pivotal elements of the hegemonic construction. Three different narratives that migrant workers produce about their own lives and about Shenzhen are examined. These narratives range from affirmations of dominant discourses about migrant workers and expressions of disillusionment about such discourses, to strategic uses of dominant discourses to justify the claims made by migrant workers.     

From Medusa Past Kantolo: Testing the Effectiveness of Canada's Enemy-Centric and Population-Centric Counterinsurgency Operational Strategies

Canada's counterinsurgency in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, involved two distinct operational strategies: an initial enemy-centric strategy and, after 2009, a population-centric strategy. Using insurgent-initiated attacks against civilians as a measure for the level of control and security provided by the counterinsurgency, this article tests the effectiveness of these two strategies using a quasi-experimental research design. This article finds that a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy that aimed to provide security to the population rather than destroy the insurgency resulted in the most controlled and secure environment for the civilian population. To the extent that a secure civilian population is important for successful counterinsurgency, the post-2009 population-centric operational strategy of the Canadian Forces, International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), and the United States increased the chances of a successful counterinsurgency in Afghanistan.     

Book reviews

This article addresses the concern that democratization may contribute to the reproduction of neo-patrimonialism, rather than to counteract it. The article reports the result of a survey among members of parliament in Ghana regarding their election campaigns. Total spending, sources of funds, and their usage are analysed in the context of the consolidation of liberal democracy. The survey results are supplemented with data collected in 34 interviews with MPs. The data show that MPs are involved in patron-client relationships to a significant degree to reproduce their political power. Furthermore, the prevalence of patronage politics among MPs in Ghana has increased throughout the period of democratic rule. This persistent pattern of patronage politics threatens the very heart of democratic consolidation. Vertical accountability and legitimacy is threatened by alternative pacts of loyalty, expectations of corruption, and tendencies to delegative mandates. Horizontal accountability risks pervasion by 'big man' interventions, and by insufficient allocation of time to monitoring the government and legislative activities.     

Do governments mean business when they derogate? Human rights violations during notified states of emergency

Whether international human rights treaties constrain the behavior of governments is a hotly contested issue that has drawn much scholarly attention. The possibility to derogate from some, but not all, of the rights enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) during declared and officially notified states of emergency provides a hitherto unexplored test case. If governments were increasingly violating non-derogable rights during derogation periods then this provides evidence that the ICCPR has no sufficient constraining effect on state parties. I analyze whether specific individual human rights as well as two aggregate rights measures are systematically more violated during derogation periods in a global sample over the period 1981 to 2008. I find that regime type matters: autocracies step up violation of both non-derogable and derogable rights, anocracies increasingly violate some derogable and some non-derogable rights, whereas democracies see no statistically significant change in their human rights behavior during derogation periods. This result suggests that the main general international human rights treaty fails to achieve its objective of shielding certain rights from derogation where, as in autocracies and anocracies, a constraining effect would be needed most.     

Electrophysiological and Behavioral Responses of Thanatophilus sinuatus Fabricius (Coleoptera: Silphidae) to Selected Cadaveric Volatile Organic Compounds

Soon after death, carcasses release volatile chemicals that attract carrion insects including Silphidae. Nevertheless, it is not known which chemical cues are involved in the attractiveness of the carcass. So far, little information is available on the chemical ecology of carrion beetles, particularly concerning the subfamily of Silphinae. The biological role of selected cadaveric volatile organic compounds including dimethyldisulfide (DMDS), butan‐1‐ol, n‐butanoic acid, indole, phenol, p‐cresol, putrescine, and cadaverine on the silphine species, Thanatophilus sinuatus Fabricius, was investigated using both electrophysiological and behavioral techniques. Among the tested cadaveric compounds, butan‐1‐ol and DMDS elicited the strongest electroantennography (EAG) from both T. sinuatus male and female antennae. In a two‐arm olfactometer, males and females were significantly attracted to DMDS for both tested doses, whereas only males were attracted to p‐cresol at 100 ng. Putrescine was repellent to males at the dose of 1 μg.