A novel method for STR-based DNA profiling using microarrays

We describe a novel method for rapidly identifying and distinguishing between different DNA sequences using short tandem repeat (STR) analysis and DNA microarrays. The method can be used to deduce identity, length, and number of STRs of the target molecule. We refer to this technique as the "variable-length probe array" method for STR profiling (VLPA). The method involves hybridization of the unknown STR target sequence to a DNA microarray displaying complementary probes that vary in length to cover the range of possible STRs. A post-hybridization enzymatic digestion of the DNA hybrids is then used to selectively remove labeled single-stranded regions of DNA from the microarray surface. The number of repeats in the unknown target is then deduced based on the pattern of target DNA that remains hybridized to the array. This DNA profiling technique is useful for performing forensic analysis to uniquely identify individual humans or other species.     

Conductive Activism: Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns across Hong Kong and Mainland China

This study looks at trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and the transformation of cross-border activism between Hong Kong and mainland China. Examining two cases, it demonstrates the mechanism and processes of trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and networks involving non-governmental agencies, student groups and workers. The study suggests that anti-sweatshop activism has been conductive and transferrable from Hong Kong to China in a way that has mobilised local civil society power, cultivated mainland activists and nurtured localised pro-labour activism. With Hong Kong activists acting as movement conveyers and mainland activists acting as adapters, anti-sweatshop activism has evolved. Once centred on marketplaces and consumers, it is now centred on production sites, and has moved domestic actors (including workers, students, scholars, media and consumers) from the margins to the centre. Anti-sweatshop activism has moulded itself to local contexts by rebuilding its strategies and tactics while coalescing with overseas networks to integrate strengths across the Hong Kong-Chinese border. Although the anti-sweatshop movement in China has its weaknesses, its evolution has the potential to gradually alter the power asymmetries between domestic and overseas activists.     

The internet and the state: Instrument of social control or subversive tecnology?

Conclusion Technological progress always contains within it the ironic dialectic of liberation and domination. The computer-based information highway is no exception. As a consequence, our own view is that the computer revolution contains the potential for both over-control and subversion of control. Science and technology are not neutral. They are social constructs that exist only within a context of choices of development and application. Therefore, it is not the technology that constrains, or oppresses, or liberates. Rather, the emancipatory potential of this new technology lies in the degree to which those who use it can disseminate it and maintain it as a relatively low-cost communication tool. To date, many of those involved in expanding the Internet frontier have generally been suspicious of and resistant to government intrusion into the Net. While it is often easier to simply dismiss such suspicion as the ranting of conspiracy theorists, history has taught us that such a na?ve faith in the benevolence of the government is unwise. Our intention here has not been to provide a definitive conclusion about the past, present, or future state of technological progress; instead we hope that our discussion will spark further critical analysis of technology and related topics.     

Corporatization in the Public Sector: Explaining the Growth of Local Government Companies

The creation of companies by local governments to provide public services—referred to as “corporatization”—is an example of systemic public entrepreneurship that is popular across the world. To build knowledge of the antecedents of public sector entrepreneurship, the authors investigate the factors that lead local governments to create companies for public service delivery. Using zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to analyze secondary data from 150 major English local governments for 2010–16, the authors find that governments with higher levels of grant dependence and debt dependence are more involved in the creation and operation of companies, as are larger governments. Further analysis reveals that very low and very high managerial capabilities are strongly associated with more involvement in profit-making companies, while local government involvement in companies is more prevalent in deprived areas. At the same time, government ownership of companies is more common in areas with high economic output.     

Recent legal developments

Abstract

THE CASE of R (Pretty) v. Director of Public Prosecutions, gave the House of Lords the opportunity to comment on the issues surrounding the application of the European Convention on Human Rights to the crime of assisted suicide in the case of the terminally ill. A conservative approach was taken in relation to both this issue and indeed in relation to the possibilities of judicial control of the Law Officers of the Crown.