Piercing the surface: A mechanical analysis of stabbing with household tools

Estimating the applied power during a stabbing incident, or estimating the minimal force necessary to penetrate the body with a certain weapon is a challenging task in forensic practice. A thorough forensic evaluation of stabbing forces needs objective numerical experimental data. Stabbing tests of 12 different weapons – including knives, a pair of scissors, a fork, screwdrivers, a rasp, a corkscrew, and a utility knife blade – were performed with a Mecmesin MultiTest-dV material tester on pork loin and ballistic gel to estimate the stabbing forces and dynamics. Penetration force (F_p) and maximal force (F_max) were recorded, and the registered force curves were analyzed. F_max was 159.8–212.07 Newton (N), 30.56–30.58 N, 168.9–185.48 N for various knives; 171.39–190.43 N for the pair of scissors, 233.6 N for the fork; 532.65–562.65 N, 370.31–367.19 N and 314.51–432.89 N for various screwdrivers, 44.14–56.62 N for utility knife during pork loin stabbing. The butter knife, corkscrew and rasp were not able to penetrate the pork loin, and the curved fork bent during stabbing. The results prove that weapon characteristics greatly influence the force necessary for penetration. Maximal stabbing force depends mostly on tip sharpness, and the force sharply decreases after penetration occurs, which indicates that edge sharpness is not as important as tip characteristics during stabbing perpendicular to skin surface. The penetration force during stabbing with a pair of scissors is comparable to the penetration force of knives. Stabbing with screwdrivers generally needs larger force than average knives but depends greatly on screwdriver size.     

Overview of the seized and examined pharmaceutical in the state of Minas Gerais-Brazil by the Civil Police from 2017 to 2022: A fundamental analysis of the recent impact over the drugs market

This work presents a data survey regarding the qualitative chemical analysis of drugs seized by the Police in the state of Minas Gerais between July 2017 and June 2022, including an evaluation of labeling of 265 samples of anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) seized in 2020. The Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API) present in the samples were identified through chemical analysis and classified by system Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) methods. Analysis of the labeling information for 265 samples of AAS followed the guidance of legislation RDC 71 (2009) from ANVISA. For this study 6355 seized pharmaceuticals underwent qualitative chemical analysis that corresponded to 7739 APIs successfully identified and classified. Among the components studied AAS, psychostimulants, anesthetics, and analgesics were the most commonly examined. AAS seized and tested increased by over 100% and for the majority of the samples analyzed were found to not match the labeling on the packaging. In the meantime, anti-obesity drugs presented a prominent increase of 400% from 2020/1 to 2021/2, during covid-19 quarantine. Seized pharmaceuticals and tests can support information in the planning of public health and safety policies.     

Accountability from the perspective of the forum: citizens’ attitudes towards accountability in Europe

The aim of this article is to analyse citizens’ attitudes towards governmental accountability in 24 European countries and to examine the influence of contextual and individual factors on perceptions of accountability. Using as a dataset the 2012 European Social Survey, the results show that citizens respond positively when the media provides reliable information on which to judge the government, when individuals perceive that governments perform well, when individuals live in more extensive and generous welfare states and when they live in countries where the rule of law is firmly established. In addition, the findings also provide evidence that compared to politically left-wing citizens, right-wing supporters have, on average, a higher perception of governmental accountability. In particular, the findings show strong positive evaluations of right-wing governments by right-wing voters in comparison with left-wing governments by left-wing voters.     

How Disgust Influences Health Purity Attitudes

Food and health regulations are increasingly being pushed onto the political agenda, with rising concerns about genetically modified foods, obesity rates, and vaccination. Public beliefs and attitudes on these issues often conflict with the scientific evidence, yet we know relatively little about what influences opinion on these issues. The public lacks clear partisan cues, and many food and health attitudes cut across the ideological spectrum. We argue that these issues represent new ‘purity’ attitudes that are driven by the emotion of disgust. Across three studies, both by measuring individuals’ trait disgust sensitivity and experimentally inducing an emotional state of disgust, we demonstrate the impact of disgust on food and health policy attitudes. Our results show that greater sensitivity to disgust is associated with support for organic foods, opposition to genetically modified foods, and anti-vaccination beliefs. However, we find only limited evidence that experimentally manipulated disgust affects attitudes toward genetically modified and organic foods. Overall, our results demonstrate that disgust plays an important role in attitudes regarding public health and broadens our understanding of purity attitudes.     

Turning Out Unlikely Voters? A Field Experiment in the Top-Two Primary

Those who turn out in American primary elections are a small and unrepresentative subset of the population. Why do citizens forgo participation in nominating contests yet vote in general elections? We argue that limited contact lowers participation in primary elections. We present results from a randomized field experiment with near 150,000 letters in California’s 2014 primary. Each letter went to one of the four million Californians who had participated in recent general elections but not in primaries. We find that a single letter increased turnout by 0.5 points from a base rate of 9.3 percent. This increase is more than twice the average effect calculated in a recent meta-analysis and represents a proportional increase of 5.4 percent. Our experiment shows that registrants who typically abstain from primaries—and who are thus often ignored by campaigns—can be effectively mobilized.     

Leadership Experiences Within Civil Organizations and Candidacy in Public Elections: Causal Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Approach

Standing as a candidate in public elections has been characterized as the ultimate act of political participation. We test the hypothesis that acquiring office within civil organizations increases the probability of becoming a candidate in public elections. In order to take self-selection problems into account, we provide quasi-experimental evidence using election discontinuities, in which we compare the likelihood of being nominated for public office between closely ranked winners and losers in Swedish student union (SU) elections. Our original data cover 5,000 SU candidates and register data on their candidacies in public elections (1991–2010). The analysis provides support to the hypothesis: Students elected to SU councils were about 34 percent (6 percentage points) more likely to become a candidate in a public election than SU council candidates who were not elected. The causal impact is fairly stable over time. The analysis makes important contributions to two interrelated bodies of literature: First, it provides political recruitment literature with causal evidence that acquiring leadership experiences at arenas outside of representative democratic institutions facilitate entry into election processes. Second, it provides strong evidence to an increasingly contested issue within political participation research by showing that certain organizational activities increase individuals’ political involvement.     

Trusting the State,Trusting Each Other? The Effect of Institutional Trust on Social Trust

Trust in state institutions is a prominent explanation of social trust. However, previous—mainly cross-sectional—analyses provide limited causal evidence regarding the relationship between institutional trust and social trust and it is thus essentially unknown whether an observed relationship reflects reverse causality (social trust forming institutional trust), or both forms of trust reflecting deep-seated dispositions (common confounding). Against the backdrop of the shortcomings of previous cross-sectional analyses, this paper utilizes two Danish panel surveys containing measures of both types of trust for the same individuals surveyed at multiple points in time over a long time-span (up to 18 years) to address the potentially reverse and/or spurious relationship. Using individual fixed effects and cross-lagged panel models, the results provide strong evidence of trust in state institutions exercising a causal impact on social trust, whereas the evidence for a reverse relationship is limited.     

How Ideology Fuels Affective Polarization

Scholars have reached mixed conclusions about the implications of increased political polarization for citizen decision-making. In this paper, we argue that citizens respond to ideological divergence with heightened affective polarization. Using a survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens, we find that increased ideological differences between political figures produce increasingly polarized affective evaluations, and that these differences are especially large among respondents with stronger ideological commitments and higher levels of political interest. We provide further support for these findings in an observational study of citizens’ evaluations of the U.S. Senators from their state. We also find that the polarizing effects of ideological differences can be largely mitigated with biographical information about the public officials, which suggests that the pernicious consequences of ideological polarization can be overcome by focusing on matters other than political disagreement.     

Are Group Cues Necessary? How Anger Makes Ethnocentrism Among Whites a Stronger Predictor of Racial and Immigration Policy Opinions

Research shows that group conflict sets ethnocentric thinking into motion. However, when group threat is not salient, can ethnocentrism still influence people’s political decision-making? In this paper, I argue that anger, unrelated to racial and ethnic groups, can activate the attitudes of ethnocentric whites and those that score low in ethnocentrism thereby causing these attitudes to be a stronger predictor of racial and immigration policy opinions. Using an adult national experiment over two waves, I induced several emotions to elicit anger, fear, or relaxation (unrelated to racial or ethnic groups). The experimental findings show that anger increases opposition to racial and immigration policies among whites that score high in ethnocentrism and enhances support for these policies among those that score low in ethnocentrism. Using data from the American National Election Study cumulative file, I find a similar non-racial/ethnic anger effect. The survey findings also demonstrate that non-racial/ethnic fear increases opposition to immigration among whites that don’t have strong out-group attitudes.     

Unresponsive and Unpersuaded: The Unintended Consequences of a Voter Persuasion Effort

To date, field experiments on campaign tactics have focused overwhelmingly on mobilization and voter turnout, with far more limited attention to persuasion and vote choice. In this paper, we analyze a field experiment with 56,000 Wisconsin voters designed to measure the persuasive effects of canvassing, phone calls, and mailings during the 2008 presidential election. Focusing on the canvassing treatment, we find that persuasive appeals had two unintended consequences. First, they reduced responsiveness to a follow-up survey among infrequent voters, a substantively meaningful behavioral response that has the potential to induce bias in estimates of persuasion effects as well. Second, the persuasive appeals possibly reduced candidate support and almost certainly did not increase it. This counterintuitive finding is reinforced by multiple statistical methods and suggests that contact by a political campaign may engender a backlash.