Cultural Attributes and Adaptations Linked to Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents

This exploratory study examined whether associations between perceived school experiences and achievement motivation varied by language acculturation and generational status among a sample of immigrant and U.S. born Latino adolescents (n = 129). Ogbu's (1993) notion of primary and secondary cultural differences was adapted to better suit comparisons within this Latino group using the terms cultural attributes and cultural adaptations. Academic competence, school belonging, and parent involvement were positively related to achievement motivation. Academic competence and parent involvement were strongly related to achievement motivation among students who spoke English or were born in the U.S., suggesting that these associations may be cultural adaptations. Future intervention programs for Latino students, regardless of acculturation or generational status, should focus on making them feel supported and included. Acculturated Latino youth and youth who have lived in the U.S. for a long time should be targeted for programs that enhance academic competence and parent involvement.     

Benin: country profile

Since 1972, Benin has had an official Marxist-Leninist ideology; however, centralized state control contributed to economic stagnation and a search for capital investment. A special section of the World Bank is advising the Government of Benin on public sector reform and privatization, and an agreement with the International Monetary Fund seems likely. At present, 65% of Benin's labor force is engaged in subsistence agriculture, most of which is collectivized, and the gross national product per capita is US$260. The main cash crops are seed cotton and palm oil kernels used in soap and margarine. While women occupy key trade positions in the south of Benin, they are very oppressed in the north. Benin has a population of 4 million. The infant mortality rate is 115/1000 lives births and life expectancy is 43 years. Only 21% of the population has access to clean water. 40% of men, compared to just 17% of women, are literate.     

La gestion ministérielle et les organismes centraux†

Sommaire. Les relations que doivent établir les gestionnaires des ministères avec les organismes centraux constituent une des composantes importantes de l'administration quotidienne dans le secteur public. Il est certain que ces relations exercent une influence significative sur l'efficacité de la gestion ministérielle. Le ministère des Affaires sociales a étéà l'origine, au cours des dernières années, de plusieurs changements profonds dans certains secteurs de la politique sociale. Il a étéà même de constater è quel point ces relations peuvent conditionner l'efficacité des ministères. L'objet du présent article est précisément de dégager un certain nombre de considérations sur les relations qui s'établissent entre, d'une part, les ministères à vocation de services et les organismes centraux tels la Commission de la fonction publique et le Conseil du trésor, et d'autre part, entre ces mêmes ministères et des ministères qui exercent un rôle de soutien tels les ministères des Trauvaux publics et de l'Approvisionnement, de la Fonction publique, des Communications, et de la Justice. Abstract. The relations that administrators of government departments are required to establish with the central government agencies constitute an important component of day-to-day administrative activities in the public sector. These relations are bound to have an effect on the efficiency of government administration. In recent years the Social Affairs Department has been instrumental in bringing about some far-reaching changes in certain areas of social policy. It has had occasion to determine to what extent these relations affect the efficiency of government departments. The following article offers a number of observations on the relations, on the one hand, between government departments providing direct services to the public and central government agencies, such as the Civil Service Commission and the Treasury Board, and, on the other, between those departments and government departments of a supportive nature, i.e. the Public Works and Supplies Department, the Civil Service Department, the Communications Department and the Justice Department.     

Reviews

Marie Lavigne, The Economics of Transition. From Socialist Economy to Market Economy. London: Macmillan, 1995, xvi + 295 pp., £13.99.

Michael L. Wyzan (ed.), First Steps Toward Economic Independence: New States of the Postcommunist World. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1995, xii + 268 pp., £53.95

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr & Marina V. Rosser, Comparative Economics in a Transforming World Economy. Chicago, IL: Irwin, xx + 488 pp.

Masahiko Aoki & Hyung‐Ki Kim (eds),. Corporate Governance in Transitional Economies. Insider Control and the Role of Banks. Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1995, xxiii + 467 pp., £29.95.

Marvin Jackson & Valentijn Bilsen (eds), Company Management and Capital Market Development in the Transition. Aldershot: Avebury, 1994, xxii + 281 pp., £40.00.

Nicolai N. Petro, The Rebirth of Russian Democracy: An Interpretation of Political Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, ix + 226 pp., £25.50.

Judith Devlin, The Rise of the Russian Democrats: The Causes and Consequences of the Élite Revolution. Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1995, x + 294 pp., £49.95.

Mark Galeotti, The Kremlin's Agenda. Coulsdon: Jane's Intelligence Review, 1995, ix+ 162 pp., £20.00.

James E. Goodby (ed.), Regional Conflicts: The Challenge to US‐Russian Co‐operation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, xiii + 251 pp., £30.00.

A. Z. Rubinstein & O. M. Smolansky (eds), Regional Power Rivalries in the New Eurasia. New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1995, xii + 290 pp., $22.95.

Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan. A Borderland in Transition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, x + 290 pp., $32.50.

John Thirkell, Richard Scase & Sarah Vickerstaff (eds), Labour Relations and Political Change in Eastern Europe. A. Comparative Perspective. London: UCL Press, 1995, viii + 197 pp., £32.00.

Jennifer Turpin, Reinventing the Soviet Self: Media and Social Change in the Former Soviet Union. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1995, x + 154 pp., £44.95.

Geoffrey Roberts, The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: Russo‐German Relations and the Road to War, 1933–1941. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1996, x + 192 pp., £37.50 h/b, £11.99 p/b.

Richard B. Day, Cold War Capitalism: The View from Moscow, 1945–1975. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995, xvi + 355 pp., $85.00 h/b., $34.95 p/b.

David Mayers, The Ambassadors and America's Soviet Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995, viii + 335 pp.

John L. H. Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union, 1945–1991. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, xiii + 477 pp., £20.00.

Oleg V. Khlevniuk, In Stalin's Shadow. The Career of ‘Sergo’ Ordzhonikidze. Edited by Donald J. Raleigh. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995, x+ 193 pp., $21.95.

Gennadi V. Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows: Anti‐Semitism in Stalin's Russia. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995, 333 pp., £21.00.

Genrich M. Deych, A Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union. Edited and Introduced by Benjamin Nathans. Moscow: Blagovest, 1995, xi + 149 pp.

Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and its Cultural Reception, trans. Alan Bodger; foreword. Tom Gunning; ed. Richard Taylor. London and New York: Routledge, 1994, xxii+273 pp., £45.00.

James R. Schlesinger (Project Chairman) et al., Nuclear Energy Safety Challenges in the Former Soviet Union. Washington, DC: CSIS, 1995, vii + 94 pp.     

Colombia at War: The Search for a Peace Diplomacy

This essay analyzes Colombian foreign policy over the last three decades with specific emphasis on Bogota's peace diplomacy from 1978 up to 2000 in the context of an ongoing and degrading internal war. Initially, it assumes a modified realist perspective that links international relations with domestic structures. Then, the text defines three models of Colombian peaceful diplomacy according to the purposes, the means, and the rationales employed by the administrations that covered the above-mentioned period. After empirically evaluating the governments of Presidents Turbay, Betancur, Barco, Gaviria, and Samper and the first two years of the presidency of Pastrana, the article concludes with an assessment of the country's peace diplomacy and its impact on internal violence and instability. The foreign policies of the six different mandates show that Colombia never developed an overall, consensual state strategy towards peace, that the multiple peaceful diplomacies were partially successful in terms of sustaining the political regime and that, notwithstanding the latter, the successive governments failed to achieve a genuine resolution to domestic war. Finally, the article calls for a serious, active, and simultaneous state foreign policy and citizen's diplomacy in favor of peace.     

Bite Mark Analysis in Foodstuffs and Inanimate Objects and the Underlying Proofs for Validity and Judicial Acceptance

Even though one of the first bite mark cases was Doyle v. State in 1954 (a bitten cheese case), the research has focused on bite marks inflicted in human skin. As published Papers, Case Reports, or Technical Notes can constitute precedents which are relied upon in making the legal arguments and a considerable amount of case law exists in this area, we present a systematic review on bite mark analysis in foodstuffs and inanimate objects and their underlying proofs for validity and judicial acceptance according to Daubert rulings. Results showed that there is vulnerability in these procedures, and it is essential to demand for focus scrutiny on the known error rates when such evidence is presented in trials. These kinds of bite marks are well documented; however, there has been little research in this field knowing that the protocols of analysis and comparison are the responsibility of the forensic odontologists.     

“Give me some space”: exploring youth to parent aggression and violence

A small scale qualitative project, undertaken by an interdisciplinary domestic violence research group involving academic researchers and research assistants, with colleagues from Independent Domestic Abuse Services (IDAS), investigated youth aggression and violence against parents. Following the literature review, data was generated through several research conversations with young people (n = 2), through semi-structured interviews with mothers (n = 3) and practitioners (n = 5), and through a practitioner focus group (n = 8). Thematic analysis and triangulation of the data from parents, practitioners and young people, elicited interconnected and complex overarching themes. Young people could be both victim and perpetrator. The witnessing or experiencing of domestic aggression and violence raised the concept of ‘bystander children’. The impact of young people experiencing familial violence was underestimated by parents. For practitioners, the effects of working with domestic violence was shown to be significant - both positively and negatively.     

A new approach in the identification of degraded paternity samples

DNA extraction from bone is an important issue particularly in paternity cases when bones are the only remaining material to obtain and analyze DNA. The difficulties arising from bacterial damages, taphonomic factors and diagenesis might negatively affect the extraction and the amplification of DNA. This makes the laboratory procedure a hard and time-consuming process, and the analysis can fail. Analyzing mini-STRs in this type of degraded samples is highly recommended. In this study a new extraction technique was carried on bone samples which were then typed for mini-STRs. The aim was to differentiate two genetically related skeletons found in the same familial grave for a paternity test. The analysis revealed that this new extraction technique along with mini-STR analysis can properly be an effective way to obtain and analyze DNA in bones in the field of forensic sciences.     

Killing the Messenger: Mark Lilla’s “End of Identity Liberalism” and its Critics

Decades of mind-numbing political correctness on the academic far-left robbed the humanities and social sciences of their legitimacy, generated the alt-right as its very own dialectial alter-ego, and provided an essential catalyzing ingredient in Donald Trump's electoral victory—understood as the clearest expression of a weary nation's revulsion at p. c.'s intolerable moralizing. The illiberal, antisemitic, white nationalist alt-right and the illiberal, antisemitic, anti-American alt-left mirror one another perfectly! Faced with competing totalitarianisms at both extremes, the liberal center should defend itself first of all by forthrightly reclaiming the univeristy as a space for education and not indoctrination. Yet the politically correct professoriate do not want to hear this—and their over-the-top hostile overreactions to the news that they are to blame for what they hate most prove that it's so. Time to repeal and replace political correctness.