Poverty and profit in Central American forest policies

The failure of forestry to contribute to poverty reduction in Central America is due to public policies which inhibit its profitability. Absence of public regulation of harvesting and competing subsidies to agriculture keep forestry stumpage prices artificially low. This encourages destruction of the forest resource, which damages both the environment and the potential to reduce poverty. A comparison of Costa Rica and Honduras reveals two dissimilar approaches toward forest policy. While Costa Rica attempts to raise producer and grower stumpage prices by tax credits, soft loans and differential species fees, Honduras enforces price ceilings and uses centralized authority to control forest production and export. Both countries exhibit weaknesses in the management control cycle of programming, budgeting, implementing and evaluating their forest policies. Yet the Costa Rican approach has increased stumpage prices already, which bodes well for their forest sector. By contrast, the major beneficiary of Honduran forest policy has been COHDEFOR, the state enterprise responsible for forestry management, controlling production, and running its national system of agroforestry cooperatives. Despite greater public authority and resources than the Costa Rican forest service (DGF), the Honduran forest policy is not likely to increase producer profitability or reduce poverty in the near future.     

(Re-)Setting the Scholarly Agenda on Transjudicial Communication

We consider the contributions made by Robert H. Bork's Coercing Virtue (2003) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order (2004) to the ongoing debate over the citation of foreign law in United States courts. While empirically minded sociolegal scholars might be tempted to dismiss these books as mere op-eds, that would be a mistake. Taken with the spate of other recent work, they supply the makings of an agenda for rigorous research devoted to understanding the exchange of law among nations.     

Deleuze &; Guattari’s Intensive &; Pragmatic Semiotic of Emergent Law

The paper articulates Deleuze & Guattari’s semiotics towards a semiotic of law through a discussion of the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence and pragmatic semiotics of social power. Within the framework of the pragmatic semiotics, it is argued that the crucial tension is how social machines and their regimes of signs operate with the intensive semiotics of the field of emergence. The signifying regime of the State social machine constructs itself on the excluded foundation of the field of emergence, and what is lost are the real ontological and social conditions of emergence, intensity and affect. In contrast, the counter-signifying regime of the war social machine actively operates with the intensive semiotic of the field of emergence, and develops an image of legality and regime of signs that taps the field of emergence for social organisation and expression. Returning to the issue of emergence and legality, the concept of Emergent Law is developed as a war social machine, abstract machine, assemblage, and regime of signs, that operates a semiotic that is developed in terms of an intensive semiotics that is open to and taps the forces of the field of emergence.     

Poppy seed ingestion as a contributing factor to opiate-positive urinalysis results: the Pacific perspective.

The possible contribution of poppy seed foods to positive opiate urinalysis results, especially from foods available in the Pacific Rim area, has recently become an issue for the U.S. Army Forensic Toxicology Drug Testing Laboratory in Hawaii. To assess the likelihood of this possible contribution, seven different poppy seed food products were consumed by male and female volunteers, and urine specimens were collected at time increments up to either 24 or 72 h. Specimens were evaluated for opiates using Roche Abuscreen radioimmunoassay (RIA), and all RIA positive specimens were analyzed for morphine and codeine using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC-MS). Poppy seed cake, bagels, muffins, and rolls did not contain sufficient quantities of poppy seeds to give rise to opiate positive specimens by U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) GC-MS cutoff levels (morphine = 4000 ng/mL, codeine = 2000 ng/mL), although a number of specimens were positive by National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) cutoff levels (morphine and codeine = 300 ng/mL). However, ingestion of poppy seed streusel or Danish pastry led to confirmed morphine and codeine positive specimens, irrespective of the use of DOD or NIDA confirmation cutoff values. In addition, significant amounts of codeine were observed in a number of these specimens. These findings argue against the unqualified application of previously published quantitative guidelines for eliminating poppy seed ingestion as a possible cause for a positive opiate urinalysis result.     

SCHOOLS AS COMMUNITIES: THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG COMMUNAL SCHOOL ORGANIZATION,STUDENT BONDING,AND SCHOOL DISORDER*

Research has indicated that school factors such as communal school organization and student bonding are predictive of school disorder, with greater communal organization and greater student bonding leading to less delinquency and victimization. Data from a nationally representative sample of 254 public, nonalternative, secondary schools were used to examine structural equation models representing hypothesized relationships among communal school organization, student bonding, and school disorder. The hypothesis that communally organized schools would have less disorder held true for teacher victimization and student delinquency, but not for student victimization. In addition, the hypothesis that the relationship between communal school organization and school disorder would be mediated by student bonding was supported for student delinquency, but not for teacher victimization.