Asian workers in the Gulf states of the Middle East

One of the most conspicuous developments in recent years in the Korean political economy is the enormous increase of Korean investment in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. In particular, since the appreciation of the Korean currency (won) in 1987 and the rapid increase of industrial action by Korean workers, more Korean foreign direct investment (FDI) has been carried out by small-and medium-sized firms, particularly in the manufacturing sector. However, many of the Korean firms in the region have already experienced various problems. This article examines the determinants of the new phase of Korean FDI. It also discusses the possible consequences of Korean FDI in Indonesia.     

THE STUDY OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE UNITED STATES

The study of public administration in the United States is large in terms of the number of academic programmes, the range of journal publications, and the number of scholars. Its scholarship attracts attention from all over the globe. At the same time it is a public administration that is clearly embedded in a specific national culture, just as anywhere else. Three of the main challenges include the strong increase of quantitative‐statistical methods, the decline of practitioner authors, and substantive specialization to the extent that generalists' perspectives are losing ground.     

A critical geography of poverty finance

This paper builds a critical geography of poverty finance with recourse to a relational comparison of the microfinance and subprime mortgage markets. It probes paradoxical claims about the nature of poverty, the poor, states and markets that have surfaced in the aftermath of the financial crisis. In doing so it aims to generate new understandings of neoliberal global finance with specific emphasis on 1) the social constitution of risk through racialised and gendered forms of difference; 2) the exercise of dispossession and imperialism by financial means; and 3) articulations of poverty finance with the social relations of debt in specific conjunctures. Each of these terrains of inquiry forms a subsection of the paper, following a preliminary section that poses the animating paradox in more detail. The paper concludes with some reflections on the conditions of possibility for democratising finance.     

Citizen experts in environmental risk

In the last two decades, public administrators have increasingly faced groups of people with opposing views about the risks of exposure to environmental contaminants. Because of a series of intriguing studies on risk perception, the situation is frequently seen, by scholars and administrators alike, as a conflict between experts and citizens, and risk communication guidelines are based on this interpretation. But the citizen-expert dichotomy appears fallacious when it is examined in light of the ways citizens actually participate in environmental policy making. The dichotomy overlooks the fact that citizens express their perception of risk largely through organized citizen groups, and that these groups employ and have access to many experts. This essay uses a mainstream environmental group and a number of grassroots environmental groups to illustrate the point. It concludes that the more important conflict is between experts who find environmental pollution safe and those who find it hazardous.     

Case report: Identification of skeletal remains using short-amplicon marker analysis of severely degraded DNA extracted from a decomposed and charred femur

Applying two extraction protocols to isolate DNA from a charred femur recovered after a major forest fire, a range of established and recently developed forensic marker sets that included mini-STRs and SNPs were used to type the sample and confirm identity by comparison to a claimed daughter of the deceased. Identification of the remains suggested that the individual had been dead for 10 years and the DNA was therefore likely to be severely degraded from the combined effects of decomposition and exposure to very high temperatures. We used new marker sets specifically developed to analyze degraded DNA comprising both reduced-length amplicon STR sets and autosomal SNP multiplexes, giving an opportunity to assess the ability of each approach to successfully type highly degraded material from a challenging case. The results also suggest a modified ancient DNA extraction procedure offers improved typing success from degraded skeletal material.