Friction Marks of Stabbing Tools in Tires

When receiving a stabbed tire for examination, forensic toolmark examiners can determine whether a suspect tool was used in a specific crime based on class-characteristics and individual-characteristics marks that have been left by the tool on the tire. This study discusses friction marks and their forensic value during the examination of a punctured tire. The term friction mark refers to the noticeable mark around the penetration area on a tire's surface. Tires designed to create high friction when contacting a road. Due to this design, friction is created between the stabbing tool shank and the sides of the hole. As a result of this friction, the shank of the stabbing tool wears the outer layer of tire around the hole. This leaves a friction mark whose general shape reflects the cross-sectional shape of the stabbing tool’s shank. This phenomenon was observed and named by Locke (7) in his evaluation of tire puncture marks with knives. This article demonstrates the same phenomenon with other types of stabbing tools. Test stabs were produced with different tools representing a variety of cross-sectional shapes of shanks, and the resulting friction marks were photo-documented and discussed. Correlations between the various cross-sectional shapes and their corresponding friction marks are shown. Based on friction mark examination, the examiner: (i) can infer suspect tool shank cross-sectional shape with the evaluation of the friction mark shape and (ii) can deduce the maximum dimensions of the shank. This examination simplifies and accelerates the forensic comparison procedure and the investigation time.     

Teachers’ Conditional Regard and Students’ Need Satisfaction and Agentic Engagement: A Multilevel Motivation Mediation Model

Teachers’ conditional positive regard and conditional negative regard are common motivational techniques in the classroom. This study investigated their respective effects on adolescent students’ agentic engagement, while considering students’ basic psychological needs for autonomy and relatedness as potential mediators. Data collected from 30 teachers and 651 7th to 10th graders (52% female) were used to test a multilevel mediation model. The results indicated that teachers’ conditional negative regard undermined students’ agentic engagement by frustrating both of their autonomy and relatedness needs. Teachers’ conditional positive regard thwarted students’ sense of autonomy, which consequently undermined their agentic engagement. The findings are discussed in terms of conditional positive and negative regard as undesirable classroom motivational practices and the mechanisms through which they operate. The discussion also notes the importance of investigating contextual factors at the classroom level.

     

Resolving Conflict Across Languages

English is increasingly used as an indispensable interlanguage, the commonthird language of non-native speakers, in international negotiations.In technical or commercial talks, where interlocutors share a stock ofexpert knowledge, semantic problems are relatively easily overcome. Inemotive and complex negotiations to resolve protracted international conflict,however, intriguing problems of interpretation arise. Though interlocutorsspeak in English, they are unlikely to think or work in English.Back home the political debate is conducted in the mother tongue. Thus thesemantic fields, the full range of meanings and connotations, of keyabstract concepts at the heart of the negotiation may not be conveyed intranslation. The ill-fated Syrian-Israeli peace talks are drawn upon to exemplifythe argument.     

“Your Wilderness:” The White Possession of Detroit in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive*

After a decade of accelerated disinvestment and depopulation, Detroit (re)appeared in the national imaginary as an “urban frontier” open for (re)settlement by (mostly white) creative entrepreneurs. Recently, scholars have addressed the ways in which this frontier rhetoric arouses settler colonial desire for land based not just on a notion of black criminality or ineptitude, but also more fundamentally on an assumption of deferred white possession. Though this work has productively described the settler colonial conditions of racialized (re)development in the Motor City, it ignores white possession as a process that mythologizes Indigenous history and delegitimizes Indigenous people. In this paper I read Jim Jarmusch’s 2014 vampire film Only Lovers Left Alive as a “landscape of monstrosity” that inadvertently and momentarily recovers Indigenous and African American presence in moments of erasure and absence, as werewolves and ghosts to the white vampire elite and zombie working class. More broadly, I argue that Only Lovers Left Alive actively participates in an ideological process of (re)settlement that disguises land speculation (and its inherently disruptive cycles of uneven development) in a renewed frontier mythology. I read the film’s central characters, the vampires Adam and Eve, as disaster tourists whose nostalgia for Detroit’s lost civilization heralds in its renewed form.     

Women's urban labour market status in developing countries: How well do they fare in Khartoum,Sudan?

This article examines the insertion of women in the formal sector labour market in urban Khartoum, Sudan, in order to explain their inferior employment status in one particular developing country environment. A number of hypotheses are tested drawing upon recent labour market theoretical developments and econometric techniques from the literature which have had limited previous applications in Third World settings, particularly in Africa. Our findings indicate that occupational segregation, rather than pay discrimination, is primarily to blame for observed wage differentials suggesting that well‐intentioned equal pay laws will do little to reduce the earnings gap.     

Consumer Preference for Neotraditional Neighborhood Characteristics

Abstract

Much research on residential mobility relies on examining people's choices within the context of what is available in a local housing market. However, it is difficult to determine the demand for alternative housing or neighborhood types that may not be available or are available only in limited quantities. Hence, the market may not accurately reveal consumer preferences for such alternatives.

We estimate a discrete choice model of neighborhood choice by using data from a choice‐based conjoint analysis survey that allows us to vary characteristics experimentally. The model is used to determine consumer preferences for neotraditional neighborhood design features, including neighborhood layout, housing density, surrounding open space, and commuting time, while holding other characteristics, including school quality and neighborhood safety, constant. The results indicate that the neotraditional design with higher density is less preferred on average, but that niche marketing, additional open space, or other amenities can overcome its negative effects.