Gold Coast Information

Mr. Wilson is Government Information Officer—a title nowchanged to Public Relations Officer—in the Gold Coast,where he has had fifteen years of experience in education. Thearticle is abridged from an interview which he broadcast tothe West Indies in April with the Jamaican writer Una Marson,now on the staff of the B.B.C.     

Editorial

Today the United States faces an unpredictable security environment characterized by regional powers and non-state actors, such as vast terrorist networks, who wield increasingly lethal weapons. To address this security environment, the George W. Bush administration has endorsed the ‘transformation’ of US military forces. This article focuses on one transformational goal, namely the development of long-range precision strike capabilities, and examines the feasibility and desirability of using existing ballistic missiles as conventional global strike assets. While some of the futuristic and stealthy long-range technologies currently touted by defense planners might fulfill their promise and could someday be deployed, conventional ballistic missiles could offer an efficient global strike capability much sooner, one that would complement other existing global strike capabilities as research and development on more futuristic platforms continues. Thus, by combining existing capabilities, advanced technologies and new, flexible concepts of operations, the United States can deliver tomorrow's capability today.     

REGIONAL GOVERNANCE IN ENGLAND: A CHANGING ROLE FOR THE GOVERNMENT’S REGIONAL OFFICES?

Debates about the appropriate territorial scales of government to meet the challenges of economic, political and social change have gained momentum in Western Europe in recent years. In the UK, political mobilization has transformed constitutional arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By contrast, in the English regions, a less radical approach has been adopted, but the outcome has been a strengthening of the institutions of regional governance. A key feature has been the enhanced responsibilities of the Government Offices for the Regions, which have been encouraged to build on their traditional administrative functions and adopt a more strategic role. This article explores the Offices’ contribution to regional and local governance. Our central argument is that although increasingly expected to act as a bridgehead between national and sub‐national government and a focus for regional policy coordination, their potential role in filling the missing gap in English regional governance has not yet been fully grasped.     

Informing Public Health Policy and Practice: The Strategic Management of Research Processes and Organizations

Better health depends on how well federal public health organizations perform both scientifically and organizationally. The performance challenges of public health science organizations are not carbon copies of those facing public service organizations. This article examines how one federal science agency in the public health field has instituted a performance orientation over a dozen years, offering a detailed illustration of how the in-principle advantages of the "managing for performance" approach can be realized in practice. In taking science more seriously as a basis for public policy, the new administration should not lose sight of lessons it can learn from its predecessors about managing science organizations for performance.     

STRESSFUL LIFE EVENTS AND DELINQUENCY ESCALATION IN EARLY ADOLESCENCE*

A recent emphasis in criminology has been on trajectories, life transitions, and turning points that affect the escalation, stabilization, or desistance of deviant behavior. The purpose of this article is to describe and examine one potential pathway of delinquency escalation in early and mid-adolescence. It draws upon Agnew's general strain theory and research on adolescent stress to describe a significant transitory stage of the life course. A key organizing principle underlying the proposed pathway is that although stressful life events are highly variable among adolescents, experiencing a persistent or increasing number over time can lead to an escalation of delinquency. Using four years of sequential data from the Family Health Study (651 adolescents aged 11–14 during year one), we estimate a hierarchical growth-curve model that emphasizes the effects of life events on delinquency. The model assumes that delinquency is distributed as an overdispersed Poisson random variable. The results indicate that experiencing a relatively high number of life events over time is related to a significant “growth” of delinquency but that this relationship is not affected by sex, family income, self-esteem, or mastery.