On a Contradiction in Mill's Argument for Liberty

Mill took very seriously the warning example from China that even a civilised country could stagnate and become a backwater of world development. Although certain sections of Mill's On Liberty have been scrutinised, evaluated and debated with intense care, this, his most fundamental warning to his own society – that it was systematically undermining its own pre-eminence – has stimulated relatively little investigation. This article notes Mill's concern with social stagnation and suggests that, even in terms of his own presentation of the balance of social forces, his proposed countermeasures of 'eccentricity' and 'refusal to bend the knee' are futile gestures quite insufficient to combat the tendencies he outlined.     

Recent developments in medicine and law

This article addresses important developments in the field of medicine and the law during the last year and highlights some of the significant areas of law affecting health care providers that should be considered. Actions against health care providers may include challenges to peer review immunity, allegations concerning the practice of medicine across state lines without a license, and even accusations of wrongfully assisting a patient to commit suicide. These areas are addressed in turn by this article. Finally, antitrust developments over the last year are briefly addressed as an emerging area of concern for providers forming complex practice networks in today's health care arena.     

Determining the time and day of photography

Photographs taken by crime victims and perpetrators are at times important evidence. Their time of photography may also affect their value as such. Three methods of determining when a picture was taken by using the content of the picture are presented. The methods utilize solar direction-measured from shadows in the photograph, identifying flowering wild plants and correlating cloudiness with meteorological observations. Solar direction is the most accurate and involved method and therefore is the main part of this paper. A case using all three methods is described.     

大学如何服务于社会

大学可以以多种方式服务社会,但主要的有三种:一是基础研究。大学的基础研究促进了科学知识、技术和医学的发展,而这正是经济增长、物质生活水平提高和人类健康状况改善的基础。大学也主要是以它的这种基础研究来服务于社会的。二是人才培养。通过基础性的学术研究创造知识绝不是大学为社会做出的唯一重要的贡献,通过对学生的能力培养使其将来能够更好地为社会服务,是与学术研究同样重要的社会贡献。大学、特别是好大学的培养目标应该是培养学生的创造性、灵活性,以及解决问题、创新和领导的能力。实际上,大学正是通过这种对学生能力的培养而积极地服务于社会的。三是履行好机构性公民的义务。大学可以通过参与社区建设、提供智力支持的方式直接为当地的经济发展、邻里关系的改善等做出自己的贡献。大学也可以通过以身作则,使学生树立强烈的社会责任感来间接地为社会做出自己的贡献。     

The Law of Crime Concentration: An Application and Recommendations for Future Research

Objective

We address four outstanding empirical questions related to the “law of crime concentration” (Weisburd in Criminology 53:133–157, 2015): (1) Is the spatial concentration of crime stable over time? (2) Do the same places consistently rank among those with the highest crime counts? (3) How much crime concentration would be observed if crimes were distributed randomly over place? (4) To what degree does the spatial concentration of crime depend on places that are crime free?

Methods

The data are annual counts of violent and property crimes in St. Louis between 2000 and 2014. Temporal stability in the spatial inequality of crime is measured by computing the fraction of crimes that occur in the 5% of street segments with the highest crime frequencies each year. The spatial mobility of crime is measured by computing the number of years each street segment appears in the top 5% of street segments. Poisson simulations are used to estimate the fraction of crimes that could appear in the top 5% of street segments on the basis of chance alone. The impact of crime-free locales on the spatial concentration of crime is evaluated by comparing results from analyses that include and exclude crime-free street segments from the crime distributions.

Results

The concentration of crime is highly unequal and stable over time. The specific street segments with the highest crime frequencies, however, change over time. Nontrivial fractions of street segments may appear among the 5% with the highest crime frequencies on the basis of chance. Spatial concentration of crime is reduced when crime-free street segments are excluded from the crime distributions.

Conclusions

The law of crime concentration is not a measurement artifact. Its substantive significance, however, should be assessed in future longitudinal research that replicates the current study across diverse social settings.

     

Educational vouchers: Effectiveness,choice, and costs

Most of the policy discussion on the effects of educational vouchers has been premised on theoretical or ideological positions rather than evidence. This article analyzes a substantial body of recent empirical evidence on achievement differences between public and private schools; on who chooses and its probable impact on educational equity; and on the comparative costs of public and private schools and an overall voucher system. The findings indicate that: (1) results among numerous studies suggest no difference or only a slight advantage for private schools over public schools in student achievement for a given student, but evidence of substantially higher rates of graduation, college attendance, and college graduation for Catholic high school students; (2) evidence is consistent that educational choice leads to greater socioeconomic (SES) and racial segregation of students; and (3) evidence does not support the contention that costs of private schools are considerably lower than those of public schools, but the costs of an overall voucher infrastructure appear to exceed those of the present system.     

Caught in a bad romance: displaced people and the Georgian state*

After years of frenetic cross-border movement, in 2014, a mother and daughter live in post-Soviet Georgia as practically stateless noncitizens. Recognizing the advantages of citizenship, they commit their limited resources to obtaining citizenship documents. Through an analysis of their attempts to make citizenship claims and build stable lives, this paper argues that the contemporary Georgian citizenship regime fosters a relationship that further destabilizes the lives of already vulnerable non-citizens. It does so by drawing them in with the promise of citizenship – only to deny them. Yet, Georgian citizenship law is neither uniquely malicious nor indifferent; its form of ‘inclusive exclusion’ is an inherent feature of the reigning paradigm of global citizenship. In this context, far from being passive subjects, non-citizens facing consistent official refusals and seemingly flagrant obfuscation actively attempt to both maintain their relationship with the state and transform it in their favor.