An exercise in improving suicide reporting in print media

This study was conducted to support the publication of guidelines for media reporting on suicide. First, quantitative and qualitative aspects of suicide reporting in Swiss print media were surveyed over a time span of 8 months. The results were presented at a national press conference, and written guidelines for suicide reporting were sent out to all newspaper editors. The results of the survey and the guidelines were discussed in a personal meeting with the Editor-in-Chief of the main tabloid. After the publication of the guidelines a second, identical survey was conducted. The main variables regarding frequency, form, and content of the newspaper reports before and after the press conference were compared. The number of articles, on the one hand, increased over the 3 years between the first and second survey, but the quality of reporting clearly improved on the other. The personal contact with the editor of the tabloid was probably the most effective means of intervention.     

Adolescents' Closeness with Parents,Siblings, and Friends in Three Countries: Canada,Belgium, and Italy

This study compared interpersonal relationships of adolescents from Canada, Belgium, and Italy. The sample of 377 subjects was composed almost equally of boys and girls, grouped into three age groups ranging from 11 to 18 years. Each subject participated in a semistructured interview designed to examine the levels of closeness with the mother, father, siblings, and close friends. The study revealed important discrepancies among the adolescents from the three countries. Family was found to occupy a more central role in the relational world of Italian adolescents, whereas friends were found to occupy a more important place for Canadian youth. Belgian adolescents were found to adopt a middle position between these two extremes. Variations in cultural context and cultural practices are explored as a possible interpretation of these differences. The study also revealed significant consistencies across the three countries: the importance of friends in the relational life of adolescents, the privileged position of the mother in the family, and the distant position of the father.     

Rent-seeking and the behavior of regulators: An empirical analysis

The main contribution of this paper is to describe empirically how the rent-seeking process takes place in a regulated industry through the consistency in Board decisions. Evidence provided by discrete-choice decision models of regulators confirms that the conventional rent-seeking view of regulation is correct, namely to distribute wealth between various groups differently from what market forces would do. First of all, the structure of the rent-seeking activities in the Quebec regulated trucking industry is well explained. There exist behavioral uniformities (Russell and Shelton, 1974) in decisions taken by the Quebec Transport Commission, given its wide range of choice provided by the absence of detailed regulatory standards by the Quebec legislature. Secondly, trucking firms and large shippers are the interest groups seeking to extract artificially contrived rents. The capture theory of regulation is not a dominant political strategy and therefore does not analytically explain various trades taking place among interest groups when a permit authority is requested. So logrolling by regulators is clearly essential to maintain their non-transferable investment of time and talent and protect their political afterlife. Thirdly, large firms are more successful, at the margin, than small firms in their expansion because of their political effectiveness. The regulatory agency gives more rents to those who offer relatively strong electoral support to its party. Finally, appointed regulators do not achieve other positive payoffs from the regulatory process than those which may result from the agency problem. So the regulatory agency does not promote its own policy agenda, but rather that of the elected politicians, given the organizational and control problem between these two.I am indebted to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support, to Gérard Bélanger, Jean-Luc Migué for helpful comments and to Sylvain Veillette, Pascal Migué, Marc Leduc for valuable research assistance. I benefitted from useful comments by the editor of this journal. All the remaining errors are mine.     

DNA Preparation from Sexual Assault Cases by Selective Degradation of Contaminating DNA from the Victim

Abstract:  The standard method to purify sperm DNA from vaginal swabs taken from rape victims is to selectively digest the victim's epithelial cells to solubilize the victim's DNA, and then separate the soluble DNA from the intact sperm by centrifugation. A different approach to removing the soluble victim's DNA is to selectively degrade it using a nuclease, DNase I. DNase I reduces the amount of soluble DNA by over 1000-fold, while having virtually no effect on the sperm DNA remaining in the sperm head and inaccessible to the enzyme. Nuclease inactivation and sperm lysis then yield a soluble, pure male DNA fraction. An aliquot of soluble DNA is removed prior to nuclease addition to provide the victim's fraction. Vaginal swabs taken at defined time points following consensual sex and taken from rape victims were processed using the nuclease method or the standard method and the nuclease method gave superior short tandem repeat profiles.     

欧洲宪法司法的多样性——兼及法国之例外

目次一、各国宪法司法中不同的抽象审查程度二、各国宪法司法的集中程度三、结论所谓宪法司法,即对国家所有行为包括立法行为、行政行为或司法行为等进行违宪司法审查。欧洲的宪法司法萌芽于19世纪下半叶。但无可否认的是,仅在诞生后的一个世纪,宪法司法方在欧洲得到显著发展。     

Democracy, Sea Power and Institutional Change: An Economic Analysis of the Athenian Naval Law

The present essay attempts to test the validity of the theory of institutional change based on the concept of property rights, in the remote historical setting of Classical Athens. The Naval Law introduced by Themistocles in 483-2 BC, established the institution of trierarchy to produce warships to face the Persian invaders. This reform led to the first attempt to define the costs and benefits of public goods in the field of national defense. Thus, institutional change in Ancient Athens, through an efficient arrangement of property rights and duties, had long-term consequences on economic performance, creating a new growth path and ensuring economic prosperity and social justice for more than 150 years.     

Maltreatment of handicapped children: A critical review

Despite increased interest in child abuse and neglect in the past decade, little research attention has been focused on maltreatment in handicapped populations. This is surprising given that many handicapped children display characteristics (e.g., chronic and pervasive behavioral disturbances, decreased social initiations with caregivers) that are associated with high risk for assault and neglect in nonhandicapped children. Numerous investigations have found an overrepresentation of handicapped children in maltreated samples, and results of more recent efforts reveal a high incidence of abuse and neglect in handicapped populations. Although these data underscore the high risk for maltreatment in handicapped children, a number of important issues warrant further empirical examination. Moreover, generalizations and interpretations of findings from previous research have been obfuscated by methodological shortcomings. The present paper reviews the literature concerning abuse and neglect of handicapped children. Research strategies and issues are delineated and current problems in this field are discussed. Suggestions for directions future research might take are offered.     

Successful extraction of human genomic DNA from serum and its application to forensic identification

We report here on the successful extraction of human genomic DNA from a serum sample in a forensic case. The extracted DNA was successfully used for the identification of remains presumably immersed for more than three weeks for which the only comparison sample was a 250-microL serum aliquot kept frozen in a laboratory. The analysis made it possible to identify a second victim as the daughter of the first.