Perceptions of the Regulated Community in Environmental Policy: The View from Below

Discussions in environmental policy often focus on the highest levels of decision making and action while paying scant attention to those individuals on the front lines. Among those frequently overlooked are the individuals at regulated facilities who interact with government regulators on a frequent basis. Interviews with nearly two dozen facility personnel in Virginia yield findings that challenge common perceptions of the relationships between facility personnel and inspectors. In particular, 86 percent of facility personnel, representing a range of regulated facilities from prisons to landfills to dry cleaners, said their interactions with inspectors were positive. Approximately 70 percent of them said that they trust inspectors and provided evidence of trust in their stories. The ramifications of these findings for environmental policy could be potentially significant because facility personnel are presumed to be adversarial, if not outright hostile, and this assumption impacts the design and implementation of environmental regulations.     

Fetishised data: counterterrorism,drone warfare and pilot testimony

Drones now comprise a major part of our culture – primarily as a consequence of the so-called War on Terror and the rise in violent extremism. Yet the available data on what it means to operate a drone (where this can influence wider perceptions on the appropriateness and effectiveness of remote warfare as an act of counterterrorism) is highly contradictory. This article explores a new source of data capable of shedding light on this contested issue: online interviews with current and former pilots discussing their personal experiences. Access to this testimony has the potential to influence cultural understandings of remote warfare, specifically where these stories highlight the severe psychological difficulties pilots can be subject to. In analysing this new data, however, the article questions whether the media typically employed to express pilot testimony comprises an appropriate space in which to publicise and engage with this evidence. It argues that this presentation has caused these personal accounts to become fetishised – to the extent this undermines the cultural, political, and informative value of the data and even reinforces the narratives of remote warfare this testimony frequently seeks to reverse.     

The Association Between Cyber Victimization and Subsequent Cyber Aggression: The Moderating Effect of Peer Rejection

Adolescents experience various forms of strain in their lives that may contribute jointly to their engagement in cyber aggression. However, little attention has been given to this idea. To address this gap in the literature, the present longitudinal study examined the moderating influence of peer rejection on the relationship between cyber victimization at Time 1 (T1) and subsequent cyber aggression at Time 2 (T2; 6 months later) among 261 (150 girls) 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Our findings indicated that both peer rejection and cyber victimization were related to T2 peer-nominated and self-reported cyber aggression, both relational and verbal, after controlling for gender and T1 cyber aggression. Furthermore, T1 cyber victimization was related more strongly to T2 peer-nominated and self-reported cyber aggression at higher levels of T1 peer rejection. These results extend previous findings regarding the relationship between peer rejection and face-to-face aggressive behaviors to the cyber context. In addition, our findings underscore the importance of utilizing multiple methods, such as peer-nomination and self-report, to assess cyber aggression in a school setting.     

A Powder-free DNA Extraction Workflow for Skeletal Samples

The processing of skeletal material poses several challenges for forensic laboratories. Current methods can be laborious, time-consuming, require dedicated equipment, and are vulnerable to contamination. In this study, various sample mass (1 × 50 mg, 3 × 50 mg, and 1 × 150 mg chip(s)) and incubation times (2, 4, and 16 h) were tested using the PrepFiler^® BTA™ Forensic DNA Extraction Kit to digest whole bone chips in lieu of powdering. The most effective method was then applied to bones and tooth fragments collected from contemporary human cadavers exposed to various environmental conditions using an automated platform. Over a third of the samples tested generated full DNA profiles without having to powder the bone/tooth fragment or further alter the manufacturer's protocol. However, for most samples resulting in incomplete STR profiles due to low amounts of DNA, slightly better results were achieved with powdered tissue. Overall, this work demonstrates the potential use of a faster, nonpowdering DNA extraction method for processing skeletal samples as an effective first-pass screening tool.     

A Male Poetics

All French literary fiction, Coquillat contends, from Madame de Lafayette to Philippe Sollers, can be shown to repeat a single representation of gender, a single, scarcely varied pattern: man is transcendence, woman contingency. Man defies death through his immortal m uvre , woman 'creates' only living beings that must die. The romantic hero, the male intellectual adventurer, continues even now to be the creator's alter ego and occupies the centre of French literature, from avant garde to mainstream. By definition, he is in aloof rebellion against a 'bourgeois society' that suppresses genius. His politics as such are more often than not an 'apolitical' conservatism, his misogyny averred, in and out of his writing. If he is intrinsically more valuable it is precisely because he can rise to the singular status of the creator-genius, while women remain biologically and sociologically rooted in the mass. Rousseau was the first to theorize this vision of male superiority in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker , celebrating creativity as a male-orgasmic return to essence of which women are by nature incapable. Rousseau's most hysterical attacks on women's literature are contained in the pages of this work.     

Adolescents’ Social Status Goals: Relationships to Social Status Insecurity, Aggression, and Prosocial Behavior

Peer status is an important aspect of adolescents’ social lives and is pursued actively by them. Although extensive research has examined how social behaviors are related to peer status (e.g., social preference, popularity), little attention has been given to adolescents’ social goals to obtain a desired peer status. Thus, this study examined two types of social status goals, popularity goal and social preference goal, and their relationships to social status insecurity and social behaviors among 405 ethnically diverse early adolescents (267 girls; M age = 12.92 years; age range = 11–15 years). After accounting for adolescents’ attained peer statuses (popularity and social preference), both social status goals were related distinctly to aggressive and prosocial behaviors as measured by self reports and peer nominations. Specifically, higher endorsement of the popularity goal was related to more self-reported relational aggression, but less peer-nominated prosocial behavior. In contrast, higher endorsement of the social preference goal was linked to less self-reported overt and relational aggression, but more self-reported and peer-nominated prosocial behavior. In addition, this study reveals that adolescents’ social status insecurity was related positively to both social status goals and had an indirect effect on adolescents’ social behaviors through the mediation of popularity goal endorsement. There were variations in goal endorsement as shown by groups of adolescents endorsing different levels of each goal. The group comparison results on social behaviors were largely consistent with the correlational findings. This study provides new insights into adolescents’ social cognitive processes about peer status and the implications of the two social status goals on adolescents’ behavioral development.     

The Observer: Good at Observing, Less Good at Influencing?

The 1997 British General Election appeared to show a clear-cut case of the media influencing electoral behaviour. In an attempt to facilitate anti-Conservative tactical voting The Observer published the results of 16 constituency-level opinion polls. The newspaper is frequently seen as influential in determining the outcome in certain seats, where several high-profile members of the then Conservative government were defeated. In fact The Observer appears to have had very little impact in the seats it covered. Higher levels of tactical voting occured in few of these constituencies than in comparable seats elsewhere, and changes in the share of the vote consistent with the paper influencing the outcome are even rarer. In just one of the 16 seats covered by the paper is there prima facie evidence of the claimed effect.