Menarcheal status and parent-child relations in families of seventh-grade girls

The associations between menarcheal status and several child-rearing and outcome variables were examined for mother-daughter and father-daughter dyads. All variables were assessed with questionnaires as an extension of earlier observational studies. Analyses were conducted via multiple regression analyses wherein menarcheal status was treated as a continuous variable and was entered into the regression equation as a set of power polynomial terms. The results indicated that most of the significant relations occurred for the mother-daughter dyad, and most of these relations were curvilinear. When menarche occurs at or around the modal time, changes in parent-child relations may be best thought of as temporary perturbations, but when menarche occurs early the effects may persist.The research reported here was funded by Father Flanagan's Boys Home, Inc., and by a grant to the senior author from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Family Relations in Early Adolescence.Received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Harvard University.Received his M.S. from Virginia Commonwealth University.Received her M.S. in counseling psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University.Received his M.S. from the University of Nebraska.She received her Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, Cornell University.     

Quantitative analysis of glasses used within Australia

An initial 134 glasses have been collected from eleven classifications of glass used within Australia. These include both local and imported glasses. Quantitative elemental analyses of the glasses have been determined using a scanning electron microscope equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer. The current program provides for an elemental analysis for Na, Mg, Al, Si, P, S or Pb, Cl, K, Ca, Ba or Ti, V, Cr, Fe, Mn and Zn expressed as oxides, and has a sensitivity down to approximately 0.1%. The data for the six most commonly occurring elements, namely, Na, Mg, Al, Si, K and Ca, together with the refractive index are presented for each class of glass in terms of their mean value and standard deviation from the mean, and also in histogram form.     

A wall of treatments: An integrative problem-solving approach to the prevention of stone-throwing in East Jerusalem

Research summary

There is growing evidence that some proactive policing strategies have shown promising results in reducing crime. Most of these strategies are generally applied separately to address specific components of criminal behavior, while the involvement in the crime itself may be caused by different factors. This raises the question of whether an integrative approach that addresses these factors could be an appropriate approach to reduce involvement in the crime. Furthermore, most of these policing strategies have been applied toward regular crime; this leaves us with the question of whether these strategies would show similar results when political offenses are involved as well. Our study focuses on the political offense of stone-throwing in East Jerusalem, usually by Palestinian teenage boys. We applied an integrative approach in one of the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which included strategies such as focused deterrence, place-based policing, cognitive behavioral therapy, diversion to nonenforcement tracks, and interventions at the community level. We found a large and significant reduction in the targeted neighborhood compared to similar Palestinian neighborhoods. We have not found evidence of displacement, but rather evidence of significant diffusion of crime-control benefits.

Policy implications

The results of the study suggest that an integrative approach that addresses the risks and needs of minority youth can help reduce their future involvement in political offenses. Furthermore, the implementation of promising strategies in the wider context of policing regular crimes may also be effective in responding to political offenses.     

A Radical Economic Model of Crime with an Empirical Test in Non-city Zip Codes

This article addresses three main issues. First, the structural explanation of crime rates across zip codes within a US county outside of that county’s major city’s limits. Second, this article addresses whether the traditional social disorganization argument which links measures of disorganized neighborhoods and in particularly deficiencies in informal social control to race, income inequality and poverty provides an adequate explanation of variations in non-city zip code crime rates. Third, this article also examines a radical critique of the kind of structural model posed by social disorganization, and tests an alternative radical economic model of crime at the zip code level. The empirical evidence illustrates the weakness of social disorganization explanations of crime at the zip code level. In contrast to those results, the empirical results for the proposed radical economic model of crime support its use for explaining crime across county zip codes. This type of empirical evidence demonstrates that radical models of crime have utility in explaining how economic structures influence the distribution of crime independently of variable identified in orthodox criminology.     

俄罗斯背景下的自由主义与民主的二律背反

20世纪90年代以来,俄罗斯的自由主义与民主并不是按照西方尤其是美国所希望的模式发展。自由主义与民主政治在后共产主义俄罗斯的背景下表现出明显的二律背反。俄罗斯自由主义的希望已基本消失,但俄罗斯政治的发展并不是不民主的,而是呈现出一种“不自由的民主”的发展模式。     

From Apalachin to the Buffalo Project: Obstacles on the path to effective federal responses to organized crime, 1957–1967

The Apalachin meeting of recognized underworld leaders from cities across the USA was held in upstate New York on November 14, 1957. The event, well known to historians and justice system officials, has become a textbook case rarely examined for its larger context of how American government officials learned to confront the organization and strength of the American Mafia, later called La Cosa Nostra (LCN). From 1957 to 1967, three presidents, four attorneys general, and hundreds of federal agents and prosecutors traveled an obstacle-filled path toward investigating, indicting, prosecuting, and convicting Apalachin attendees and their successors. Steps were taken to challenge the power of the mob during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, but they were consistently plagued by false starts, frustrations, and side steps. Each obstacle further instructed policy makers, however, on the need for an intensive and coordinated effort grounded in common goals and interagency cooperation. This article considers six key obstacles to the decade-long quest for a concerted federal initiative against organized crime. It examines how the characteristics and the impact of each obstacle contributed to a meandering and slothful federal response to the Mafia’s power. Lessons learned about how to effectively attack the mob were finally implemented in May 1966 when President Johnson institutionalized Executive agency cooperation, making the Attorney General (AG) the focal point in the war on organized crime. One element in this new initiative was known as the ‘Buffalo Project,’ an experiment commencing officially in January 1967 in Buffalo, New York to concentrate intelligence, investigations, and prosecutive resources working across bureaucratic lines to pursue guilty pleas or convictions. The Project, a closely supervised operation directed by the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section (OCRS), was conceptualized as a small team of supervisory federal investigators and experienced prosecutors who built cases against local Mafia associates and leaders to withstand the scrutiny of the federal justice system. Assistance was also rendered by state, local, and international organizations. The Project formed a template for the DoJ Criminal Division’s Strike Force program.

Trajectories of Positive and Negative Behaviors from Early- to Middle-Adolescence

Although the positive youth development (PYD) model initially assumed inverse links between indicators of PYD and of risk/problem behaviors, empirical work in adolescence has suggested that more complex associations exist between trajectories of the two domains of functioning. To clarify the PYD model, this study assessed intraindividual change in positive and problematic indicators across Grades 5–10, and the links between these trajectories of development, among 2,516 participants from the 4-H Study of PYD (58.1% females; 64.9% European American, 7.0% African American, 12.3% Latino/a American, 2.6% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 1.8% Native American, 3.0% multiethnic-racial, and 8.4% with inconsistent race/ethnicity across waves). Results from person-centered analyses indicated that most youth clustered in the high trajectories of positive indicators and in the low trajectories of the negative ones. Consistent with past research, overlap between trajectories of positive and negative behaviors was found. These results suggest that theory and application need to accommodate to variation in the links between positive and problematic developmental trajectories.     

The Constrained Instability of Majority Rule: Experiments on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set

Michael S. Lynch Department of Political Science, University of Kansas, 504 Blake Hall, Lawrence, KS 66044 e-mail: mlynch{at}ku.edu Gary J. Miller and Itai Sened Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, Campus Box 1063, One Brooking Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130 e-mail: gjmiller{at}wustl.edu e-mail: sened{at}wustl.edu (corresponding author) The uncovered set has frequently been proposed as a solutionconcept for majority rule settings. This paper tests this propositionusing a new technique for estimating uncovered sets and a seriesof experiments, including five-player computer-mediated experimentsand 35-player paper-format experiments. The results supportthe theoretic appeal of the uncovered set. Outcomes overwhelminglylie in or near the uncovered set. Furthermore, when preferencesshift, outcomes track the uncovered set. Although outcomes tendto occur within the uncovered set, they are not necessarilystable; majority dominance relationships still produce instability,albeit constrained by the uncovered set. Authors' note: We thank Matthew M. Schneider for research assistance.We thank James Holloway, Tse-Min Lin, Jim Granato, Randall L.Calvert, Rick K. Wilson, faculty and students of the Juan MarchInstitute, and reviewers of Political Analysis for their veryhelpful comments and suggestions.