Metric Sex Determination of the Human Coxal Bone on a Virtual Sample using Decision Trees

Decision trees provide an alternative to multivariate discriminant analysis, which is still the most commonly used in anthropometric studies. Our study analyzed the metric characterization of a recent virtual sample of 113 coxal bones using decision trees for sex determination. From 17 osteometric type I landmarks, a dataset was built with five classic distances traditionally reported in the literature and six new distances selected using the two-step ratio method. A ten-fold cross-validation was performed, and a decision tree was established on two subsamples (training and test sets). The decision tree established on the training set included three nodes and its application to the test set correctly classified 92% of individuals. This percentage was similar to the data of the literature. The usefulness of decision trees has been demonstrated in numerous fields. They have been already used in sex determination, body mass prediction, and ancestry estimation. This study shows another use of decision trees enabling simple and accurate sex determination.     

Contested governance: The new repertoire of the Eurozone crisis

The austerity policies that EU policymakers adopted in response to the Eurozone crisis are often criticized as the product of institutionalized neoliberal ideas. This critique has merits, but tends to overlook institutional changes that do not neatly conform to well demarcated neoliberal ideas considered as “switchmen,” “paradigms,” or “blueprints.” This article offers an alternative reading of the Eurozone's institutional evolution that bridges pragmatist scholarship with cognitive and social psychology. The Eurozone crisis saw the emergence of a new and contested repertoire of governance. Policymakers agreed that “stronger governance” was necessary, but they struggled over how to perform that repertoire. This contest ultimately produced institutional changes that typically mixed austerity and unconventional policies. The advantage of thinking about ideas in terms of repertoires that actors perform is to afford a more granular view of institutions as sites of individual cognition, collective innovation, and political contestation.     

Psychological assistance to victims throughout difficult trials

In France, only very recently have victims begun to be assisted throughout "difficult" trials. We have developed different hypotheses to think over the function of psychologists when they step in to help out victims of criminal offences. Moreover, we have developed an argument for the need to set up units of medical and psychological assistance for certain difficult trials. Among other topics, we discuss the victims' expectations for psychic and/or affective reconstruction during trials. We suggest that penal trials can "potentially" heal victims, but more often than not they are "potentially" traumatic. We support our arguments with clinical examples that come from our personal experience of providing psychological assistance to victims.     

Emergency suicide care in France: the psychiatrist's liability as seen in case law

In France, in general emergency departments, psychiatric consultations are on the increase and suicidal behavior represents a frequent reason for consultation. Psychiatrists treat patients whose behavior may be impulsive and irrational, and whose critical judgment is impaired. In emergency units, the reception and initial assessment of the patient determines his or her future pathway through the healthcare system. By its very nature, emergency medicine deals with inherently unstable situations, which may lead to the risk of medical malpractice. The aim of this article is to provide a summary of the initial management of suicidal patients by general emergency units and to comment on the medical malpractice that may expose the practitioner to risk of liability. An analysis of case history has shown that in suicide cases, malpractice due to inadequate supervision is the most frequent ruling.     

‘A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work’? Exploring the connection between the parliamentary work of MPs and their electoral support

Electoral systems across Europe increasingly invite candidates to build up a personal reputation to earn votes. In this article, we investigate whether parliamentary work can be considered as a personal vote-earning attribute for incumbent MPs based on data of the 2014 elections in Belgium. The results show that when parliamentary work is operationalised in a narrow way (i.e. as the number of bills and the number of oral and written questions of an MP), this has no influence on the amount of preferential votes. When parliamentary work is defined in a broader way (i.e. also including other aspects of the legislative and control function of MPs), parliamentary work has a significant positive effect for MPs from opposition parties. This supports the claim that the number of legislative and control activities is not sufficient to measure the impact of parliamentary work on preferential votes, but that also other aspects of the work should be taken into account.     

Do Provincial Governors Control National Legislators? Quasi-Experimental Evidence of Argentine Federalism

Do governors control the behaviour of legislators from their provinces and parties in the national congress? The aim of the article is to test gubernatorial subnational political influence on national legislators. I first discuss the problems of the logic behind empirical exercises that measure the legislative influence of governors. Then the study tests gubernatorial influence using quasi-experimental evidence from Argentina, a federalism that bears all the hallmarks for governors to be central actors in the legislative arena. The results support the hypothesis that governors influence the behaviour of legislators from their provinces and parties in the national congress.