Sea Grant — The MIT Sea Grant Marine Industry collegium: A partnership of industry,government and academia

The Collegium has fostered interaction and technology transfer between MIT and the Marine Industry for five years, resulting in early utilization of the fruits of marine research at MIT and valuable guidance for MIT Sea Grant in addressing needs of industry. For maximum technology transfer to take place effectively in an academic/industry program, a number of conditions have to be met. This paper discusses three of the most important conditions. First, industry people must be aware of the interests and research capabilities of the faculty and of the resources available to the university. Second, successful technology transfer is a person to person interaction between people of common interest and roughly equivalent technical background. Third, and very important, technology transfer is communication from the recipient, or user, to the source of technology. Along with these three conditions is the need for early involvement of industry and government user in the research activity. The Collegium is a unique arrangement to accomplish these conditions. This paper describes the program at MIT.     

Barring ultimate issue testimony

This research focuses on one of the major changes wrought by the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984: the exclusion of expert mental health testimony on the “ultimate issue,” that is, testimony specifically addressing the expert's opinion that the defendant is sane or insane. Subjects in this research were presented with 1 of 10 variants of an insanity case in which experts testified for the defense, prosecution, both, or neither. The testimony was at one of three levels: diagnostic only, penultimate issue, or ultimate issue. Results showed that level of testimony had no effect on the verdict pattern. There was evidence to suggest that this effect may occur because jurors infer, and/or mistakenly recall, higher levels of expert testimony than was actually presented to them. In addition, general and specific constructs (Finkel & Handel, 1989) that predict verdict yieldedR ² values from .500 to .668 and were not significantly affected by the level of expert testimony. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

The ideology of anti‐bolshevism

Continuity existed between Marx and Lenin on the peasant problem. Marx recognized that the capitalist peasant, the tenant‐farmer, would not support a proletarian revolution, but the capitalist peasant could be a revolutionary force in a liberal revolution. Marx felt that if a liberal revolution was found to be progressive for the proletariat, an alliance could be formed between proletariat and tenant‐farmers in the bourgeois revolution. Moreover, in Vol. III of Das Kapital Marx discerned the evolution of an agricultural proletariat. These agricultural wage‐labourers would support a proletarian revolution, and thus were allies of the urban proletariat in a socialist revolution. Lenin was familiar with the arguments of Vol. III of Das Kapital and incorporated them in his Development of Capitalism in Russia (composed in 1898). And certainly by 1901, and not in the revolution of 1905 as most commentators maintain, Lenin's ideas on the peasantry had fully matured and were entirely consonant with the views of Marx. By 1901, by extending the insights of Marx to Russia, Lenin had formulated the policy later enunciated in 1905 in Two Tactics of Social‐Democracy in the Democratic Revolution: two revolutions were brewing in the countryside, between capitalist farmers and aristocracy and between agricultural wage‐labourers and capitalist farmers, and the urban proletariat could find an ally for either a liberal or socialist revolution by allying with the capitalist farmer in the bourgeois revolution or the agricultural wage‐labourer in the socialist revolution.     

Bitter pill for the pharmaceutical industry

In Case C-431/04 of 4 May 2006 the European Court of Justiceruled that a combination of an active ingredient and an excipientcannot be understood as ‘combination of active substances’in the sense of Article 1(b) of Council Regulation 1768/92 andthus is not entitled to SPC protection.     

Relation of Antisocial and Psychopathic Traits to Suicide-related Behavior Among Offenders

Offenders with antisocial traits are relatively likely to attempt suicide, largely because they are more likely to have high negative emotionality and low constraint. Among 682 male offenders, we tested whether negative emotionality, low constraint, and also substance use problems mediated any relationship between antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and psychopathy on the one hand, and suicide-related behavior (SRB) and ideation on the other. ASPD and the impulsivity/lifestyle features of psychopathy weakly predicted SRB. High negative emotionality and low constraint (but not substance use) mediated the relation between ASPD and SRB. Impulsivity/lifestyle features of psychopathy retained an independent predictive effect. Self-report psychopathy measures added unique predictive variance to the Psychopathy Checklist—Revised. We discuss implications for suicide risk assessment and prevention.