DISENTANGLING THE EFFECTS OF GENDER AND INTIMACY ON VICTIM PRECIPITATION IN HOMICIDE*

Research indicates that incidents in which women kill their husbands are more likely to involve victim precipitation than incidents in which men kill their wives. Formulating a causal interpretation of this finding, however, is complicated because the observed pattern may reflect gender differences in violence rather than any special dynamics between husbands and wives. In this research, we introduce and illustrate a framework for disentangling the effects of intimacy and gender on violence. We examine the additive and multiplicative effects of the gender of the offender, the gender of the victim, and the relationship between the offender and victim on victim precipitation. For the most part, the pattern of victim precipitation in homicide reflects the fact that males tend to be more violent than females. However, we find some evidence of special dynamics for intimate partner homicides: Men who are killed by their partners tend to have more violent records than men who are killed in other circumstances.     

Human cannibalism: a case report

Human cannibal cases are relatively rare in modern civilized societies. We report a single case of familial cannibalism that occurred in Oklahoma in 1977. The investigation posed unique problems in pathology, psychiatry, criminalistics, and serology.     

The importance of “spillovers” in the policy mission of the advanced technology program

Government policies like the Advanced Technology Program (“ATP”) are intended, at least in part, to remedy the “market failure” inherent in the fact that a significant portion of the social benefits of new knowledge and technology are not captured by a firm that invests in R&D. ATP’s project selection, and its evaluation of the impact of its program, can be made more effective by explicitly incorporating the analysis of such “spillovers.” For project selection, this means identifying technological, organizational and economic factors that tend to oint to a large “spillover gap,” or deviation between the social and private rates of return to a proposed project. For program evaluation and assessment, it means adapting existing study methods that measure social returns to innovation in ways that explicitly capture spillover effects. This paper is based on a study that I performed for the ATP, Economic Analysis of Research Spillovers: Implications for the Advanced Technology Program, NIST GCR 97-708. I have benefited from comments and useful discussions with Zvi Griliches, Jeanne Powell, Rosalie Ruegg, and Richard Spivack. Some of the ideas in this paper grew out of previous joint research with James Adams. The views expressed herein are my own, however, and should not be attributed to any of these individuals or to the ATP.     

Learning, multiple equilibria, and the state: Agriculture’s role

This article will argue that the state must learn to pursue productivity enhancing rather than predatory policies if rapid long-run development is to occur in poor countries. These productivity enhancing strategies will most likely involve investment coordination. However, such coordination of investment in manufacturing is likely to fail in less developed countries as a result of low productivity in the traditional, agricultural sector. More importantly, investment coordination in agriculture is more likely to be successful especially if this is a broad based investment strategy involving the bulk of the population. In this context, the state will learn effective policies for coordinating development. Alternatively, if the agricultural sector is ignored and productivity here remains low, investment coordination in manufacturing will likely fail, and the state will learn to become a predator. Richard Grabowski is professor of economics at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale     

Measuring the thickness of facial soft tissues using nuclear magnetic resonance tomography for the purpose of identification

Nuclear spin tomography since its beginnings in the seventies has steadily gained in importance as a method of examination in medical diagnostics as it produces a picture. In the field of forensic medicine the NMR technique as used for anatomic-anthropologic issues attempting to identify skulls this is a valuable supplement to an extension of the existing methods of investigation. The results of a measurement of the thickness of soft facial tissue in a live test person is shown as compared to measures obtained by sonography.