Psycho-social Analysis of Black Teenage Pregnancies: Implications for Public and Cultural Policies

This paper identifies three challenges to understanding and remedying problems in black teenage pregnancy: cultural, developmental, and normative.     

Can communist regimes be reformed?

She was a student and collaborator of Georg Lukacs; and, after a long record of dissidence, she had to leave her native Hungary in 1977. Her publications include Renaissance Man, Everyday Life, Radical Philosophy, A Theory of Feelings, A Theory of History, Beyond Justice, General Ethics,and The Power of Shame.     

Editors' Note

Note

Editors' Note     

An interlaboratory study to evaluate the utility of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and gas chromatography-infrared spectroscopy spectral libraries in the forensic analysis of fentanyl-related substances

Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl account for over 71,000 of the approximately 107,000 overdose deaths reported in the United States in 2021. Fentanyl remains the fourth most identified drug by state and local forensic laboratories, and the second most identified drug by federal laboratories. The unambiguous identification of fentanyl-related substances (FRS) is challenging due to the absence or low abundance of a molecular ion in a typical gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis and due to a low number of fragment ions that are similar among the many potential isomers of FRS. This study describes the utility of a previously reported gas chromatography-infrared (GC-IR) library for the identification of FRS within a blind, interlaboratory study (ILS) involving seven forensic laboratories. Twenty FRS reference materials, including those with isomer pairs in the library, were selected based on either their presence in the NIST library and/or some similarity of the mass spectra information produced. The ILS participants were requested to use the Florida International University (FIU) GC-MS and GC-IR libraries supplied by FIU to search for matches to their unknown spectra generated from in-house GC-MS and GC-IR analysis. The laboratories reported improvement in the positive identification of unknown FRS from ~75% using GC-MS alone to 100% correct identification using GC-IR analysis. One laboratory participant used solid phase IR analysis, which produced spectra incompatible with the vapor phase GC-IR library to generate a good comparison spectrum. However, this improved when searched against a solid phase IR library.     

Assets and Poverty Traps in Rural Bangladesh

Using longitudinal survey from rural Bangladesh, this article examines the determinants of land and asset accumulation over time and explores why some households may be trapped in asset poverty. Non-parametric and parametric methods are used to discern the shape of the asset accumulation path, and whether unique or multiple equilibria exist. We find evidence for concavity of the dynamic asset frontier but no evidence for multiple equilibria. It is suggested that the existence of well-functioning factor markets in rural Bangladesh and elsewhere in South Asia explain the contrasts between our results and those for several African countries.     

How Resilient are Labour Markets to Natural Disasters? The Case of the 1998 Bangladesh Flood

Natural disasters devastate economies as they impede capital accumulation. The resilience of labour markets is crucial for the poor who rely on labour to reduce risk. We evaluate how the 1998 ‘flood of the century’ affected wages in Bangladesh. We find short-term declines in agricultural and non-agricultural wages. Agricultural workers who moved towards non-agricultural employment to cope benefitted through a lower percentage reduction in short-term wages. Endowed with human capital, salaried workers were unable to mitigate income risk. Extending the eligibility of credit access or relief programmes may preserve local businesses and their employees in the years following a flood.