Hyperthermia,Thermal Injuries,and Death from a Forced Convection Heat Source: A Case Report and Experimental Model

Heat‐related deaths of children are most often encountered in the context of enclosed vehicles in summer months. Deviating from this, a 16‐month‐old boy was found unresponsive in a stroller that was placed adjacent to a space heater during mid‐winter. The cause of death was hyperthermia and thermal injuries. Manner of death determination was difficult due to alleged surrounding circumstances. To understand the time‐course of this child's injuries, a child death scene investigation was performed; the stroller and space heater were recovered. In a re‐enactment of the events, a slaughtered pig approximating the child's size was warmed using a water bath and placed in the stroller beside the space heater. Cutaneous temperature measurements showed rapid initial temperature rise with subsequent steady increases. Tanning of the skin was seen on periodic direct observations. Internal temperature monitoring illustrated steady increases. This experiment was essential in classifying the manner of death as homicide.     

Trait Anger,Physical Aggression,and Violent Offending in Antisocial and Borderline Personality Disorders

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are common conditions in forensic settings that present high rates of violence. Personality traits related to the five‐factor model personality domains of neuroticism and agreeableness have shown a relationship with physical aggression in nonclinical and general psychiatric samples. The aim of the present investigation was to examine the association of these personality traits with violence and aggression in ASPD and BPD. Results revealed that trait anger/hostility predicted self‐reported physical aggression in 47 ASPD and BPD subjects (β = 0.5, p = 0.03) and number of violent convictions in a subsample of the ASPD participants (β = 0.2, p = 0.009). These preliminary results suggest that high anger and hostility are associated with physical aggression in BPD and ASPD. Application of validated, self‐report personality measures could provide useful and easily accessible information to supplement clinical risk assessment of violence in these conditions.     

Outsourcing Public Service Delivery: Management Responses in Noncompetitive Markets

Capturing the benefits of competition is a key argument for outsourcing public services, yet public service markets often lack sufficient competition. The authors use survey and interview data from U.S. local governments to explore the responses of public managers to noncompetitive markets. This research indicates that competition is weak in most local government markets (fewer than two alternative providers on average across 67 services measured), and that the relationship between competition and contracting choice varies by service type. Public managers respond to suboptimal market competition by intervening with strategies designed to create, sustain, and enhance provider markets. In monopoly service markets, managers are more likely to use intergovernmental contracting, while for‐profit contracting is more common in more competitive service markets. The strategies that public managers employ to build and sustain competition for contracts often require tangible investments of administrative resources that add to the transaction costs of contracting in noncompetitive markets.     

From uninformed to informed choices: Voters,pre-election polls and updating

Pre-election opinion poll results for U.S. presidential contests have large variation in the early parts of the primary campaigns, yet pre-election opinion polls later in the campaign are typically within several percentage points of the actual outcome of the contest in November. This paper argues this trend demonstrates that voters are beginning to poll “correctly” – that is, to ascertain their most-preferred candidate. This convergence process is consistent with boundedly rational voters making decisions with low information. We examine the process by which voters can use opinion polls to guide their candidate choice. We undertake a series of laboratory experiments where uninformed voters choose between two candidates after participating in a series of pre-election polls. We demonstrate that voters update their beliefs about candidate locations using information contained in the opinion polls. We compare two behavioral models for the updating process and find significant evidence to support a boundedly rational Bayesian updating assumption. This assumption about the updating process is key to many theoretical results which argue that voters have the potential to aggregate information via a coordination signal and for their beliefs to converge to the true state of the world. This finding also indicates that uninformed voters are able to use pre-election polls to help them make correct decisions.     

Social and economic impact of the commercialization of the Argus II artificial retina in the United States

Each year, the United States invests about $45 billion in research conducted by federal researchers within federal laboratories. These efforts generate extensive social benefits when results are transferred to the private sector. It is important that we effectively quantify the economic and societal impact of federal technology transfer activities to inform taxpayers and policymakers about the value of public investments in this form of research. The Argus II device, an artificial retina commercialized in the United States by Second Sight in 2013, provides a rich example of how private sector innovation can be enhanced by research collaborations with federal labs and academia. Over the 25-year journey from idea to product, Second Sight carried out research and development collaborations with six Department of Energy national laboratories and seven universities. The case of Argus II also offers valuable insight into (1) how private industry, academia, and government can work together to bring socially beneficial innovations to fruition and (2) the tradeoffs inherent in these public–private collaborations. In this paper, we use a Markov model to estimate the realized and potential future social benefits associated with Argus II. We provide an interactive tool that can be used to replicate our findings and modify assumptions using updated patient information as it becomes available. We also provide insight into the aspects of federal involvement surrounding the development of Argus II that contributed to its successful commercialization and discuss other spillover benefits from these public–private collaborations.     

Countries start to explain how their climate contributions are fair: more rigour needed

In the lead-up to the Paris Agreement, every country was invited to submit an intended nationally determined contribution (INDC), and indicate how it is fair. We analyse how countries have explained the equity of mitigation and adaptation in 163 INDCs, providing a bottom-up analysis of equity to complement a literature that has focused on top-down allocations. While no single indicator of equity was used by all INDCs, a menu of quantified indicators or tiered approaches could provide bounded flexibility across different national circumstances. The most common equity indicator used in mitigation INDCs is the country’s ‘small share’ of global emissions, followed by per capita emissions. The emissions of individual ‘small share’ INDCs add up to 24% of annual global emissions when using a consistent data set. Per capita emissions are used across a range of countries with low (0.5) to high (25 t CO₂–eq per capita) values for that indicator. Adaptation is included in 89% of INDCs, of which more than half quantify impacts in some manner, and two-thirds use vulnerability as an equity argument. Broadly, we find that most claims to equity are either unsubstantiated or drawn from analysis by in-country experts. Only two INDCs refer to independent evidence, and none consider the consequences of their approach when applied to all countries. Given that the aggregate effect of INDCs will not be sufficient to keep global temperature increase well below 2 °C, and even less to keep temperature below a 1.5 °C rise, the INDCs have distributional implications. More rigorous information is needed to assess relative fair shares, which could be provided officially in future nationally determined contributions (NDCs). Absent improved information, it is likely that researchers and civil society will continue to assess informally what could be considered fair. A hybrid approach to equity—combining bottom-up assessment and top-down allocation—would be consistent with the hybrid architecture of the Paris Agreement, which comprises bottom-up elements such as NDCs and top-down elements such as global goals. Improved information on equity in NDCs will be an important input to the global stocktake ‘in the light of equity’.     

Reaching Out versus Lashing Out: Examining Gender Differences in Experiences with and Responses to Bullying in High School

The present study examines gender differences in bullying in high school. Unique contributions include comparisons of both victimization and perpetration rates across four subtypes of bullying: physical, verbal, relational, and cyber. Further, as we conceptualize bullying within the larger framework of literature on social rejection, we also address whether there are gender differences in experiencing social rejection–in the form of bullying–and responding with aggression, as opposed to asocial or prosocial behavior. The literature yields mixed findings across these three questions (i.e., gender differences in experiences with victimization and perpetration and responses to those experiences), suggesting sample variations (Archer Review of General Psychology, 8(4), 291–322, 2004; Archer & Coyne Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9, 212–230, 2005; Card, Stucky, Sawalani, & Little Child Development, 79, 1185–1229, 2008). Thus, we explored experiential differences in our sample, and hypothesized based on the tend and befriend model (Taylor et al., 2000) that girls would be more likely than boys to respond to bullying with prosocial behaviors. With regard to victimization and perpetration differences, we found that male students both experienced and perpetrated significantly more physical bullying. Boys were also significantly more likely to report experiencing verbal bullying than girls. No significant differences emerged for relational or cyber bullying. With regard to responses, social withdrawal was more common than aggressive responding, but consistent with the tend and befriend model, girls chose prosocial responses significantly more than boys, whereas boys were just as likely to choose antisocial responding as prosocial responding. These results suggest that gender should be considered in studies addressing the question of when experiences with rejection–in its many forms–results in antisocial versus prosocial behavior.     

Limitations on the ability to negotiate justice: attorney perspectives on guilt,innocence, and legal advice in the current plea system

In the American criminal justice system the vast majority of criminal convictions occur as the result of guilty pleas, often made as a result of plea bargains, rather than jury trials. The incentives offered in exchange for guilty pleas mean that both innocent and guilty defendants plead guilty. We investigate the role of attorneys in this context, through interviews with criminal defense attorneys. We examine defense attorney perspectives on the extent to which innocent defendants are (and should be) pleading guilty in the current legal framework and investigate their views of their own role in this complex system. We also use a hypothetical case to probe the ways in which defense attorneys consider guilt or innocence when providing advice on pleas. Results indicate that attorney advice is influenced by guilt or innocence, but also that attorneys are limited in the extent to which they can negotiate justice for their clients in a system in which uncertainty and large discrepancies between outcomes of guilty pleas and conviction at trial can make it a sensible option to plead guilty even when innocent. Results also suggest conflicting opinions over the role of the attorney in the plea-bargaining process.     

The identification of 2-phenoxyethanol in ballpoint inks using gas chromatography/mass spectrometry--relevance to ink dating

Developing and implementing a generally accepted procedure for the dating of ink found on documents using dynamic approaches has been a very formidable undertaking by forensic document examiners. 2-Phenoxyethanol (PE), a common volatile organic compound found in ballpoint inks, has been recognized for over a decade as a solvent that evaporates as ink ages. More recently, investigations have focused on the solvent loss ratio of PE prior to and after heating. To determine how often PE occurs in ink formulations, the authors analyzed 633 ballpoint inks utilizing a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. 2-Phenoxyethanol was identified in 85% (237/279) and 83% (293/354) of black and blue inks, respectively.