Are Your Disputants Insecure and Does It Matter? Attachment and Disputants' Speech during Mediation

An exploratory qualitative study explored the effect of attachment styles on disputants' speech during real‐life mediations. Drawing on attachment theory, we classified disputants as secure or insecure individuals using a self‐report attachment‐style questionnaire. Subsequently, they entered their mediation sessions, where their entire speech was recorded. Qualitative analysis of their speech yielded consistent and sometimes striking differences that portrayed secure speech as remarkably more useful and enhancing toward resolution compared with insecure speech. The findings, presented with many examples, strongly indicate the relevance of attachment to the research of communication during mediation sessions. In this report, we also consider the practical implications of the association between attachment and disputants' behavior, emphasizing the role of mediators.     

Microcrystal analysis of cocaine hydrochloride and added adulterants

The objective of this project was to investigate the trends of changes in the crystal morphology of cocaine in the presence of the common adulterants, caffeine and lidocaine HCl. By performing gold chloride microcrystal tests on samples of cocaine with adulterants at 10, 20, and 50% concentrations, trends in the changes of the crystal morphology can be linked to specific adulterants and concentrations. For cocaine/caffeine mixtures, the trend is elongation of one axis, additional branching, and brown discoloration of the crystals. At 50:50 cocaine/caffeine mixtures, branched spherical crystals and long needles appear. The trends for cocaine/lidocaine mixtures include elongation of one axis with an X-shaped middle axis. The axes continue to grow and branching decreases until at 50%, spherical clusters of needles appear. These results indicate microcrystal analysis can be used as a novel method for presumptively identifying not only cocaine but also the identity and concentration of the adulterant.     

Lady Elinor Davies: The prophet as publisher

Lady Elinor Davies, who published between 1625 and 1652 more works than any other Englishwoman before her, believed herself to be the prophet of the apocalypse, divinely chosen to reveal that the apocalypses of Daniel and St John find their fulfillment in the events of the seventeenth century and thereby to proclaim the coming of the judgement and the end of time. Empowered by confidence in her gift and compelled by the urgency of her mission, Lady Elinor defied patriarchal authority when in 1633 she published prophecies attacking church and king, an act that brought her to trial and to prison and her prophecies to the bonfire. Lady Elinor then mythologized this trial: She, the woman-prophet-publisher, becomes the apocalyptic Woman in Travail, who triumphs over the monstrous embodiments of patriarchal power that persecute her and seek to destroy her work.     

Bureaucratizing Democracy, Democratizing Bureaucracy

This article analyzes the relationship between how rationality is conceived and how democracy is practiced in the Bureau of Reclamation, a water development agency in the Department of Interior. The efforts of some inside the agency to institutionalize rational decision-making models, partly in response to new environmental law, expanded the number and range of interest groups that participated in its decisions fry incorporating their preferences into their models for evaluating plans. But the terms under which people could express their values and interests were strictly controlled in ways that some felt misrepresented their concerns. How we conceive of rationality has important implications for how and which people are included in bureaucratic decision making.     

An Unusual Economic Arrangement: The Brazilian Economy during the First Lula Administration, 2003–2006

This paper describes the economic policy and economic performance of Brazil during the first Lula administration, in 2003–2006. I show that in his first term as president Lula chose fast disinflation as one of the main priority of its economic policy. This choice required the adoption of high real interest rates, which also demanded an increase in the government’s primary surplus to keep the country’s public debt under control. Consequently, as I strive to demonstrate, investment in social safety net (the administration’s other main priority) was financed not only by the increase in tax revenues but also by a reduction in the government’s expenditure on both wages and benefits of public employees and in public investments in infrastructure. A combination of, on the one hand, a favorable global environment and, on the other, successful economic policies resulted in a significant improvement in the Brazilian macroeconomic performance. This in turn contributed a great deal to a reduction in both income inequality and poverty rates. I conclude by unveiling what I view as a quite unusual economic arrangement: president Lula’s economic choices over the 2003–2006 period ended up benefiting most the extremely rich (through high real interest rates) and the very poor (through the increase in income transfers).