Preliminary Study on the Effect of Heated Surfaces Upon Bloodstain Pattern Analysis

Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA) involves the interpretation of distinct blood patterns found at crime scenes following a violent act. In this paper, we explored for the first time the effects of surface temperatures upon blood impacting a horizontal surface (steel) with its implications in BPA explored. Specific surface temperatures were explored over the range 24–250°C which relate to the four major boiling regimes of liquid media; natural convection, nucleate boiling, transition boiling, and film boiling, where a series of blood drops tests were performed at varying impact velocities. Blood was found to separate into its components at temperatures of 50°C+, displayed as temperature induced blood rings, where a single secondary and a series of further inner rings are exhibited. This consequently led to the development of a new constant expressing the decrease in spread factor (D_s/D_o) at the secondary ring.     

What harm,whose justice?: excavating the restorative movement

The city of Hull in the northeast of England gave itself the ambitious task of becoming the world’s first restorative city. The aim of this strategy was to create a more socially and emotionally confident youth population which in turn would encourage a more entrepreneurial and aspirational outlook across the City. Based on a two-year National Lottery-funded project exploring peoples’ experiences of restorative approaches and a Knowledge Transfer Project to help develop restorative skills, the development of restorative justice is analysed. How does a restorative classroom, workplace, or family really behave? Is there a common objective within, and across, all restorative initiatives and if so, what is it? The answer to these questions is that communication breakdown can be understood as the common harm within, and across the restorative movement. This raises some interesting questions and challenges for zemiology where both restorative justice and social harm perspectives contain quite different notions of harm suggesting that neither has yet developed a clear or solid foundation upon which to build an alternative focus to criminal harms.     

Memory conformity and suggestibility

Abstract

The present study examined whether the degree to which participants engage in memory conformity, which occurs when a person alters their memory report of an event to be consistent with another person, can be predicted by their levels of interrogative suggestibility (IS), which is the degree to which people are susceptible to altering their memory reports during questioning. Memory conformity was introduced by having participant and confederate pairs study words and then complete a social recognition test where they took turns to make judgements to the same items. When the participants responded after the confederate, they tended to conform to confederate's judgements regardless of whether the confederate had made a correct or incorrect response. IS was measured using the Gudjonsson Suggestibility Scale 2. This scale allows separate measures of Yield, which is a measure of how susceptible people are to altering their memory reports of events as a result of leading questions, and Shift, which is a measure of how susceptible people are to changing responses to questions when placed under pressure to do so. Only Yield was a significant predictor of memory conformity.     

Farm transmission and the commercialization of agriculture in northern Maine in the second half of the 19th century

The transition to capitalism has been one of the most discussed issues in the historiography of the rural United States in the 18th and 19th centuries, but the typology, and the “market revolution” construed upon it, are problematic. The article explores some of these problems by examining the commercialization of eastern Canadian agriculture, which was a prolonged process starting in the beginning of the 19th century in the St. Lawrence–Great Lakes axis and ending during the 1960s in the outlying parts of Quebec, Ontario, and the Maritime Provinces. It is difficult to identify clear trends in the numbers yielded by evidence from this region for the time period in question. Highly commercial farms were more likely than the others to transfer all their property to their children. Deficit farmers were much more likely than the others to transfer all their property to outsiders. But the data do not support the view that farmers who were keen on turning their farms into moneymaking businesses adopted property transmission practices that were markedly different from the others. And before the 1830s, there was really no need to have strategies in place because land was plentiful.     

Financial investment via ADRs in Mexico and South America

American depository receipts (ADRs) are dollar-denominated, negotiable instruments issued by a depository bank to represent ownership of a foreign security in the bank's possession. They are the primary method employed by Latin American corporations to raise equity capital in the United States. One flequently overlooked aspect about ADRs is that their investment performance provides a gauge not only on management's performance but also a measure of the foreign government's ability to provide a political, legal, economic and social climate that is conducive to international investment. This paper investigates the returns and risks associated with foreign investment in Mexico and South America. First, we show that the weekly returns to Latin American stocks are weakly correlated with the U.S. stock market which suggests that they can reduce the risk of a portfolio that is fully diversified within the U.S. market. Second, we find that ADRs from this region are more risky than U.S. common stocks. However, we find little evidence that foreign exchange rate risk should be a major factor in the investment decision. Third, we examine the effects of the devaluation of the Mexican peso and show that political factors can significantly increase the risk and reduce the return to foreign investment. Finally, the results show that investors do not pay a significantly larger relative transaction cost premium for investing in Mexican and South American equity vis-à-vis U.S. common stock. We conclude that ADRs provide the ability for the U.S. investor to realize potentially superior gains from companies located in these emerging economies. However, the willingness by the U.S. investor to disinvest means that politicians and managers have a powerful incentive to continue reforms that lead to improved standards of living for their citizens and employees.     

Does the Restrictiveness of State Tax and Expenditure Limitations Affect State Revenues and Expenditures?

This paper examines the impact of tax and expenditure limitations (TELs) on state governments. We examine how TELs are represented in empirical modeling. We compare and contrast an index of state-level TEL restrictiveness to a simple dummy variable approach. We use a panel of data for the 50 U.S. states to capture changes in state TELs and a generalized method of moments (GMM) dynamic panel estimator. We find that results vary across the two methods of capturing the presence of TELs, suggesting that simple dummy variables are not sufficient to capture the heterogeneity of TELs across states and over time.     

Who's in charge? Lessons in discerning the source of authority for a rural local government's decision to retain od help

In the face of increasing demand in this era of “fend for yourself federalism,” greater numbers of university-based organization development consultants will likely be working closely with city and county governments in the coming years. Questions of authority to engage the consultant and to implement any new policies which result from the OD intervention process are not always easy to answer. This paper describes an illustrative case study in which failure to answer these questions resulted in the premature termination of an ongoing intervention. Lessons learned from this “failure” and steps which might be taken to avoid similar outcomes in comparable circumstances are discussed.     

Education for Child Labour: Evaluating the National Child Labour Policy in West Bengal,India

Transitioning child labourers from work to education is a key component of global efforts to eliminate child labour. In India, the National Child Labour Project is the central programme aimed at achieving this goal. This paper examines the operation of the project in the state of West Bengal using original survey data collected in 2008. The survey reveals a number of promising findings, including high rates of provision of both midday meals and free learning materials to students, as well as evidence of adequate schooling quality and availability. However, areas of concern were also identified, including irregularities in stipend payments to parents of child labourers who send their children to school and inadequate provision of free health services to children who attend school rather than work. These operational short-comings revealed by the survey reduce the incentive and ability parents have to send their children to school rather than work and, accordingly, undermine the effectiveness of the project.     

Issue-Related Learning in a Gubernatorial Campaign: A Panel Study

This study is based on data from a three-wave telephone panel survey conducted during the 1998 governor's race in Florida. The evidence suggests that a considerable amount of issue-related learning (having to do with candidate policy stands and group endorsements) took place over the course of the general election campaign, though substantial differences were observed from one issue area to the next. Further analysis indicates that learning was especially likely to occur among voters (a) who were more knowledgeable about political affairs to start with (confirming that the so-called “knowledge gap” may be exacerbated during campaigns), (b) who scored high on a measure of advertising negativity (for one candidate but not the other), and (c) who early in the campaign, read their local newspaper less frequently. Consistent with prior research, TV news appears to have done little or nothing to boost issue-based learning among the electorate.