Envisioning Public Child Welfare Agencies as Learning Organizations: Applying Beer's Viable System Model to Title IV-E Program Evaluation

The idea of a learning organization emerges from organizational cybernetics and results in agency staff having the means to use their skills and expertise to meet the needs of the organization's clients. Relevant to Title IV-E training programs, such organizational processes would maximize the use of knowledge and skills the graduates bring back to the agency. This article uses focus group data to explore how Title IV-E graduates perceive the potentialities of their agency as a learning organization. This analysis results in recommendations to improve organizational performance without impinging on existing agency resource constraints.     

Solution or Smokescreen? Evaluating Industry Self-Regulation of Televised Food Marketing to Children

It is well established that children's exposure to television advertising for unhealthy food products contributes to the epidemic of childhood obesity. Given this finding, public health officials recommended that the government restrict unhealthy food marketing to children if the industry does not accomplish that goal voluntarily. Food marketers responded by adopting industry self-regulation several years ago, but this study finds that it has produced only marginal improvements in the overall nutritional quality of foods advertised to youth. Unless federal policy-makers intervene, it appears that unhealthy food marketing to children will continue to contribute to childhood obesity in the future.     

American National Security and the Death of Space Sanctuary

At the beginning of the space age, the United States relied upon the general acceptance of a sanctuary narrative of outer space in order to help support its reconnaissance activities over the Soviet Union. The notion that space could be a sanctuary thus served as a diplomatic tactic, one designed to thwart Soviet opposition to American overflight. While the Soviets eventually achieved parity—having later acquired the ability to surveil the United States—the notion of sanctuary became untenable once the Soviet Union began to further leverage space power for the aim of attacking American satellites and naval assets. The crucial moment, as revealed in recently declassified documents, occurred in 1976 when the Ford Administration recognized the need for an American anti-satellite capability. Subsequently, while the Carter Administration appeared to pursue comprehensive space arms control, what was really in play was a gambit, one designed to eliminate the Soviet’s co-orbital anti-satellite capability and maintain strategic parity in space.     

Public wage differentials and the treatment of occupational differences

Past research demonstrates that the estimated size of the federal government earnings differential shrinks substantially with the addition of detailed occupational controls. Possible explanations for this reduction are: controlling for the differing sectoral distributions of common occupations, and controlling for detailed occupations unique to each sector. While occupational detail does not eliminate the federal differential, more than two‐thirds of the reduction in the federal differential comes from controlling for unique occupations and, moreover, this is equivalent to excluding all observations in unique occupations. This finding is contrasted with that for the local sector in which the differing distribution of common occupations largely explains the pattern of the differential. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

对绑架罪若干问题的探讨

绑架罪属侵犯复杂客体类犯罪，其客观形式表现多样，容易与相近罪名混淆，本文主要从绑架罪的认定、在司法实践中的运用(主要突出与相似罪名的比较)等方面加以探讨，以切实保护公民的合法权利。     

Criminology and animality: stupidity and the anthropological machine

Although a relatively small, yet growing group of scholars have been lamenting the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the scope of criminology for over thirty years now, animals have been historically present in criminological theorizing, legal practices, and research. However, this presence has not been of the form advocated for by scholars who variously identify themselves as non-speciesist criminologists, green criminologists, or ecological criminologists, who have been arguing largely for recognition of harms perpetrated against animals, or ‘zoological crime’. Instead, the longer history of animals in criminology is as offenders or as prototypes of criminality. In this article, we are concerned with the production – vis-à-vis the anthropological machine – of the ‘stupid’ animal and subhuman within criminology and criminal justice. Guided by the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, we trace the animal through criminological thought from the premodern period to Lombroso to contemporary criminological scholarship illustrating how the animal has been (ab)used to shore up the classifications between humans, between humans and animals, and the intelligent and the stupid. We also examine how historically through criminal trials of animals and the feebleminded, criminal justice has played an active role in buttressing these classifications and acting on these classifications to produce bare life, that is, life without form or value.