Does Targeted Capture Reduce Terrorism?

From January 1979 to December 2009, the Maoist insurgent Shining Path committed a total of 9,034 violent acts in a concerted attempt to topple the Peruvian government. These acts of violence included bombings, armed assaults, and assassinations. The Shining Path's leader Abimael Guzmán was captured by the Peruvian government on 12 September 1992. Using quarterly data and an interrupted times-series AutoRegressive Integrative Moving Average (ARIMA) study design, we investigated the effect of Abimael Guzmán's capture on the ability of the Shining Path to wage its war against the Peruvian government. Maximum-likelihood results revealed that the frequency of terrorist acts committed by the Shining Path dropped by 143 incidents per quarter a short time after Guzmán was captured. The analysis also evinced a positive relationship between the lethality of attacks and the frequency of the Shining Path's terrorist activity. We conclude that targeted capture shows some promise as an effective counterterrorism strategy, at least for terrorist groups such as the Shining Path that have a top-down type of organizational structure.     

IMPASSE AT MCAS FUTENMA

In 1960, a Japanese prime minister was forced to resign after he committed Japan to an unpopular security relationship with the United States. In 2010, exactly fifty years later, the security relationship with the United States, centered on the stationing of a vast U.S. base complex in Japan, has unseated a prime minister who came to office just last year with an over 70 percent approval rating. In the small southern prefecture of Okinawa, where 75 percent of the U.S. military in Japan is stationed, the continued presence of the unpopular Futenma air base has become a lodestone for Okinawan frustration. High-level talks to remove Futenma from the crowded city of Ginowan have been ongoing since 1996, yet nothing has been accomplished. On 25 April 2010, an estimated 90,000 people rallied in Okinawa and demanded the base be removed from the prefecture completely, and not simply relocated to a location near the city of Nago. This essay attempts to explain Washington's central role in creating the problem and argues that Futenma is an unnecessary burden on the people of Okinawa and on cash-strapped Japanese and American taxpayers.     

The More You Say the Less It Means: Overreporting and Attenuated Criterion Validity in a Forensic Disability Sample

A recent publication in Psychological Bulletin by McGrath et al. (Psychological Bulletin 136:450–470, 2010) challenged the necessity of response bias indicators in applied psychological assessment on the grounds that there is insufficient empirical support that shows that they are able to moderate the prediction of substantive measures. The current study challenges their conclusions by examining the effects of response bias in a sample of 2,275 disability litigants. We utilized the validity scales of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF; Ben-Porath and Tellegen, 2008) in order to establish a group of litigants who did not exhibit evidence of overreporting and compared them to a group of overreporting litigants. The overreporting group scored significantly higher on every Restructured Clinical Scale. Moreover, we compared the criterion validity between various substantive scales on the MMPI-2-RF and extratest measures [e.g., Beck Depression Inventory-II (Beck, Steer, & Brown, 1996)] and found evidence of significantly attenuated criterion validity in the overreporting group. Implications of the study in light of the review by McGrath and colleagues are discussed.     

UK Initiatives on Forced Marriage: Regulation, Dialogue and Exit

The literature on feminism and multiculturalism has identified potential conflicts between the recognition of cultural diversity and securing women's equality. Three broad approaches to this dilemma have emerged in the practices of contemporary states: regulation, working with the communities, and exit. Each of these is apparent in current initiatives regarding forced marriage, but the overwhelming emphasis in the UK has been on enabling individuals to exit from the threat or reality of a forced marriage. In assessing these initiatives, this paper highlights the limitations of exit and the danger of moving towards immigration regulation as the preferred solution.     

IDENTIFYING MECHANISMS BEHIND POLICY INTERVENTIONS VIA CAUSAL MEDIATION ANALYSIS

Causal analysis in program evaluation has primarily focused on the question about whether or not a program, or package of policies, has an impact on the targeted outcome of interest. However, it is often of scientific and practical importance to also explain why such impacts occur. In this paper, we introduce causal mediation analysis, a statistical framework for analyzing causal mechanisms that has become increasingly popular in social and medical sciences in recent years. The framework enables us to show exactly what assumptions are sufficient for identifying causal mediation effects for the mechanisms of interest, derive a general algorithm for estimating such mechanism‐specific effects, and formulate a sensitivity analysis for the violation of those identification assumptions. We also discuss an extension of the framework to analyze causal mechanisms in the presence of treatment noncompliance, a common problem in randomized evaluation studies. The methods are illustrated via applications to two intervention studies on pre‐school classes and job‐training workshops.     

Policing Schools: Examining the Impact of Place Management Activities on School Violence

The present study examines whether the presence of school resource officers (SROs) and their level of involvement in place management activities are associated with higher or lower rates of school-based serious violence. This study uses data from the 2010 School Survey on Crime and Safety (SSOCS) conducted by National Center for Educational Statistics. Propensity score matching is used to create a quasi-experimental design and isolate the influence of SROs and their level of involvement in place management activities on school-based serious violence. The analysis reveals that schools with a school resource officer are associated with higher rates of reported serious violence and those schools with SROs that participate in more place manager duties are also associated with higher rates of reported serious violence. These findings do not support the notion that SROs are acting as effective place managers and through this place management, reducing reported serious violence. Rather, it appears that the presences of a SRO and their execution of place manager duties is associated with an increase in the reporting of serious violence. Policy implications and limitations of the current research are also discussed.     

Barriers to prosperity: the harmful impact of entry regulations on income inequality

Public Choice - Entry regulations, including fees, permits and licenses, can make it prohibitively difficult for low-income individuals to establish footholds in many industries, even at the...     

Validation of reduced-scale reactions for the Quantifiler Human DNA kit

Accurate quantification of DNA samples is an important step in obtaining accurate and reproducible short tandem repeat (STR) profiles. Quantitative real-time-PCR has improved the speed and accuracy of DNA quantification over earlier methods, albeit at significantly greater cost per reaction. Here, the performance of reduced volume (10 microL) DNA quantification assays using the Quantifiler Human DNA Quantification Kit was evaluated using commercial standards and single source biological stains (e.g., venous blood, saliva, and semen). In addition, casework-type samples including those subjected to environmental contaminants containing PCR inhibitors and samples having undergone extensive DNA degradation were also quantified. The concentration of DNA in various forensic samples ranged from 0 to 2.9 ng/microL depending on sample source and/or environmental insult. Compared to full-scale reactions, reduced volume assays displayed equivalent to improved amplification efficiency and sample-to-sample reproducibility (+/-0.01-0.17 C(T FAM)). Furthermore, the use of data from reduced-scale Quantifiler reactions facilitated the accurate determination of the amount of sample DNA extract needed to generate quality STR profiles. The use of 10 microL-scale Quantifiler reaction volumes has the practical benefit of increasing the effective number of reactions per kit by 250%; thereby reducing the cost per assay by 60% while consuming less sample. This is particularly advantageous in cases of consumptive testing.     

Persistence of Polydimethylsiloxane Condom Lubricants

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is commonly used to lubricate condoms. The detection of PDMS on swabs from complainants can be used to support an allegation of sexual assault. Previous research has focused on establishing analytical techniques for detecting PDMS. This research examined the persistence of PDMS on the penis, in the vagina, in the mouth, and on skin. The longest PDMS detection times were 20 h on the penis, 35 h in the vagina, and 52 h on skin. PDMS was detected up to 4 h in the mouth if the participant did not eat or drink and up to 9 h if the participant slept. PDMS was not detected in the mouth after eating or drinking. The presence of biological fluids had no detrimental effect on the analysis. Aqueous extraction of swabs for DNA did not remove any significant amount of PDMS; hence, swab remains could be subsequently analyzed for PDMS.