The Regional Innovation Paradox: Innovation Policy and Industrial Policy

This paper explores the regional innovation paradox and its policy implications. The regional innovation paradox refers to the apparent contradiction between the comparatively greater need to spend on innovation in lagging regions and their relatively lower capacity to absorb public funds earmarked for the promotion of innovation and to invest in innovation related activities compared to more advanced regions. Empirical analysis of the nature of the paradox shows that there are strong complementarities between business, education and government spending on R&D and that technology/innovation policy and industrial policies tend to work in opposite directions. Our analysis suggests that resolution of the paradox requires policies that: (i) increase the innovation capacity of regions by working both on the demand and the supply side of the system to increase both private and public sector investment in innovation activity; and (ii) integrate technology policy and industrial policy by encouraging expenditure on innovation activity within mainstream industrial policy programmes. The penultimate section of the paper outlines and assesses policy initiatives/experiments along these lines and suggests how they might be developed in the future.     

Turning Off the Tap: Urban Water Service Delivery and the Social Construction of Global Administrative Law

This article explores the development of a cross-border dimensionto the delivery of urban water services as an arena for thesocial construction of global administrative law. When companiesfrom one country deliver water services in another country underdecades-long concession contracts, the ensuing political andlegal struggle engages one of the central strands of administrativelaw traditionally understood: the question of participationin decision-making processes that affect vital individual interests.Moreover, it does so in an arena that embeds public and privateactors in hybrid routines of both formal and informal participationat multiple levels of governance. Using Argentinian and SouthAfrican case studies, the article teases out in detail the interplaybetween international and domestic levels of the forms and processes(both formal and informal) that facilitate participation intransnational urban water services governance. The process ofsocially constructing global administrative law is centred initerative interaction between formal legal and informal politicalmodes of participation, especially social protest and politicalnegotiations. It is a process with two modes, political andtechnical, and the political salience of global administrativelaw is shaped first by differential capacities to deploy bothmodes, and secondly by the capacity to switch between nationaland international levels of governance.     

Age of greatest risk for victimization by forced sexual intercourse: Vulnerability of high school women

Data were collected from three studies over an eight–year period, which produced a sample of 868 female college students at a southern university. The three data sets were combined to permit an assessment of the extent to which reported victimization occurred among students before coming to the university rather than during their college experience, and to examine the nature of force in intimate relationships among maturing adolescents. About half of the subjects reported that their last victimization occurred while in high school, thus they were younger and less mature at the time of their victimizations. The researchers note that these two factors raise concern as adolescent girls may not be prepared to adequately define or protect themselves from inappropriate use of force in dating relationships, as the literature reports that both the development of sexuality and a redefinition of the use of force in childhood play are occurring at this point in their development, increasing the potential for victimization.     

Magistrates: The Future According to Auld

This paper arises out of work I undertook before I was appointed to my present post. I wish to comment narrowly on Auld's proposals for the future role of magistrates (in which category, for present purposes, I include district judges, formerly stipendiary magistrates), and will do so in the light of my own published research, commissioned jointly by the Home Office and Lord Chancellor's Department to inform Auld's deliberations. In the process I will comment on the manner in which Auld drew on, or failed to draw on, data generated in the course of that research.     

Toward a Global Theory of Mind: The Potential Benefits of Presenting a Range of IR Theories through Active Learning

Active learning is particularly well-suited to teaching across the range of perspectives inherent in the practice and study of international politics for two key reasons: (1) because of its capacity to highlight how subjective, intersubjective, and contested understandings play an important role in determining outcomes in the ivory tower as well as in the real world and (2) because of the compatibility between underlying theories of knowledge that inform active learning and the newer generation of IR theories including subaltern realism, social constructivism, constitutive theory, and postmodernism. This article explores the potential benefits of presenting these and other norm-oriented theories through active learning. It also discusses ways to overcome barriers to the integration of active learning techniques.     

Multi-technique comparison of source and primary transfer soil samples: an experimental investigation by D Croft and K Pye. A comment.

The Croft and Pye paper has a story to tell about the differentiation capabilities of four analytical techniques. It is not however, the whole story. This may be due in part to the lack of reproducibility in the generation of results, and also in the effort to match soil samples and thus infer that the results provide stronger conclusions than is possible to make with this sort of analysis. More research must be done to establish in what instances these techniques and others provide reliable, reproducible, representative and accurate results, and in what capacity such results can be presented. As they stand, the results from this paper should be treated with great caution and not extrapolated to any other forensic case work until greater reliability of these and other techniques has been established.