THE CRITICAL CLIMATE AGENDA

The world set a goal in the Paris Agreement: to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius of preindustrial levels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has explained why this is a valid goal. If global warming were to go higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius, this would jeopardize life on the planet with a potential multi-meter sea-level rise, the collapse of critical ecosystems, and the release of methane from thawing permafrost, possibly triggering runaway warming. Yet the world's current trajectory implies a catastrophic 2.7-degree- Celsius increase in global temperature.     

In other journals

Historical Foundations of the Common Law, Second Edition. S.F.C. Milson . London 1981. Butterworths. pp xii &; 475 (incl. Index). £18 cased, £11.95 limp.?

Marriage Settlements 1601–1740. Lloyd Bonfield. Cambridge 1983. Cambridge University Press, xviii &; 136 pp. (incl. index). £19.50.

The English and Colonial Bars in the 19th Century, Daniel Duman, London, 1983. Croom Helm, xv + 228 pp. (incl. index). £13.95.     

Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach

This article proposes a new approach to investigating the substance of lawmaking. Only a very small proportion of bills become law in the U.S. Congress. However, the bills that do become law often serve as vehicles for language originating in other bills. We investigate “text reuse” methods as a means for tracing the progress of policy ideas in legislation. We then show how a focus on policy ideas leads to new insights into the lawmaking process. Although our focus is on relating content found within bills, the same methods can be used to study policy substance across many research domains.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.