STR data for the 15 AmpFlSTR identifiler loci in the Western Romanian population

Allele frequencies for the 15 tetranucleotide short tandem repeat loci contained in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler kit were obtained from a population sample of 219 unrelated individuals born in the western part of Romania.     

Suicide by skull stab wounds: a case of drug-induced psychosis

Suicide by stabbing to the head and/or driving sharp objects into the skull is of extreme rarity. This article reports the case of a 27-year-old man, who committed suicide by multiple knife stabs and cuts to the head, the torso, one shoulder and the forearms. Autopsy showed a perforating wound of the skull and the 10-cm long broken blade of the knife being still embedded in the right temporal lobe of the brain. The deceased had no history of psychiatric illness but was currently treated by mefloquine, a quinine derivative associated with a high rate of psychiatric adverse effects. Toxicological examination confirmed a recent intake of mefloquine together with chloroquine, another antimalarial drug. To our knowledge, this is the first report of a completed suicide with very strong evidence of mefloquine implication. Discussion focuses upon mefloquine-induced psychiatric disorders and highlights the importance of performing toxicological investigations in cases of unusual suicides.     

Laws and Universality,Laws and History

The article begins by examining two arguments used by Derrida in work published in 1967. The first claims against Lévi-Strauss that an empirical pattern of events cannot be injected into or superimposed onto an historical pattern claiming universality, for then there can be no disconfirmation of what is said. (This argument is used against Marxian history by some who write in the wake of Existentialism, Paul Roubiczek for instance.) The second claims against Foucault that he does not distinguish between reason as part of thinking and language and reason as an empirical historical structure capable of modification along time. The article then discusses the use of very similar if not identical arguments in Derrida’s much more recent work on laws, Force of law. The intelligibility, the interpretability, of laws and their history comes after the laws, not before, and is thus not fully universalisable.     

Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws and Equitable Sharing Activity by the Police

Research Summary

For several decades, critics have argued that civil forfeiture laws create incentives for law enforcement to increase departmental revenue by “policing for profit.” By using data on federal equitable sharing payments to nearly 600 local law enforcement agencies between 2000 and 2012, we examine the relationship between the characteristics of state forfeiture laws and equitable sharing payments to local agencies. Our results indicate that agencies in states with state laws that are more restrictive or less rewarding to police collect more in federal equitable sharing. This finding supports the critics’ argument that police behavior in regard to forfeiture activities is influenced by the financial rewards and burdens involved.

Policy Implications

Our results reveal that the findings of investigative journalism and case study research, that is, that police forfeiture activities are influenced by financial rewards, may be more generalizable to law enforcement than previously thought. Despite recent state‐level reforms, federal equitable sharing and most state forfeiture laws provide limited due process protections and have minimal accountability or reporting requirements. Concerns about the impact of civil forfeiture practices on perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy are discussed, and possible policy reforms are reviewed.     

Public-Sector Reform: Employment Security and Quality of Decision Making in the Australian Taxation Office

This article examines the impact of structural reforms and industrial relations changes on the employment security and decision behaviors of middle-level managers in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). This article is based on an empirical study using focus group and survey data that investigated how structural change and public-sector reforms substantially altered the employment environment. This research reveals that the ATO environment can be characterized by low morale, risk aversion, fear, and distrust brought about, in part, by employment insecurity. Where middle managers perceived organizational threats to their employment security, they engaged in self-protective “survivor” behaviors even when no such threats to their employment security existed. The article concludes that a substantial number of middle-level managers, survivors of years of restructuring, downsizing, and organizational change, were unlikely to display high-quality decision-making behaviors.     

Some Features of Cultural Policies Applied in Belgium,Particularly in the French-Speaking Community

The training of arts and cultural administrators in Taiwan is related to the development of Taiwan's cultural sector and the centralized system of its government. In this top-down system, the government has long played a leading role in the development of the arts, cultural policies, and industries. The purpose of this article is to examine elements of historical events and factors causing change in the environment to discover the characteristics of arts/cultural administrators, the skills needed for arts/cultural administrators, and the development of curriculum. The researcher divided the historical development of Taiwanese arts administration into three waves. The first wave is from 1949 to 1980, the second wave is from 1981 to 1990, and the third wave is 1991 through the present. Through a discussion of various historical events, factors concerning arts administration and its training system are discovered. In conclusion, after reviewing Taiwan's development in the area of arts administration, one finds that viewing arts administration as a profession is a relatively recent phenomenon. The training of arts administrators and curators in the visual arts was the first area to develop. Training for performing arts administrators was not emphasized until the 1980s. Graduate programs of arts administration in universities have been promoted only since the middle of the 1990s.     

Fertility and migration in the heart of the industrial revolution

Using research into the formation of industrial populations in the nineteenth century, this article examines the relationships between immigration and natality in Tilleur, an exemplary locality for studying the industrial revolution in Belgium. The main purpose is to test the general hypothesis positing a distinction between a foundation phase and a maturation phase in the process through which an industrial population is formed. The results are a contribution to the debate about the beginning of the fertility transition in industrial cities, and its relations to differential nuptiality and fertility in light of spatial origins.     

Societal openness during the urban crisis. Partner selection in the 19th-century Belgian textile cities Ghent and Verviers

This paper examines the partner selection of the lower classes during an urban crisis period in early industrial Belgian cities. It was found that in this period characterized by an economic transition, overpopulation, migration and a low standard of living, social heterogamy was high, whereas social homogamy increased, or was ‘restored’, in the subsequent period. The urban crisis effect on partner selection contradicts the claims of modernization theory that there was a gradual increase in societal openness and that societal openness was typically modern, but it fits the idea of the informalization of marriage, a process marked by an increase in unmarried cohabitation and illegitimacy.     

The age at marriage of migrants during the industrial revolution in the region of liège

The articl7e examines the cities and towns in the Liège region during industrialization in the ninteenth century, focusing on the relationship between marriage, migration, and entry of people into urban areas. The average age at marriage was higher for in-migrants than for natives, but so was the intensity of nuptiality. Thus, the average age at marriage is not the sole statistic through which to approach questions about the socio-demographic consequences of arrival into town. Towns had several, seemingly closed, marriage markets, and it is important to pay attention to differential behaviors by taking this fact into account. Moreover, in-migration to an industrial city created opportunities to contract marriage, for women as well as men. Sometimes marriages occurred in the village, and were contracted to escape the old system and to prepare for the migration to the city of the young couple. Structural as well as life-course approaches must be combined for a thorough understanding of migration to industrializing cities.     

Policy Change and Industry Associability: The Australian Mining Sector

In this paper we use evidence from the recent trajectories of mining industry associations in the Australian federation to argue for the significance of institutional explanations for the formation and maintenance of interest groups. We argue that the recent lack of consultation by the Commonwealth government with the Minerals Council of Australia over resources rent taxation proposals reflected a weakness that resulted from the shifting basis of associability stemming from institutional changes.