A microfluidic device for presumptive testing of controlled substances

A simple microfluidic device (MFD) has been developed to perform multiple color and crystal tests for controlled substance analysis. The MFD method uses less sample and reagents and generates less waste than traditional spot plate methods while performing several tests simultaneously. This methodology provides significantly more analytical information for a single sample analysis. The current generation device is the size of a microscope slide with four analytical channels: one for microcrystal tests and three for color tests. The optimized devices were subjected to a rigorous validation study using comparative replicate analyses and several operators. Target analytes were methamphetamine, amphetamine, cocaine, and oxycodone and color test reagents used were the Marquis, Simon, and cobalt thiocyanate. For the crystal tests, platinic chloride was used. The validation study showed the MFD's limits of detection to be in the picogram range. Positive tests results were observed in complex mixtures in which the controlled substance was present at concentrations of 5-10% (w/w). The microcrystal reagents showed greater sensitivity than color test reagents when used in the device. Reagent use and waste generation using the devices was 95% less that that used and generated using the traditional methods. The device performance was also shown to be operator independent.     

Filicide: A Comparison by Sex and Presence or Absence of Self-destructive Behavior

The purpose of this study was to identify sociodemographic, contextual, situational, and individual variables, as well as certain behavioral warning signs, associated with filicide as a function of sex of the agressors and the presence or absence of self-destructive behaviours. The data cover all officially registered filicides committed in Quebec from January 1, 1986, to March 31, 1994, against youths under the age of 18 years. For the group of individuals who have self-destructive behaviours, results indicate that men compared to women are more likely to commit spousal homicide, to kill a higher number of victims, to be going through a conjugal separation, to have committed conjugal violence, to have threatened suicide, and to have threatened to kill their spouse. For the group of individuals who commit no self-destructive acts, women are more likely to present with a depressive disorder, whereas men are more likely to maltreated their children. Men who do not commit a self-destructive act are characterized by a significantly higher likelihood of maltreatment against their children and of tyrannical discipline, whereas men who commit a self-destructive act perpetrate filicide as a means of reprisal against their spouse. Results underscore the importance of considering the different groups of individuals who commit filicide as a function of sex as well as presence or absence of self-destructive behaviour.

Navigating the Wave of Water Contamination Claims: Analysis of City of New York v. Amerada Hess Corp. and Its Implications for Other Water Contamination Claims

An emerging issue that has gained the attention of the media and environmental activists in the United States over the past decade is the contamination of the United States’ drinking water supply. The alleged contaminants in the nation's water supply have ranged from methyl tertiary-butyl ether and coal by-products to pesticides and herbicides. Although these threats have drawn the attention of the media and activists, federal, state, and local regulators have been slow to respond. As a result, water contamination lawsuits are becoming more prevalent.     

Structural correlates of female homicide: A cross-national analysis

The present study went beyond previous cross-national homicide research, which has largely focused on combined (male and female) rates of homicide offending, by using gender-disaggregated homicide arrest figures. The study included controls for the clearance rate and the percentage of homicides that were attempts, and included data for forty-eight countries across multiple levels of development. The author compared the effects of development/modernization and opportunity on female homicide rates to their effects on male homicide rates. Results indicated that, overall, structural predictors had very similar effects on male and female homicide rates. Both rates were lower in countries with a higher gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, and neither male nor female homicide rates were related to urbanization. Countries with a higher number of people per household had a lower rate of both male and female homicide offending; however, this relationship only held when percent young was excluded from the model.     

Parental Support and Knowledge and Adolescents’ Sexual Health: Testing Two Mediational Models in a National Dutch Sample

This study investigated age- and gender-specific associations between parental support and parental knowledge of the child’s whereabouts, on the one hand, and sexual experience and sexual health (the ability to have safe and pleasurable sexual experiences) on the other hand. A representative Dutch sample of 1,263 males and 1,353 females (aged 12–25 years), who had previously engaged in sexual intercourse, completed a questionnaire that included measures of these constructs. Both parental support and knowledge were positively associated with contraceptive use, social skills in sexual interactions, sexual satisfaction, and delay of sexual debut. Findings also revealed that the majority of correlations between parental support and sexual experience and sexual health are attributable to the relationship between a supportive family environment and parental knowledge of the child’s whereabouts. Parental knowledge thus appeared to be more important for healthy sexual development than parental support.     

Earning through learning in legislatures

This inquiry applies Gary Becker’s theoretical notions of general and specific training to the experiential learning that occurs within political institutions, in particular the U.S. Congress. In the process, we isolate economic facets of these legislative experiences that influence the rental-value of human capital derived from congressional training. We identify four factors that structure legislators’ post-elective wages: pre-congressional salary, year of entry, tenure, and variables closely related to general training in Congress—specifically, assignment to powerful legislative committees, acquisition of broad skill packages, investment in expanding skill-set proficiencies, and to a lesser extent, life-cycle driven declines in such investments.     

Social Networks of Homeless Youth in Emerging Adulthood

Little is known about the social networks of homeless youth in emerging adulthood despite the importance of this information for interventions to reduce health risks. This study examined the composition of social networks, and the risks and supports present within them, in a random sample of 349 homeless youth (33.4% female, 23.9% African American, 17.7% Hispanic) between the ages of 18 and 24. Social network members who were met on the street were among the most likely to be perceived as engaging in risky sex, as well as to engage in substance use with the youth. Youth were more likely to count on relatives and sex partners for support compared to other network members, but they also were more likely to use substances with sex partners and perceived them as engaging in risky sex. Interventions may need to recognize the importance of intimate relationships during the developmental stage of emerging adulthood by enhancing supportive bonds and reducing substance use and risky sex in these relationships.     

‘she found a way,left the child’: ‘child-shifting’ as the plantation's affects and love's paradox in Donna Hemans’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">River Woman</Emphasis>

This article proposes a situated reading of maternal love, loss and lovelessness in Donna Hemans’ novel River Woman, locating her text in relation to other contemporary Caribbean women writers and to the early fiction of Toni Morrison. I argue that the complex affects that her representation of ‘child-shifting’ produces, can be articulated both in relation to literary texts that re-imagine historical and contemporary practices leaving a child in order to save her, and in the context of the plantation, where ruptured ties at the level of community and culture continue to be reproduced in the personal, emotional and family spheres. I use the concept of marronage, developed in the work of Glissant and Depestre, to define strategies of survival that necessitated actual and imaginative flight or escape, to contextualise the complex affects of the plantation that are repeated and reproduced in the novel's present—the late twentieth-century Caribbean.     

Reviews

From Mad Max to Sane Elaine

Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997, £16.39; Picador, 1998, £6.99

But Words Can Never Hurt Me

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, New York and London: Routledge, 1997, £40.

Women in Theatre: Practitioners’ Voices

Lizbeth Goodman, Feminist Stages: Interviews with ‘Women in Contemporary British Theatre, Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996, £18. Joanne Tompkins and Julie Holledge (eds), Performing Women/Performing Feminisms: Interviews with International Women Playwrights, Australasian Drama Studies Association Academic Publications 2, University of Queensland, 1997. Elaine Aston (ed.), Feminist Theatre Voices, Loughborough Theatre Texts, University of Loughborough, 1997, £7.99.

Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, (eds), Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting, London: Methuen, 1997, £9.99.

Life and Death in the Next World

Christine Brook‐Rose, Next, Manchester: Carcanet, 1998, £9.95 pbk.