Swabs as DNA Collection Devices for Sampling Different Biological Materials from Different Substrates

Currently, there is a variety of swabs for collection of biological evidence from crime scenes, but their comparative efficiency is unknown. Here, we report the results of an investigation into the efficiency of different swab types to collect blood, saliva and touch DNA from a range of substrates. The efficiency of extracting blood and saliva from each swab type was also tested. Some swabs were significantly more effective than others for sampling biological materials from different substrates. Swabs with the highest sampling efficiency, however, often did not have the highest extraction efficiency. Observations were recorded regarding practicality of each swab in a variety of situations. Our study demonstrates that selection of sampling device impacts greatly upon successful collection and extraction of DNA. We present guidelines to assist in evaluation of swab choice.     

News and notes

Igor Primoratz, Justifying Legal Punishment Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, and London: Humanities Press, 1989, x + 196 pp.; bibliography.     

Russia's information warfare structure: Understanding the roles of the security council,Fapsi, the state technical commission and the military

During the past two years, Russia has made significant progress in improving its infrastructure responsible for information security. Security specialists also have produced a draft information security doctrine (which the US does not possess) that discusses critical information issues and areas, and the internal and external information threats to the state. The primary organizations responsible for information security in Russia are the Security Council, responsible for national interests affected by the information age; the Federal Agency for Government Communications and Information (FAPSI), responsible for ensuring the security of state communications and conducting intercept operations; the State Technical commission, devoted to the development of international laws, licensing and certification of IW related policies; and the Russian armed forces, responsible for studying the impact of information operations on military art.     

Campaign contributions as valence

I study how the possibility of voters contributing to candidates in response to the candidates’ policy proposals affects the equilibrium policy in winner-take-all political competition. More specifically, I allow each partisan voter to contribute to her preferred candidate where the amount contributed depends on the relative positions of the two candidates. Candidates then use the donations to build valence through campaigning, which in turn affects the voting decision of impressionable voters. Since candidates are concerned with raising money as well as picking a policy position preferred by the median voter, I show that campaign contributions may lead to divergent equilibria in winner-take-all elections when politicians are policy-motivated, albeit only under stylized utility functions and donor densities. Further, under symmetric voter and donor densities, if either the donor density is single-peaked or the voter utility is concave, a unique equilibrium exists in which both candidates propose the ideal policy of the median voter.     

The New Enclosures: London,New York City,Philadelphia, and the Transformation of Public Space

ABSTRACT

In recent years, social movements have taken to the streets to protest various forms of economic and racial injustice. However, these attempts to exploit the political opportunities public spaces afford have been compromised by the increasingly private nature of “public” spaces. What has changed is the rise of privately owned public spaces (POPS), areas that appear to be public, but in fact are owned by corporations that prohibit a range of activities, including political protest. This article argues such restrictions of public space are not limited to POPS. Rather, they are just one expression of a far more pervasive phenomenon, novel variations on centuries-old practices by which common or public land has been enclosed. I suggest that four forms of enclosure -for profit, of behavior, of community, and of the public realm- degrade the status of public institutions and insulate private interests from counter-mobilization by groups pursuing egalitarian ends.     

Book Reviews

Ben Agger, Fast Capitalism: A Critical Theory of Significance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 191 pp.

Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 1991, New York: Routledge, ISBN 0–415–90387–4

Timothy W. Luke, Screens of Power. Ideology, Domination, and Resistance in Informational Society: (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 265.

Andre Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason. London: Verso. 1989. pp. 250.     

Advertising and the conquest of culture

Thomas Frank's important The conquest of cool: Business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism usefully described the advertising industry's “conquest of cool” in the 1960s and beyond, the co-optation of the hip and the cool for the purposes of advertising marketing. This article argues that, since Frank's book appeared, the “convergence of commerce and content” – as the advertising industry calls it – has meant that the production of content is even more entwined with advertising than ever before. The first part of this article describes this shift with particular attention paid to the production of advertising music, which increasingly employs well-known rock, hip-hop, and other popular musicians. The analytical portion of this article draws on the studies of Richard A. Peterson and others on the rise of the socially elite “omnivore” consumer of cultural products to argue that advertising has played a crucial role in this shift, emphasizing the cool and the trendy. Last, the article updates Pierre Bourdieu's influential notion of cultural capital, for, if social elites are more omnivorous in their tastes, then cultural capital today must increasingly be associated with knowledge of the trendy, not only the fine arts.