De Novo Advanced Adult‐Onset Offending: New Evidence from a Population of Federal Correctional Clients

Adult antisocial behavior is almost always predated by delinquency during childhood or adolescence; however, there is also evidence of adult‐onset criminal offending. This study examined this controversial subgroup of offenders using self‐reported and official data from a total population of federal correctional clients selected from the Midwestern United States. Difference of means t‐tests, chi‐square tests, and logistic regression models found that 11.7% of clients had an adult onset of offending and 2.7% of clients (n = 23) had an onset occurring at age 60 years or older. This group—introduced as de novo advanced adult‐onset offenders—had high socioeconomic status, mixed evidence of adverse childhood experiences, and virtually no usage of drugs with the exception of alcohol. These offenders were primarily convicted of social security and white‐collar crimes and evinced remarkably low psychopathology and criminal risk. More research is needed to replicate the phenomenon of de novo advanced adult‐onset offending.     

论严格相符标准的软化处理--轻微瑕疵例外

由于严格相符标准过于机械、刚性,各国对其进行了适当的软化处理(Soften Processing).轻微瑕疵例外就是其中得到各国多数学者和法官支持的一个理论.本文对轻微瑕疵例外的概念进行了总结,并分析了其构成要件,进而对国际商会的UCP500和ISBP规则已接受该理论进行了论证.我国法院在信用证案件审理过程中也应接受轻微瑕疵例外理论.     

Comparing regulatory processes in genome editing and autonomous vehicles: How institutional environments shape sociotechnical imaginaries

This study compares the regulation of two emerging technologies, the CRISPR genome-editing system and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in the United States. The study draws on 33 in-depth interviews with innovation and governance experts to study the relationship between their regulatory environments and developing beliefs about these technologies. Using sociotechnical imaginaries as a framework, we explore how social actors envision technologically driven futures and the social order that enables them. These imaginaries are essential to emerging technologies, where experts build a framework of potentialities for innovation still underway. While scholarship has documented how sociotechnical imaginaries arise among policymakers, groups of scientists, state and local stakeholders, and public actors in different countries, less has been said about how regulatory organizations and their actors shape expectations around technologies that are in the early and middle stages of development. This article finds that regulatory institutions shape emerging imaginaries along three related axes: the distribution of authority, technological novelty, and risk. Interviewees negotiate these three contingencies differently based on relevant extant regulatory structures and ideologies, resulting in distinct imaginaries around each technology. CRISPR actors envision genome editing as largely diminishing biomedical harm and eventually suitable for health markets, while CAV actors diverge on whether self-driving cars alleviate or exacerbate risk and how they may enter roads. That organizational structures and practices of regulation inform broadly held sociotechnical imaginaries bears significance for studies of innovation trajectories, suggesting regulators can take an active role in shaping how risks and benefits of emerging technology are defined.     

Support for the environment post-transition? Material concerns and policy tradeoffs

Though many individuals are aware of the need to address environmental concerns, fewer are willing to pay for climate action or think the environment should be a priority for government spending. One compelling reason is that they prioritize using scarce resources to address immediate material concerns. This is particularly likely for individuals facing absolute material scarcity or for those who think they are relatively economically worse off, especially in contexts characterized by rapid transformation and volatility in the levels and quality of social welfare provision. To test these expectations, we analyze survey data from formerly Communist economies, which today find themselves with vastly different fortunes. Empirical findings suggest that absolute and relative material scarcity affect opinions regarding government spending on, and the willingness to pay more for, environmental action. However, willingness to pay more for government public services, inclusive of anti-poverty initiatives, has an impact on willingness to pay more for climate action, but in counter-intuitive ways. Overall, the results appear to suggest that explicitly addressing and relating individual living standards and inequality with environmental concerns may expand support for climate action.     

Competition and cooperation in artificial intelligence standard setting: Explaining emergent patterns

Efforts to set standards for artificial intelligence (AI) reveal striking patterns: technical experts hailing from geopolitical rivals, such as the United States and China, readily collaborate on technical AI standards within transnational standard-setting organizations, whereas governments are much less willing to collaborate on global ethical AI standards within international organizations. Whether competition or cooperation prevails can be explained by three variables: the actors that make up the membership of the standard-setting organization, the issues on which the organization's standard-setting efforts focus, and the “games” actors play when trying to set standards within a particular type of organization. A preliminary empirical analysis provides support for the contention that actors, issues, and games affect the prospects for cooperation on global AI standards. It matters because shared standards are vital for achieving truly global frameworks for the governance of AI. Such global frameworks, in turn, lower transaction costs and the probability that the world will witness the emergence of AI systems that threaten human rights and fundamental freedoms.     

The times make a hero: Street-level policy entrepreneurship in major crisis responses in China

Street-level bureaucrats are often grassroots officials, and they are regarded as passive practitioners of policy with no authority to change policy or innovate, while policy entrepreneurs are usually high-level officials. Based on observations of China's responses to two national crises, this study found that the times do make a hero. When acting as innovative frontline technocrats, major transboundary crisis practitioners, and management savvy operators within the top-down bureaucracy, street-level bureaucrats can become policy entrepreneurs. To innovate and drive policy change, street-level policy entrepreneurs will adopt innovative strategies. They will make efficient use of their expertise and discretion, integrate various resources, strive for attention from superiors, consolidate their achievements, and expand their influence.     

Third-worldism: sensibility and ideology in Uruguay – from Third Position to the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa

This article examines the trajectory of the concepts ‘Third World’ and ‘Third-worldism’ in Uruguay, and attempts to prove that, although Third-worldism developed thoroughly as sensibility, it did not have the same success as ideology. The article examines authors and intellectual groups who reflected on the Third World, and especially on ‘tercerismo’ (Third Position) – understood as a set of ideas related to Third-worldism but not part of Third-worldism as such. It next explains the importance of the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa, identified as the main ideologist of Third-worldism in Uruguay. The research shows as a result that there was great concern about the Third World, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, expressed in articles, reports and speeches, among others. Nevertheless, a full conceptualisation was never realised, except in the contribution made by Real de Azúa. The article concludes that, paradoxically, ‘tercerismo’ blocked the development of more elaborated third-worldist thought in Uruguay.     

The making of land ownership: land titling in rural Colombia – a reply to Hernando de Soto

Hernando de Soto’s best-selling book The Mystery of Capital argues that economically disadvantaged countries lack institutional arrangements that can spur economic development and capital growth. This article questions de Soto’s institutional economist account. It draws on a 14-month ethnographic study performed at two rural field sites in Colombia and in the central government office responsible for promoting land programmes designed to improve the living conditions of rural communities. This study, which focuses on the daily practices of public officials and rural campesinos, suggests the importance of the title document, and in particular the public deed, for land ownership. It describes the process by which landownership is created by the issuance of the land title document and highlights some important elements and untended consequences that are often neglected in this process of making land a legal and economic asset.     

The cordial maid: representations of servants in Brazilian adaptations of Eça de Queirós

ABSTRACT

This article considers the ways in which recent Brazilian film and television adaptations of the works of Eça de Queirós portray relationships between servants and their employers. I argue that the adaptations exaggerate certain connections and forge altogether new ones in order to create or emphasise a sense of kinship between people of different social strata.

This newfound familiarity between employer and employee, in relationships that recall Gilberto Freyre’s and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s theorisation on Brazilian society, breaks some of the fixed hierarchies presented in Eça’s work. Such a change, paradoxically, grants working-class characters much more air time than their original creator would have envisioned, while at the same time emptying the social commentary that derived from the rigid power structures found in the novels. In this context, this article argues that the blurring of class lines in these films and series is quintessentially Brazilian in its use of emotional connection to mask oppression and create a false sense of equality.