How Plausible is Chinese Annexation of Territory on the Moon?

This article argues that a hypothetical decision by the People's Republic of China to assert territorial sovereignty over the area surrounding its planned manned Moon base is plausible. Enhanced international prestige in the near term and access to natural resources and strategic military positions in the long term may be sufficient temptations for China's leaders to challenge the United States to a twenty-first century space race. Strategic surprise could be successfully employed, given the opacity of Chinese decision-making; the conceptual blindness of external observers, including decision-makers, analysts, and academics; and China's repeatedly demonstrated capacity for executing military or diplomatic surprises of comparable magnitude. The ability of signatory states to withdraw from the 1967 Outer Space Treaty with one-year's notice means that international law only poses a temporary obstacle to such a decision. A manned Moon base would fulfill the condition of effective occupation necessary for territorial sovereignty under international law. An international relations constructivist approach discourages consideration of the advantages to states of territorial aggrandizement or the weakness of international law in restraining the behavior of states.     

Problems of Interplanetary and Interstellar Trade

If and when interplanetary and interstellar trade develop, it will be novel in two respects. First, the distances and time spans involved will reduce all or nearly all trade to the exchange of intangible goods. That threatens the possibility of conducting business in a genuinely common currency and of enforcing debt agreements incurred by governments. Second, interstellar trade suggests trade between humans and aliens. Cultural distance is a probable obstacle to initiating and sustaining such trade. Such exchange also threatens the release of new and dangerous memes.     

Applying Rasch modeling to the validity of a control balance scale

Classical test theory approaches to measurement are based upon a number of fairly restrictive assumptions. The nature of these assumptions is such that scales designed to operationalize latent constructs are treated with little regard for the interaction between the human subject and the items that compose the measurement scale. A competing measurement approach, the Rasch model, has been advanced to improve upon the limitations of classical test theory. In this article, the Rasch model was applied to a scale designed to measure Tittle's control balance ratio. Analysis suggests that the original scale and response category options do not meet fundamental measurement. In particular, several items exhibited misfit (and were thus removed from the scale), response category options were reduced from eleven to four, and the scales that form the control balance ratio exhibited very little gender bias. An alternative control balance scale that retains the original items is presented, but this scale no longer summarizes the control balance ratio as one overall score. The implications of these results are addressed.     

The POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) paradigm to improve end-of-life care: potential state legal barriers to implementation.

The Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Paradigm is designed to improve end-of-life care by converting patients' treatment preferences into medical orders that are transferable throughout the health care system. It was initially developed in Oregon, but is now implemented in multiple states with many others considering its use. An observational study was conducted in order to identify potential legal barriers to the implementation of a POLST Paradigm. Information was obtained from experts at state emergency medical services and long-term care organizations/agencies in combination with a review of relevant state law.     

The Political Economy of a Planetary Sunshade

Geoengineering proposals are increasingly acknowledged as possible responses to climate change because of the repeated failure of national decision makers to solve the collective action problem of allocating carbon emission reductions at the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Geoengineering is attractive, the possible moral hazard notwithstanding, because of differences in the economic effects of climate change across countries, which are organized as factions seeking to shift the burden of carbon reductions or to delay response. This article outlines the political economic advantages of a planetary sunshade to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth. Rather than adopt the more common game theoretic model to describe the relevant international relations, construction of the planetary sunshade is characterized as an auction in which a single spacefaring power completes construction of the megaproject as a global good, comparable to the willingness of the United States to provide the dollar as a global reserve currency, and then determines the average global temperature based upon financial or material contributions from other countries. The willingness to contribute is based upon calculations of preferred average global temperatures.     

Digital Analysis of Crime Statistics: Does Crime Conform to Benford’s Law?

Benford’s law suggests that the distribution of leading (leftmost) digits in data of an anomalous nature (i.e., without relationship) will conform to a formula of logarithmic intervals known as the Benford distribution. Forensic auditors have successfully used digital analysis vis-à-vis the Benford distribution to detect financial fraud, while government investigators have used a corollary of the distribution (focused on trailing digits) to detect scientific fraud in medical research. This study explored whether crime statistics are Benford distributed. We examined crime statistics at the National, State, and local level in order to test for conformity to the Benford distribution, and found that National- and State-level summary UCR data conform to Benford’s law. When National data were disaggregated by offense type we found varying degrees of conformity, with murder, rape, and robbery indicating less conformity than other offense types. Some tentative implications of these findings are discussed, as are areas for further research.