Fluorescence of a Natural Fluorophore as a Key to Improve Fingerprint Contrast Image

The optical and morphological properties of resveratrol were investigated. This nontoxic fluorescent natural material, emitting in the visible blue light, was used as an optical marker, enabling the enhancement of the image contrast coming from relief pictures marked on challenging surfaces. By applying appropriated imaging softwares, this marker was verified to be very useful in the latent fingerprint recognition deposited on different wood surface types, mainly those with high level of roughness, where conventional forensic materials do not allow effective fingerprint image visualization.     

Cause Lawyering and Movement Tactics: Disability Rights Movements in South Korea and Japan

We investigate cause lawyers’ roles in movements for the domestic adoption of international human rights norms. Social movements scholarship often assumes that lawyers will divert activism toward institutional tactics, while the sociolegal studies literature emphasizes that lawyers are active in diverse ways across venues. A paired comparison of antidiscrimination movements in South Korea and Japan reveals how critical junctures in regime history shape the tactical repertoires that cause lawyers bring to their interactions with movement actors, and thus also movement tactics. This research advances scholarship on professionals in social movements, cause lawyers as norm entrepreneurs, and legal mobilization in East Asia.     

Agricultural Diversity and Child Stunting in Nepal

Abstract

This article investigates empirical connections between agriculture and child nutrition in Nepal. We augment the standard approach to explaining child nutrition outcomes by including information about household level agricultural production characteristics, including indicators of agricultural diversity. Data from the 2010/2011 Nepal Living Standards Survey (NLSS) are used in a series of regression models to explain stunting outcomes and variation in height-for-age Z-scores among 1,769 children 0–59 months of age. Results highlight the relative importance of overall agricultural yields, specific crop groups, and the consumption of own-production as factors correlated with long-term nutrition among children of different age groups. We find a small positive association between the degree of commercial market-orientation of households and child HAZ, but only among children under 24 months of age.     

Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

ABSTRACT

From a cursory look at the terms of service of the main social networking websites, it is immediately possible to detect that Facebook’s show a peculiar configuration. Although they represent a mere contract between private parties, these terms adopt the traditional jargon of constitutional texts and articulate their contents in terms of rights, principles and duties. This curious pairing between norms regulating social media and the constitutional sphere is also apparent in a series of non-binding documents that are unequivocally named ‘bill of rights’ and seek to articulate a set of principles to protect social media users. This paper examines whether the emergence of a constitutional tone in this limited number of texts could be related to the effective, or aspirational, constitutional function that these documents exercise. The identification of a series of significant shortcomings will lead to exclude that social media’s terms of service and bills of rights of social media users currently play a constitutionalising role. Nevertheless, the possibility to theoretically justify the use of these documents as mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment will be adduced as an evidence of the potential constitutional aspirations of these texts.     

Learning-Shaping Crises: A Longitudinal Comparison of Public Personnel Reforms in Italy, 1992‒2014

Abstract

This article analyses the attempts to reform public administration, notably personnel management, in Italy between 1992 and 2014, with a focus on implementation and the period following the multiple crises that have unfolded since 2008. By untangling the policy learning processes between multiple crises, past reform attempts and domestic and European “contexts in motion”, the article finds that efficiency-oriented reforms have floundered regardless of the political color of governments or indeed of the nature – political or technocratic – of the governments. Domestic factors, notably the frequency of government alternation, i.e. government instability, and European pressure have further reinforced the orientation towards single-loop lessons, i.e. the almost exclusive effecting of short-term cost-cutting measures.     

Leprosy,Legal Mobilization,and the Public Sphere in Japan and South Korea

This article addresses the question of what gets transmitted in cross‐national diffusion and why. It does so by analyzing the spread of rights‐based activism from Japanese to South Korean leprosy (Hansen's disease) survivors in the 2000s. Previous scholarship would predict extensive diffusion of mobilizing frames and tactics, especially since Korean lawyers learned an effective legal mobilization template while working with Japanese lawyers to win compensation for Korean leprosy survivors mistreated by Japanese colonial authorities before 1945. Yet the form of subsequent activism by Korean leprosy survivors for redress from the Korean government differed from the original Japanese model. This case suggests the need for scope conditions on theories about isomorphism and the agency of brokers. In particular, it draws attention to how the structure of a country's public sphere—and especially its legal profession, news media, and activist sector—affects the feasibility of imported innovations related to activism and legal mobilization.     

Binational Vital Signs: A Quality of Life Indicator Program for the San Diego–Tijuana Metropolitan Region1

This is a study of a binational community indicator program for the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan area (SDTMA). The key objective of the research was to produce a citizen-generated community indicator program (CIP). The study is closely based on the work of the two focus groups held in the two cities and offers a small program that has immediate practical potential for implementation. The program consists of a suite of thirty-five indicators for which data has been identified and provided. Fifteen of the indicators apply to Tijuana, twenty to San Diego. The program is built around principles of community well-being or quality of life (QOL). It is the first subregional attempt at the scale of the United States-Mexico Bi-National Region (BNR) to integrate existing environmental, social, and economic data into a single coherent program to inform community leaders about the condition of the SDTMA. The region covered by the CIP generally consists of the urbanized core of metropolitan Tijuana, the city of San Diego, and associated cities like Chula Vista and El Cajon within the southern part of San Diego County.