Gender in White-Collar Crime: An Empirical Study of Pink-Collar Criminals

White-collar crime is financial crime committed by white-collar criminals. Sensational white-collar crime cases regularly appear in the international business press and studies in journals of ethics and crime. This article is based on a sample of 255 convicted white-collar criminals in Norway from 2009 to 2012. Only 20 out of 255 white-collar criminals presented in Norwegian newspapers in the years from 2009 to 2012 were women. In the popular press, white-collar crime committed by women is sometimes labeled pink-collar crime. In this article, a number of reasons for this gender discrepance are discussed. Women’s access to organizational power structures is rising, but remains still limited. This is in line with opportunity theory. Women may have a greater sense of risk aversion rather than risk willingness, and women may more easily be perceived as victims of crime. However, It is very hard to believe that Norwegian men commit ten times more white-collar crime than Norwegian women, also because Norway is seen as a salient egalitarian country. Therefore, it is a question of whether the detection rate for female white-collar criminals is lower than for males. As a consequence, more attention should be paid to characteristics of female white-collar crime and criminals in future criminology research and law enforcement

Corporate Crime Does Pay! The Relationship between Financial Crime and Imprisonment in White-Collar Crime

White-collar crime is financial crime committed by white-collar criminals. Sensational white-collar crime cases regularly appear in the international business press and studies in journals of ethics and crime. Many of these scholars apply anecdotal evidence to suggest what might be included and what might be excluded from the concepts of white-collar crime and white-collar criminals. On contrast, with a larger sample, we can study white-collar crime convictions using statistical techniques to identify relationships between variables. For example, it has been suggested that the amount involved in the crime (fraud, corruption, etc.) is an important factor when the judge decides the length of the prison sentence. In our sample of 255 criminal cases we identified 88 corporate criminals and 167 occupational criminals. Age when convicted was 47 years for occupational criminals and 49 years for corporate criminals. Furthermore, occupational criminals served 2.2 years in prison, while corporate criminals served only 2.1 years. This is particularly interesting, when the amount of money that was involved in the crime is taken into account. While occupational criminals on average abused 26 million Norwegian kroner, corporate criminals on average abused as much as 121 million Norwegian kroner. So, even if the magnitude of the financial crime in terms of money was substantially and significantly larger for corporate crime, occupational crime was nevertheless judged more severely in terms of imprisonment

Amenability of groups and GG-sets

This text surveys classical and recent results in the field of amenability of groups, from a combinatorial standpoint. It has served as the support of courses at the University of G\"ottingen and the \'Ecole Normale Sup\'erieure. The goals of the text are (1) to be as self-contained as possible, so as to serve as a good introduction for newcomers to the field; (2) to stress the use of combinatorial tools, in collaboration with functional analysis, probability etc., with discrete groups in focus; (3) to consider from the beginning the more general notion of amenable actions; (4) to describe recent classes of examples, and in particular groups acting on Cantor sets and topological full groups

Huddle Up: Using Mediation to Help Settle the National Football League Labor Dispute

In a patient transferred from Togo to Cologne, Germany, Lassa fever was diagnosed 12 days post mortem. Sixty-two contacts in Cologne were categorised according to the level of exposure, and gradual infection control measures were applied. No clinical signs of Lassa virus infection or Lassa specific antibodies were observed in the 62 contacts. Thirty-three individuals had direct contact to blood, other body fluids or tissue of the patients. Notably, with standard precautions, no transmission occurred between the index patient and healthcare workers. However, one secondary infection occurred in an undertaker exposed to the corpse in Rhineland-Palatinate, who was treated on the isolation unit at the University Hospital of Frankfurt. After German authorities raised an alert regarding the imported Lassa fever case, an American healthcare worker who had cared for the index patient in Togo, and who presented with diarrhoea, vomiting and fever, was placed in isolation and medevacked to the United States. The event and the transmission of Lassa virus infection outside of Africa underlines the need for early diagnosis and use of adequate personal protection equipment (PPE), when highly contagious infections cannot be excluded. It also demonstrates that larger outbreaks can be prevented by infection control measures, including standard PPE

Novel loci and pathways significantly associated with longevity

Only two genome-wide significant loci associated with longevity have been identified so far, probably because of insufficient sample sizes of centenarians, whose genomes may harbor genetic variants associated with health and longevity. Here we report a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of Han Chinese with a sample size 2.7 times the largest previously published GWAS on centenarians. We identified 11 independent loci associated with longevity replicated in Southern-Northern regions of China, including two novel loci (rs2069837-IL6; rs2440012-ANKRD20A9P) with genome-wide significance and the rest with suggestive significance (P < 3.65 × 10(−5)). Eight independent SNPs overlapped across Han Chinese, European and U.S. populations, and APOE and 5q33.3 were replicated as longevity loci. Integrated analysis indicates four pathways (starch, sucrose and xenobiotic metabolism; immune response and inflammation; MAPK; calcium signaling) highly associated with longevity (P ≤ 0.006) in Han Chinese. The association with longevity of three of these four pathways (MAPK; immunity; calcium signaling) is supported by findings in other human cohorts. Our novel finding on the association of starch, sucrose and xenobiotic metabolism pathway with longevity is consistent with the previous results from Drosophilia. This study suggests protective mechanisms including immunity and nutrient metabolism and their interactions with environmental stress play key roles in human longevity

Behavior and chronic toxicity of two differently stabilized silver nanoparticles to Daphnia magna

While differences in silver nanoparticle (AgNP) colloidal stability, surface potential, or acute aquatic toxicity for differently stabilized AgNP have often been reported, these have rarely been studied in long-term ecotoxicity tests. In the current study, we investigated the chronic toxicity of AgNP to Daphnia magna over a 21-day period with two different stabilizers (citrate and detergent), representative for charge and sterical stabilizers, respectively. This was coupled with a series of short-term experiments, such as mass balance and uptake/depuration testing, to investigate the behavior of both types of AgNP during a typical media exchange period in the D. magna test for chronic toxicity. As expected, the sterically stabilized AgNP were more stable in the test medium, also in the presence of food; however, a higher uptake of silver after 24 h exposure of the charge stabilized AgNP was found compared to the detergent-stabilized AgNP (0.046 ± 0.006 μg Ag μg DW−1 and 0.023 ± 0.005 μg Ag μg DW−1, respectively). In accordance with this, the higher reproductive effects and mortality were found for the charge-stabilized than for the sterically-stabilized silver nanoparticles in 21-d tests for chronic toxicity. LOEC was 19.2 μg Ag L−1 for both endpoints for citrate-coated AgNP and &gt;27.5 μg Ag L−1 (highest tested concentration for detergent-stabilized AgNP). This indicates a link between uptake and toxicity. The inclusion of additional short-term experiments on uptake and depuration is recommended when longer-term chronic experiments with nanoparticles are conducted