Measuring Feelings and Beliefs that May Facilitate (or Deter) Homicide: A Research Note on the Causes of Historic Fluctuations in Homicide Rates in the United States

Abstract The essay seeks to construct measures of feelings and beliefs that may facilitate or deter homicides among unrelated adults. The measures try to quantify political stability, government legitimacy, and fellow feeling along national, religious, or racial lines in the United States from colonial times through the 19th century

Criminologists and Historians of Crime: A Partnership Well Worth Pursuing

From 2013 to 2016, I had the privilege of serving as a member of the National Academy of Science’s Roundtable on Crime Trends. The Roundtable, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice, brought together scholars from criminology, public health, economics, and sociology, as well as jurists, public health officials, and former police chiefs, in an effort to better understand recent trends in street crime in the United States, particularly the so-called “crime drop” of the 1990s. Ably chair..

Homicide in Early Modern England 1549-1800 : The Need for a Quantitative Synthesis

Scholars of early modern England have produced superb studies of crime and violence. Given the differences, however, in the sources, methods, and chronological range of their studies, it is difficult to construct a synthetic quantitative analysis of homicide from their findings. The essay offers a provisional quantitative synthesis of research on neonaticide and adult homicide, and argues that a comprehensive examination of the surviving evidence and an application of statistical techniques drawn from econometric and demography can lead to reliable estimates of early modern homicide rates.Les spécialistes de l'Angleterre à l'époque moderne ont produit de remarquables recherches sur la criminalité et la violence. Toutefois, en raison des différences dans les sources, les méthodes employées et les périodes étudiées, il est difficile de construire sur cette base une synthèse quantitative des résultats concernant l'homicide. Le présent article propose une synthèse provisoire des travaux sur l'infanticide et l'homicide et avance la thèse selon laquelle un examen approfondi des données existantes et l'utilisation de techniques statistiques empruntées à l'économétrie et à la démographie peut conduire à une estimation fiable des taux d'homicide à l'époque moderne

Yes We Can: Working Together toward a History of Homicide that is Empirically, Mathematically, and Theoretically Sound

I would like to thank the Editorial Board of Crime, History, and Societies for giving Pieter Spierenburg and me an opportunity to discuss my book, American Homicide. As I anticipated, Pieter’s essay is an aggressive defense of the “civilization” thesis of Norbert Elias, a thesis which Pieter has advanced in creative ways. At the end of my essay, I will suggest ways in which my findings on the history of homicide are compatible and incompatible with Pieter and Elias’s thesis. Before I do, howe..

Eric Monkkonen (1942-2005)

Eric Monkkonen, who passed away on May 30, 2005 at the age of 62, was one of the greatest historians ever to write on the history of crime. An urban and social science historian by training, he dedicated his life to understanding the social problems that, like many historians of his generation, he believed most pressing: poverty, prejudice, and violence. He was an iconoclast in his approach to those problems, on good terms with ideologues of all stripes but unwilling to settle for ideological..

Manufacturing-focused emissions reductions in footwear production

What is the burden upon your feet? With sales of running and jogging shoes in the world averaging a nontrivial 25 billion shoes per year, or 34 million per day, the impact of the footwear industry represents a significant portion of the apparel sector's environmental burden. A single shoe can contain 65 discrete parts that require 360 processing steps for assembly. While brand name companies dictate product design and material specifications, the actual manufacturing of footwear is typically contracted to manufacturers based in emerging economies. Using life cycle assessment methodology in accordance with the ISO 14040/14044 standards, this effort quantifies the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions, often referred to as a carbon footprint, of a pair of running shoes. Furthermore, mitigation strategies are proposed focusing on high leverage aspects of the life cycle. Using this approach, it is estimated that the carbon footprint of a typical pair of running shoes made of synthetic materials is 14 ± 2.7 kg CO[subscript 2]-equivalent. The vast majority of this impact is incurred during the materials processing and manufacturing stages, which make up around 29% and 68% of the total impact, respectively. Other similar studies in the apparel industry have reported carbon footprints of running shoes ranging between 18 and 41 kg CO[subscript 2]-equivalent/pair (PUMA, 2008; Timberland, 2009). For consumer products not requiring electricity during use, the intensity of emissions in the manufacturing phase is atypical; most commonly, materials make up the biggest percentage of impact. This distinction highlights the importance of identifying mitigation strategies within the manufacturing process, and the need to evaluate the emissions reduction efficacy of each potential strategy. By suggesting a few of the causes of manufacturing dominance in the global warming potential assessment of this product, this study hypothesizes the characteristics of a product that could lead to high manufacturing impact. Some of these characteristics include the source of energy in manufacturing and the form of manufacturing, in other words the complexity of processes used and the area over which these process are performed (particularly when a product involves numerous parts and light materials). Thereby, the work provides an example when relying solely on the bill of materials information for product greenhouse gas emissions assessment may underestimate life cycle burden and ignore potentially high impact mitigation strategies

An evolutionary perspective on psychiatry

Recent progress in the evolutionary understanding of behavior may greatly assist psychiatry. Although explanations of psychopathology have traditionally emphasized proximate causes of individual differences, consideration of the evolutionary functions of human behavior is essential for psychiatry, just as biology, ethology, and medicine routinely consider both proximate and evolutionary explanations for a variety of phenomena. The methods and data for testing evolutionary hypotheses are reviewed, and the ways in which evolutionary principles can help to explain maladaptive behaviors are considered. Some psychiatric symptoms that seem maladaptive may, in fact, serve specific survival functions. Hypotheses are proposed about the possible evolutionary significance of overeating, anorexia nervosa, panic attacks, and sexual disorders, and tests of these hypotheses are considered. By incorporating an evolutionary perspective on psychopathology, psychiatry may share the foundation that evolution provides for the rest of natural science.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/24655/1/0000068.pd

Trisomy: Chromosome competition or maternal strategy? : Increase of trisomy incidence with increasing maternal age does not result from competition between chromosomes

Axelrod and Hamilton (Science 211:1390, 1981) suggested that trisomies may result from an end-game strategy between chromosomes competing to get on the gamete as the mother approaches menopause. We tested this hypothesis by reviewing studies of the parental origin of the extra chromosome in trisomy 21 births. These data show that there is no significant rise in trisomy 21 conceptions as the mother ages. The increase in trisomies with maternal age results not from an increase in nondisjunctions, but from a decrease in rejection of trisomy zygotes, which may be adaptive for the mother towards the end of her reproductive life. This decreasing rate of rejection may result from the changing inclusive benefits of two maternal strategies as menopause approaches.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/29963/1/0000325.pd

ICAMs Redistributed by Chemokines to Cellular Uropods as a Mechanism for Recruitment of T Lymphocytes

The recruitment of leukocytes from the bloodstream is a key step in the inflammatory reaction, and chemokines are among the main regulators of this process. During lymphocyte–endothelial interaction, chemokines induce the polarization of T lymphocytes, with the formation of a cytoplasmic projection (uropod) and redistribution of several adhesion molecules (ICAM-1,-3, CD43, CD44) to this structure. Although it has been reported that these cytokines regulate the adhesive state of integrins in leukocytes, their precise mechanisms of chemoattraction remain to be elucidated. We have herein studied the functional role of the lymphocyte uropod. Confocal microscopy studies clearly showed that cell uropods project away from the cell bodies of adhered lymphocytes and that polarized T cells contact other T cells through the uropod structure. Time-lapse videomicroscopy studies revealed that uropod-bearing T cells were able, through this cellular projection, to contact, capture, and transport additional bystander T cells. Quantitative analysis revealed that the induction of uropods results in a 5–10-fold increase in cell recruitment. Uropod-mediated cell recruitment seems to have physiological relevance, since it was promoted by both CD45R0+ peripheral blood memory T cells as well as by in vivo activated lymphocytes. Additional studies showed that the cell recruitment mediated by uropods was abrogated with antibodies to ICAM-1, -3, and LFA-1, whereas mAb to CD43, CD44, CD45, and L-selectin did not have a significant effect, thus indicating that the interaction of LFA-1 with ICAM-1 and -3 appears to be responsible for this process. To determine whether the increment in cell recruitment mediated by uropod may affect the transendothelial migration of T cells, we carried out chemotaxis assays through confluent monolayers of endothelial cells specialized in lymphocyte extravasation. An enhancement of T cell migration was observed under conditions of uropod formation, and this increase was prevented by incubation with either blocking anti– ICAM-3 mAbs or drugs that impair uropod formation. These data indicate that the cell interactions mediated by cell uropods represent a cooperative mechanism in lymphocyte recruitment, which may act as an amplification system in the inflammatory response

Heterochromatin Protein 1 (HP1a) Positively Regulates Euchromatic Gene Expression through RNA Transcript Association and Interaction with hnRNPs in Drosophila

Heterochromatin Protein 1 (HP1a) is a well-known conserved protein involved in heterochromatin formation and gene silencing in different species including humans. A general model has been proposed for heterochromatin formation and epigenetic gene silencing in different species that implies an essential role for HP1a. According to the model, histone methyltransferase enzymes (HMTases) methylate the histone H3 at lysine 9 (H3K9me), creating selective binding sites for itself and the chromodomain of HP1a. This complex is thought to form a higher order chromatin state that represses gene activity. It has also been found that HP1a plays a role in telomere capping. Surprisingly, recent studies have shown that HP1a is present at many euchromatic sites along polytene chromosomes of Drosophila melanogaster, including the developmental and heat-shock-induced puffs, and that this protein can be removed from these sites by in vivo RNase treatment, thus suggesting an association of HP1a with the transcripts of many active genes. To test this suggestion, we performed an extensive screening by RIP-chip assay (RNA–immunoprecipitation on microarrays), and we found that HP1a is associated with transcripts of more than one hundred euchromatic genes. An expression analysis in HP1a mutants shows that HP1a is required for positive regulation of these genes. Cytogenetic and molecular assays show that HP1a also interacts with the well known proteins DDP1, HRB87F, and PEP, which belong to different classes of heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoproteins (hnRNPs) involved in RNA processing. Surprisingly, we found that all these hnRNP proteins also bind heterochromatin and are dominant suppressors of position effect variegation. Together, our data show novel and unexpected functions for HP1a and hnRNPs proteins. All these proteins are in fact involved both in RNA transcript processing and in heterochromatin formation. This suggests that, in general, similar epigenetic mechanisms have a significant role on both RNA and heterochromatin metabolisms