We test the hypothesis that US corporations headquartered in states with greater public corruption are also prone to more unethical behavior when operating abroad. We exploit passage of Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that curtailed bribery of foreign officials and find firms in corrupt states, especially those exporting to more corrupt countries, suffer greater performance decline following FCPA, suggesting larger loss from anticipated bribery restrictions. Controlling for industry, firms in corrupt states are more likely to be targets of FCPA enforcement actions. (...) They are also more likely to have paid foreign bribes, as disclosed during pre-FCPA investigations. (shrink)

This paper is discusses the preliminary research ideas in our attempt to address the development of the resources that an organization needs towards its sustainability performance by investigating two important categories of variables: values and motivators. The paper discusses the preliminary literature review and inputs to the research idea as presented at IABS 2010.

High‐throughput DNA analyses are increasingly being used to detect rare mutations in moderately sized genomes. These methods have yielded genome mutation rates that are markedly higher than those obtained using pre‐genomic strategies. Recent work in a variety of organisms has shown that mutation rate is strongly affected by sequence context and genome position. These observations suggest that high‐throughput DNA analyses will ultimately allow researchers to identify trans‐acting factors and cis sequences that underlie mutation rate variation. Such work should provide insights (...) on how mutation rate variability can impact genome organization and disease progression. (shrink)

Buddhists endorse the concept of human actions and their consequences as they uphold the doctrine of karma. However, they deny the existence of a ‘permanent self’. Few questions arise in this regard. If a permanent self does not exist then who guides a person to decide the course of an action? How does a person choose to perform an action of the many alternatives in a situation? Who takes responsibility for the consequences of an action? This paper attempts to answer (...) these questions by reinterpreting the Buddhist’s ‘no-self’ theory from epistemological and logical perspectives. This paper argues that Buddhists while rejecting the existence of a ‘permanent self’ affirm the existence of impermanent psychophysical entities (five skandhas). The mereological sum of these psychophysical entities is known as a ‘person’ who performs actions. A person becomes morally responsible for the consequences of an action justifying the Buddhist doctrine of karma. (shrink)

Meiotic recombination occurs preferentially at certain regions called hot spots and is important for generating genetic diversity and proper segregation of chromosomes during meiosis. Hot spots have been characterized most extensively in yeast, mice and humans. The development of methods based on sperm typing and population genetics has facilitated rapid and high‐resolution mapping of hot spots in mice and humans in recent years. With increasing information becoming available on meiotic recombination in different species, it is now possible to compare several (...) molecular features associated with hot‐spot loci. Further, there have been advances in our knowledge of the factors influencing hot‐spot activity and the role that they play in structuring the genome into haplotype blocks. We review the molecular features associated with hot spots in terms of their properties and mechanisms underlying their function and distribution. A large number of these features seem to be shared among hot spots from different species suggesting common mechanisms for their formation and function. BioEssays 28:45–56, 2006. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractGroup photo of the participants at the chromosome stability meeting in Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore, India. The meeting brought together the Indian scientific community and investigators from other countries working on various aspects of chromosome stability.

Recent studies show that racism still exists in the American medical profession, the fact of which legitimizes the historically long-legacy of mistrust towards medical profession and health authorities among African Americans. Thus, it was suspected that the participation of black patients in end-of-life care has always been significantly low stemmed primarily from their mistrust of the medical profession. On the other hand, much research finds that there are other reasons than the mistrust which makes African Americans feel reluctant to the (...) end-of-life care, such as cultural-religious difference and genuine misunderstanding of the services. If so, two crucial questions are raised. One is how pervasive or significant the mistrust is, compared to the other factors, when they opt out of the end-of-life care. The other is if there is a remedy or solution to the seemingly broken relationship. While no studies available answer these questions, we have conducted an experiment to explore them. The research was performed at two Philadelphia hospitals of Mercy Health System, and the result shows that Black patients’ mistrust is not too great to overcome and that education can remove the epistemic obstacles as well as overcome the mistrust. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)