On 22--23 June 2001, the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, in collaboration with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Analytic Services Institute for Homeland Security, and the Oklahoma National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, held a senior-level exercise entitled "Dark Winter" that simulated a covert smallpox attack on the United States. The first such exercise of its kind, Dark Winter was constructed to examine the challenges that senior-level policy makers would face if confronted with a bioterrorist attack that initiated outbreaks of highly contagious disease. The exercise was intended to increase awareness of the scope and character of the threat posed by biological weapons among senior national security experts and to bring about actions that would improve prevention and response strategies.

▪ Abstract  Violence traditionally had been considered a problem exclusively within the criminal justice domain, although it is now widely viewed as a public health issue as well. Public health has brought new and complementary tools for understanding and preventing violence. Whereas public health has long recognized the environment as a determinant of disease and injury, it has paid less attention to the environment when considering violence prevention strategies. For several decades though, some criminologists and others have been researching environmental factors in crime prevention. This article aims to discuss the main environmental crime-prevention strategies, provide examples of promising interventions, review public health literature that uses these strategies, discuss what public health can contribute, and suggest public health research to test the hypothesis that violence can be prevented and controlled through environmental modifications.

Oligonucleotide primers complementary to conserved regions of the 16S and 23S ribosomal RNA genes were used to amplify the 16S-23S intergenic spacer region of bacterial pathogens. The amplification patterns produced were compared for their potential use in molecular epidemiologic analysis. This method, polymerase chain reaction (PCR) ribotyping, was applied to isolates of Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecium, Escherichia coli, and Enterobacter species. Length polymorphisms in the amplified DNA distinguished unrelated strains of all bacteria. The banding patterns of 3 S. aureus isolates from the blood of 1 patient on 3 consecutive days were identical. Plasmid analysis, biotyping, and antibiograms were also obtained on the Enterobacter isolates. All three of these methods showed considerable variability after in vitro passage of bacteria, but PCR ribotypes remained stable. Results demonstrate the utility of the conserved primers for PCR ribotyping, a widely applicable method for the molecular epidemiology of genetically diverse bacteria.

Despite the huge literature on the methodology of the social sciences, relatively little interest has been shown in sociological description of social science research methods in practice, i.e., in the application of sociology to sociological work. The overwhelming (if not exhaustive) interest in research methods is an evaluative and prescriptive one. This is particularly surprising, since the sociology of science has in the past few decades scrutinised almost every aspect of natural science methodology. Ethnographic and historical case studies have moved from an analysis of the products of science to investigations of the processes of scientific work in the laboratory. Social scientists appear to have been rather reluctant to explore this aspect of their own work in any great depth.In this paper, we report on a "methodography", an empirical study of research methods in practice. This took the form of a small-scale investigation of the working practices of two groups of social scientists, one with a predominantly qualitative approach, the other involved in statistical modelling. The main part of the paper involves a comparison between two brief episodes taken from the work of each, one focussing on how two researchers analyse and draw conclusions from an interview transcript, the other on how collaborators work out an agreed final version of a statistical model for combining temporal and spatial data. Based on our analysis of these examples, we raise some questions about the way in which social scientists reason through their problems, and the role that characterisations of research, as research of a particular kind (e.g., qualitative or quantitative), play in actual research practice.