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AbstractThe majority of law enforcement agencies in the USA use pre-employment polygraph screening as a pass/fail criterion for prospective applicants. However, the polygraph has a number of unresolved practical and theoretical issues that are pronounced in the pre-employment screening context. After reviewing the literature in 2003, the National Research Council concluded there is a strong risk that pre-employment polygraph screening may erroneously exclude a large number of otherwise suitable candidates. Meanwhile, police departments face increasing difficulties finding qualified candidates to hire, and are often unable to keep pace with force attrition due to retirements and other factors. In light of these facts, this study attempts to determine if the polygraph is an effective means of filtering undesirable candidates by comparing data on police officer arrests between states that mandate pre-employment polygraph screening for law enforcement personnel and those that forbid the practice as a matter of law. The results were both surprising and completely contrary to initial expectations. It was found that states using the polygraph have significantly fewer years of service at the time of arrest and more per-capita arrests than police agencies in states that forbid the practice. Based on these results and a review of the polygraph literature, this study concludes that sole reliance on polygraph results as a pass/fail criterion for police hiring is a misguided practice.

Despite being the global legislative reality for more than half a century, when it comes to the control and management of illicit drugs, there is still a sharp academic divide between strict prohibitionists and open access legalisers, with both sides claiming supremacy in their ability to reduce the harms drug users face. Spanning these opposing academic extremes, governments around the world have experimented with, or put into practice a range of alternatives to prohibition that generally hold harm reduction as a centrally guiding principle. However, in the realm of drugs control, harm reduction is not a simple utilitarian problem and is often clouded by a number of moral aspects that will seemingly continue to frustrate the prospects for consensus among the various drug control stakeholders for the near future. Moreover, while proponents of reform and legalisation have put forth seemingly plausible and well considered theories for the regulation and control of drugs in lieu of prohibition, it has become rather clear in the wake of the recent United Nations Special Assembly on Drugs in 2016 that a significant top-down change in international drugs control policy is unlikely for the foreseeable future. This is not to say the global prohibitionist framework is destined to remain predominant, and clear lines are emerging for the practical evolution of international drugs control policy. With an ever expanding variety of novel alternative methods being implemented by countries around the world to reduce the harm from illicit drug use, especially with regards to the unique challenges faced by intractable, chronic users of 'hard' drugs such as heroin, coupled with a softening of hard-line attitudes, a path towards sensible drug reforms is becoming clearer. This short article examines a number of those alternative methods, where it is argued that medicalised harm reduction for 'hard' drugs is the most likely to find broad acceptance under the international drug regime and the growing tolerance and liberalisation of cannabis laws will likely continue because of its relatively low risk profile and high cost of prohibition.

Building on global advances in artificial emotional intelligence, Japanese companies have increasingly invested in developing social robots with capacities to express and evoke emotion. In some cases, they can even read the emotional expressions of human users. These efforts parallel a broader trend in state support for developing technological solutions to socioeconomic problems, such as social isolation and a deficit in care workers. The rise of companion robots has elicited excitement about potential futures of human–robot existence as well as concerns over data privacy and the loss of inter-human connection, embodying the dynamic emotional dimensions of Japan's social transformation.

AbstractAs part of a surge in technologies with so‐called 'artificial emotional intelligence', robotics engineers and Buddhist monks in Japan have developed an android bodhisattva to deliver teachings at a popular Zen temple. Like many recent robots in Japan, the android is designed to impact visitors' feelings. For this reason, it can be called a 'technology of affect'. In order to communicate how new affective technologies are facilitating intimacy in human‐machine relations in Japan, we employ the concept of 'disassembling'. By conceptuallydisassemblingtechnologies of affect and placing them in performative contexts, we show how technologies of affect alsodisassembleestablished associations between artificial agents and the feelings they evoke in popular imaginaries. We argue that identifying these disassembling processes helps demonstrate how emerging AI technologies can engender social change at the level of affect through evocative depictions of machine emotion.