Brian Gill

Museum natural history collections have been called libraries of life. Their very purpose is to help us probe, understand and enjoy the world's astonishing biodiversity. In The Unburnt Egg Brian Gill continues his spellbinding stories from more than thirty years as a curator. Some tales are so bizarre they read like fiction: a population of ship rats decimating the entire wildlife of an island and then collapsing; birds leaving their young to be raised by other birds; frogs and lizards living in trees and flying. Others reveal the painstaking detective work involved in solving mysteries presented by police, biosecurity agencies, government departments and members of the public. Frogs' legs on sale as chicken, a feather hidden in a bag of sugar, a live boa constrictor on a street in snake-free New Zealand--it's all in a day's work. Into these stories Gill weaves as fascinating a cast of characters as you are ever likely to meet.

The U. S. Supreme Court's 1993 Daubert decision directed federal judges to scrutinize the reliability of expert evidence proposed for admission at trial. This study uses a sample of federal district court opinions between 1980 and 1999 to examine how judges, plaintiffs, and defendants responded to the new directive. The authors find that after Daubert, judges increasingly evaluated the reliability of expert evidence. A rise in both the proportion of challenged evidence found unreliable and the proportion of challenged evidence excluded suggests that the standards for admitting evidence tightened. A subsequent fall in these two proportions suggests that the parties proposing and challenging evidence responded to the change in standards. The study also examines how "general acceptance" of proposed evidence in the expert community enters the reliability assessment and which types of evidence were affected by Daubert. The authors caution that even though judges are more actively screening expert evidence, whether they are doing so in ways that produce better outcomes has not been determined. The study concludes by identifying gaps in what is known about how well federal courts screen expert evidence and by recommending research to help fill those gaps.

How can public schools be improved? One radical solution that has been proposed is to provide parents with a voucher for a specified dollar amount for use at any public or private school (both religious and non-religious). Proponents argue that those children using the voucher would be able to attend more effective and efficient private schools, and that the loss of students (and revenue) to public schools would force them to respond by improving their programmes. Everyone would then be better off. In what has become a fiercely contentious and highly political debate opponents claim that moving to such a voucher system on a large scale would destroy public schools and exacerbate inequities in student outcomes by class and race/ethnicity. Both sides use research evidence from a small number of voucher experiments, and other sources, to bolster their claims. In this RAND Education book, the authors take a hard look at the evidence on vouchers in education. They consider what we know and what we would like to know more about: how vouchers would affect the academic achievement of participating and non-participating students, which students might use vouchers, who would supply and regulate schooling under a voucher system, and how much a voucher system would cost. After an exhaustive and critical review, the authors conclude that the evidence for many of the positions taken by either side in the debate is remarkably weak. For example, there is little rigorous empirical analysis that suggests public schools do any better job than private schools in promoting civic values or racial/ethnic integration, and that moving to a voucher system would have disastrous consequences. However, the evidence on the positive effects of vouchers on participating students is modest at best, and there is almost no grounded analysis of the key policy questions that policymakers need to consider before moving to a large-scale voucher experiment. This book should be a useful, unbiased primer for all those interested in this controversial topic.