Substance use and substance use disorders run in families. While it has long been recognized that the etiology of substance use behaviors and disorders involves a combination of genetic and environmental factors, two key questions remain largely unanswered: (1) the intergenerational transmission through which these genetic predispositions are passed from parents to children, and (2) the molecular mechanisms linking genetic variants to substance use behaviors and disorders. This article aims to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework and methodological approach for investigating the intergenerational transmission of substance use behaviors and disorders, by integrating genetic nurture analysis, gene expression imputation, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis. We also additionally describe two longitudinal cohorts — the Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study in Australia and the Lifelines Cohort Study in the Netherlands. By applying the methodological framework to these two unique datasets, our future research will explore the complex interplay between genetic factors, gene expression, and environmental influences on substance use behaviors and disorders across different life stages and populations.

This article explores the representation of alcohol on East German television, radio and film in the 1960s and 1970s. It analyses the state media's attempts to strike a balance between preaching moderation in the name of public health and co-opting the cultural legacy of beer, particularly for working-class men. The attempt to accomplish both goals simultaneously resulted in a seemingly contradictory programme of public messaging that reveals efforts by the socialist leadership to calibrate their vision of a modern socialist future to accommodate the persistent power of a cultural commodity in Germany.

Over the last three decades, transnational certification standards have proliferated to fill perceived ‘governance gaps’ in developing countries. Transnational non-governmental organisations and private standards-setting agencies have developed standards that cover a vast range of areas such as labour rights, social justice and environmental protection. As a form of private transnational regulation, certification standards travel through transnational production networks that link lead firms in developed countries with supplier firms in developing countries. This article draws on a case study about coffee certification to challenge the conventional understanding of transnational certification as a contractual conduit that transfers encoded certification standards from senders to receivers. It shows how transnational certification standards interact with, and remake local regulatory landscapes as they pass through. This interaction between global and local knowledge compels us to see transnational standards as a protean, highly localised regulatory process rather than stable universal norms. The article concludes that transnational certification does not function like an integrated ‘joined-up’ process and it is better understood as a mode of polycentric regulation that decentres and fragments transnational norms and standards.

As conventionally understood, anti-corruption programs rely on legal rules to define and control the abuse of official power for private gain. This study explores the limits to law-based standards of corruption where state officials obscure bribery and the abuse of power beneath a veneer of legality. Drawing on an empirical study of two public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Vietnam, it asks whether the failure of anti-corruption laws to curb malfeasance in PPPs is attributable to insufficient enforcement, to targeting the wrong behavior, or to both of these issues. It argues that if anti-corruption laws are blind to the opportunistic manipulation of laws in PPPs, then we must consider other ways of conceptualizing and controlling corruption. This argument links the way in which corruption is conceptualized to the efficacy of policy instruments used to curb corruption in PPPs. In particular, it examines whether public interest corruption provides a framework that makes malfeasance in PPPs visible and thus offers a mechanism for holding officials accountable. This study concludes that public interest corruption broadens the analysis of corruption in PPPs from transgressions of legal boundaries to an examination of public inclusion and exclusion from decision making.

The ‘16Up’ study conducted at the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute from January 2014 to December 2018 aimed to examine the physical and mental health of young Australian twins aged 16−18 years (N = 876; 371 twin pairs and 18 triplet sets). Measurements included online questionnaires covering physical and mental health as well as information and communication technology (ICT) use, actigraphy, sleep diaries and hair samples to determine cortisol concentrations. Study participants generally rated themselves as being in good physical (79%) and mental (73%) health and reported lower rates of psychological distress and exposure to alcohol, tobacco products or other substances than previously reported for this age group in the Australian population. Daily or near-daily online activity was almost universal among study participants, with no differences noted between males and females in terms of frequency or duration of internet access. Patterns of ICT use in this sample indicated that the respondents were more likely to use online information sources for researching physical health issues than for mental health or substance use issues, and that they generally reported partial levels of satisfaction with the mental health information they found online. This suggests that internet-based mental health resources can be readily accessed by adolescent Australians, and their computer literacy augurs well for future access to online health resources. In combination with other data collected as part of the ongoing Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study, the 16Up project provides a valuable resource for the longitudinal investigation of genetic and environmental contributions to phenotypic variation in a variety of human traits.

This article considers the current position of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) research by producing an integrative synthetic overview of all the articles published in three leading international CALL journals: ReCALL (in its 31st year of publication), the CALICO Journal (its 36th) and Computer Assisted Language Learning journal (its 32nd) over a sustained recent period: 2006–2016. They are judged sufficiently representative to enable broad trends to be detected and the sector’s strengths and weaknesses to be identified. The focus is on CALL research’s international reach, the range of topics researched and the nature of the studies themselves. The findings suggest that CALL research is growing internationally in the number of countries and researchers involved. A wide range of topics is researched, but there is a concentration of papers published on a cluster of popular areas. Consequently, fewer articles are published on a large number of CALL topics or, in some cases, rarely studied. The research methods employed are rigorous: in writing, structure, theory, literature awareness, and discussion and presentation of results, yet there are still weaknesses. Most empirical studies are small scale: based on one institution, a small cohort of students, over a short period of time and seldom followed up. Based on these findings, suggestions are made with a view to broadening and strengthening CALL research through targeting neglected strategic areas with special journal issues and conferences, and improving the quality of research projects. Key areas for future research are proposed.