Development and Consideration of Global Policies for Managing the Future Risks of Poliovirus Outbreaks: Insights and Lessons Learned Through Modeling

The success of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative promises to bring large benefits, including sustained improvements in quality of life (i.e., cases of paralytic disease and deaths avoided) and costs saved from cessation of vaccination. Obtaining and maintaining these benefits requires that policymakers manage the transition from the current massive use of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) to a world without OPV and free of the risks of potential future reintroductions of live polioviruses. This article describes the analytical journey that began in 2001 with a retrospective case study on polio risk management and led to development of dynamic integrated risk, economic, and decision analysis tools to inform global policies for managing the risks of polio. This analytical journey has provided several key insights and lessons learned that will be useful to future analysts involved in similar complex decision-making processes.     

DIFFICULT JOURNAL ARTICLE REJECTIONS AMONG PROLIFIC FAMILY THERAPISTS: A QUALITATIVE CRITICAL INCIDENT STUDY

This qualitative cirtical incident study examines the reactions and coping strategies of prolific family therapy scholars to difficult journal article rejections. Participants provide suggestions for ways to increase the likelihood of publication and to decrease the negative effects of journal article rejection. We discuss the implications of this investigations for the socialization of young professionals, the improvement of the journal review process, and the study of professional issues in family therapy.     

THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF STYLE: Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class as Contested Text

Social scientists have begun to appreciate the importance of style in academic discourse. Style and its evaluation, I argue, are not givens, but are created and negotiated by a body of readers, judging a text. To explain the process by which style comes to be known, I choose the case of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class , published in 1899. I demonstrate that style was always important in the interpretation of his work, and that this "classic" can be read as literature, scholarly discourse, humor, or poor writing—or a combination thereof. A consensus on the qualities of Veblen's style has never emerged. Focusing on claims emphasizing Veblen's irony, I suggest that an ironic interpretation is particularly likely when an author analyzes those with superior status.

Veblen, a grayfaced shambling man lolling resentful at his desk with his cheek on his hand, in a low sarcastic mumble of intricate phrases subtly paying out the logical inescapable rope of matter-of-fact for a society to hand itself by, dissecting out the century with a scalpel so keen, so comical, so exact that the professors and students nineteenths of the time didn't know it was there, and the magnates and the respected windbags and the applauded loudspeakers never knew it was there.

—John Dos Passos, "The Bitter Drink" The Big Money (1946, pp. 106–107)     

Minimum wages and poverty with income-sharing

Textbook analysis tells us that in a competitive labor market, the introduction of a minimum wage above the competitive equilibrium wage will cause unemployment. This paper makes three contributions to the basic theory of the minimum wage. First, we analyze the effects of a higher minimum wage in terms of poverty rather than in terms of unemployment. Second, we extend the standard textbook model to allow for income-sharing between employed and unemployed persons in society. Third, we extend the basic model to deal with income sharing within families. We find that there are situations in which a higher minimum wage raises poverty, others where it reduces poverty, and yet others in which poverty is unchanged. We characterize precisely how the poverty effect depends on four parameters: the degree of poverty aversion, the elasticity of labor demand, the ratio of the minimum wage to the poverty line, and the extent of income-sharing. Thus, shifting the perspective from unemployment to poverty leads to a considerable enrichment of the theory of the minimum wage.      

Moments of Inertia and Graph Separators

Graphs that arise from the finite element or finite difference methods often include geometric information such as the coordinates of the nodes of the graph. The geometric separator algorithm of Miller, Teng, Thurston, and Vavasis uses some of the available geometric information to find small node separators of graphs. The algorithm utilizes a random sampling technique based on the uniform distribution to find a good separator. We show that sampling from an elliptic distribution based on the inertia matrix of the graph can significantly improve the quality of the separator. More generally, given a cost function f on the unit d-sphere Ud, we can define an elliptic distribution based on the second moments of f. The expectation of f with respect to the elliptic distribution is less than or equal to the expectation with respect to the uniform distribution, with equality only in degenerate cases. We also demonstrate experimentally that the benefit gained by the use of the additional geometric information is significant. Some previous algorithms have used the moments of inertia heuristically, and suffer from extremely poor worst case performance. This is the first result, to our knowledge, that incorporates the moments of inertia into a provably good strategy.     

ASA certification as cooptation

We provide a brief overview of the American Sociological Association’s Ph.D. Certification Program and question the need for, and justification of, certifying sociologists. Essentially, the ASA certification mechanism, as implemented, is nonsociological, emphasizing presumed defects in the individual to the neglect of wider, systemic forces impinging on our discipline. If certification of sociologists is warranted, a view difficult to support given the small number of applicants for certification since 1986, we suggest departmental accreditation—a more sociological approach that emphasizes the value of the discipline, in and of itself. His research interests include political sociology, stratification and contemporary issues affecting the discipline. His research foci include rural and agricultural issues and the sociological employment market and profession.