So Many Civilizations,So Few Pages: A Review Essay*

Books reviewed in this article: Christian Joppke Selecting by Origin: Ethnic Migration in the Liberal State Douglas S. Massey and J. Edward Taylor (EDS.) International Migration: Prospects and Policies in a Global Market United Nations Research Institute For Social Development Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World International Organization For Migration Arab Migration in a Globalized World     

Hearing “That’s So Gay” and “No Homo” on Campus and Substance Use Among Sexual Minority College Students

ABSTRACT

Sexual orientation microaggressions are common on college campuses and can contribute to negative outcomes; yet little is known about their relationship with substance use outcomes. Among a convenience sample of cisgender sexual minority college students (n= 574; 57.0% female, 24.9% people of color, 50.7% gay/lesbian; 72.4% public school) from 37 states (67.8% Midwest), this analysis investigates the association between hearing “that’s so gay” and “no homo” on campus and hazardous alcohol use and the frequency of illicit drug use. Using multivariable regression analyses, the commonly heard phrases “that’s so gay” and “no homo” were each found to significantly increase the risk for hazardous drinking and the frequency of drug use among students. Efforts should be made to create more welcoming campus climates for sexual minority students by reducing the use of these microaggressions and, in the meantime, offering supports to mitigate their harmful effects.     

“I’m Not like That,So Am I Gay?” The Use of Queer-Spectrum Identity Labels Among Minor-Attracted People

ABSTRACT

Largely based on an erroneous belief that individuals who are preferentially attracted to minors are necessarily sex offenders, queer communities have distanced themselves from this population over the past several decades. There are now those who object to the use of labels such as “gay” and “queer” by minor-attracted people (MAPs), raising the question, “to whom do queer-spectrum identity labels belong?” I engage with this question using data from my research with 42 MAPs, exploring their uses of queer-spectrum identity labels and the conflicts they have encountered regarding their use of these terms. I then discuss the potential consequences of accepting the use of these labels by MAPs.     

发挥计生优势 推进电子健康

健康是关系人民福祉与国家可持续发展的一个重要公共议题,也是中国人口发展战略的一个重要组成部分。健康永远是人的最基本需求之一,也是人实现全面发展的重要基础。全民健康水平在很大程度上决定着一个国家的人口素质,它既是人口发展的重要基础,也是一个国家经济社会政治文化发展的重要测度指标之一。健康不仅仅是生理问题,也是心理问题、精神问题、情感问题、生活习惯与行为方式问题;健康也不仅仅是个体问题,也是家庭问题、代际问题、社会问题;健康更不仅仅是单纯的医学问题,它与人口发展、社会管理、技术进步、     

论“计划生育”的“善”与“恶”—《大国空巢》批判

人口质量的提高、“国家力量”的形成存在人口规模障碍,中国与西欧因人口状况的不同而走上了不同道路;“人口爆炸”是中国“百年屈辱”的总根源;老龄化并非衰亡,西方文明衰落,东方、伊斯兰文明兴起根本不会出现在可预见的将来。计划生育是道德的—在高层级、总体上直接就是“善”,低层级、部分的“恶”,也指向和被转化为高层级、总体上的“善”;自由生育则会把中国推向毁灭的深渊。作为“拾荒集”的《大国空巢》,只是被用来“砸”计划生育的一块“砖”。     

The Assumptions Underlying Eco-Footprinting

In essence, the concept of a person's ecological footprint is simple: it is the area of land needed to support permanently a specified lifestyle. But in practice eco-footprinting is more complex. It is the purpose of this paper to investigate the most important aspects of that complexity. We avoid discussion of a recent elaboration of eco-footprinting, namely including the sea as a component of the ecological footprint and the use of equivalence factors. The reason is that we see those changes as being less fundamental, and intend to cover them in a separate paper. The current paper—concentrating on the fundamentals—concludes that eco-footprinting is the best method available for making a quantitative assessment of the extent to which consumption, by a specified human population, is exceeding biocapacity.     

The study of urbanization

Seven years' work of the Committee on Urbanization of the Social Science Research Council has produced The Study of Urbanization. Although the book is an excellent series of documentations of trends in specific fields, it lacks any attempt to unify the contributions to a concise definition of urbanization.Most contributors view urbanization as a process of aggregation, but this is no more than a rough indicator of the fundamental processes at work, and each discipline explores only the matter confined to its assigned segment of the process. Thus, for example, the city is viewed as a sub-division of localized space; as a complex of markets for land, labor, housing, and goods and services; or as a set of market-social units. From what is offered in this volume, then, one is led to think that sociology cannot find a comprehensive approach to fashioning a general model of urbanization.While three papers come close to defining urbanization as substance and process and are an orderly account of at least the salient features of urbanization through early, transitional, and late phases, urbanization as a process in different areas and cultures is a subject which is treated casually. While the very concept of urbanization implies the recurrence of common features, a set of criteria for avoiding preoccupation with the exotic and inconsequential in different cultures is still needed. We need to study the significance of the fact that peoples of various parts of the world have entered urbanization at different points in industrial, institutional, and administrative technology. Here, organization, the most commonly agreed upon variable in this book, is not a sufficient explanation.In sum, the subject is too broad for close agreement, but the failure of the book to achieve its objective is counterbalanced by the individual quality of the contributions.     

Optimal population and exhaustible resource constraints

A large literature considers the optimal size and growth rate of the human population, trading off the utility value of additional people with the costs of a larger population. In this literature, an important parameter is the social weight placed on population size; a standard result is that a planner with a larger weight on population chooses larger population levels and growth rates. We demonstrate that this result is conditionally overturned when an exhaustible resource constraint is introduced: if the discount rate is small enough, the optimal population today decreases with the welfare weight on population size. That is, a more total-utilitarian social planner could prefer a smaller population today than a more average-utilitarian social planner. We also present a numerical illustration applied to the case of climate change, where we show that under plausible real-world parameter values, our result matters for the direction and magnitude of optimal population policy.     

Women and Caring:

Adopting a symbolic interactionist perspective, this paper examines what the caring experience means to women. Drawing upon data obtained from in-depth interviews with 142 elderly women, the analysis presents an interpretation of caring as a route to self-meaning. It is argued that caring can be a meaningful component of self-identity. Moreover, these data show that the caring role can be a source of self-continuity in later life as it is a role that can last a lifetime. In contrast to the psychological view, which suggests that caring is a naturally feminine activity, it is argued in this paper that women learn to care through a socialization process wherein girls learn from their mothers and others that caring is women's work.     

Who takes care of the children? The quantity-quality model revisited

We study the Becker and Lewis (1973) quantity-quality model of children adding an explicit child care time constraint for parents. Parents can take care of the children themselves or purchase day care. Our results are: (i) If there only is own care, a quantity-quality trade-off, different from that of Becker and Lewis (1973), arises. The income effect on fertility is positive if child quantity is a closer complement than child quality to the consumption of goods. (ii) If, instead, there is a combination of purchased and own care, the effect of income on fertility is ambiguous, even if quantity of children is a normal good in the standard sense. This is the Becker and Lewis (1973) result extended to a situation with a binding child care time constraint. The conclusion is that the Becker and Lewis (1973) result holds as long as at least some child care is purchased. Received: 12 November 1999/Accepted: 1 September 2000     

Causal direction in a model of life satisfaction: The top-down/bottom-up controversy

In social indicator studies, there is some controversy about the causal direction between subjective well-being and domain-specific satisfaction variables; a “top-down” approach is distinguished from a “bottom-up” approach. In this paper, the effects in both directions are estimated in a model with reciprocal relationships as a starting model. It can then be determined which of the two effects for each pair of variables is strongest and which effect can be ignored in the model. This procedure is applied to four different datasets collected in the Netherlands, and to models with different exogenous variables. Comparing the best solutions obtained for all different models and datasets, it is shown that the direction of the effects is not consistent across models and datasets. We have to conclude that it is impossible to obtain a stable solution for the model of subjective well-being in this study. As a consequence, we also have to conclude that the results from other studies cannot be trusted in which the causal order in a model of subjective well-being is tested.     

The rôle of density as a factor in metropolitan growth in the United States of America

U.S. Census data are used to show that, as the density of a metropolis increases there is a concomitant increase in the movement of population to the suburbs. This relationship is closest for small metropolitan areas. As size of the area increases, the closeness of the relationship decreases until it reverses—the largest areas actually show a slight decline in metropolitanization when density goes up. It is concluded that metropolitan expansion has definite bounds set by technological factors which place a limit on the distance that the commuter can reasonably travel daily.

For cities with populations of less than 500,000 there is a correlation of near zero between size of population and density. Such cities therefore maintain a constant density. But for cities with larger populations, size of population and density rise together.

It is concluded that small cities undergo metropolitan expansion with ease. Distances are within technological limits and any increase in population is reflected in an increase in area. But when a certain area is reached, further expansion is curtailed with a resultant increase in internal density. The net result is a stopping or slowing down of the metropolitan process.     

If you look at it long enough..

"If you look at it long enough..." is a user's account--40 years of looking at pornography. It attempts to raise issues around gay studies and academic "detachment." It is, to a great extent, autobiographical. But it also is the voice of a character speaking. A persona. It is a tribute to pornography and pornographers.     

The Relationship Between Islam and Democracy in Turkey: Employing Political Culture as an Indicator

During the last decade the agenda of local and global politics is heavily marked by the encounter of two powerful currents, namely democracy and political Islam. On the one hand Islam as a religion itself is facing a cultural dialectic between a modern and an authentic form, producing a synthesis which is only to be criticized again by a new radical antithesis. Within that framework political Islam is perceived to be a tool for this current antithesis, attacking the states for impiety and materialism. Democracy, on the other hand, is becoming dominant as a criterion of good government, the “only game in town”, with its inherent complexity which reveals itself in each particular context. The two currents are not necessarily irreconcilable, but they produce a number of different effects on each other whenever they meet. The fundamental contention of this article is to demonstrate this relationship within the Turkish setting.     

The Interaction of Values and Validity Assessment: Does a Test's Level of Validity Depend on a Researcher's Values?

This paper presents a somewhat different framework for considering the validity problem than that proposed by Messick (1989). Validity evaluation is considered as a problem of comparing continua in a multidimensional space corresponding to constructs, tests, and applications. This framework is used to consider the position taken by Markus (1998) and to argue that a test's validity is independent of a researcher's values, and that a completion of Messick's synthesis is not needed.     

A note on the measurement of accuracy for subnational demographic estimates

Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), the measure most often used for evaluating subnational demographic estimates, is not always valid. We describe guidelines for determining when MAPE is valid. Applying them to case study data, we find that MAPE understates accuracy because it is unduly influenced by outliers. To overcome this problem, we calculate a transformed MAPE (MAPE-T) using a modified Box-Cox method. Because MAPE-T is not in the same scale as the untransformed absolute percentage errors, we provide a procedure for calculating MAPE-R, a measure in the same scale as the original observations. We argue that MAPE-R is a more appropriate summary measure of average absolute percentage error when the guidelines indicate that MAPE is not valid.     

Income per Natural: Measuring Development for People Rather Than Places

It is easy to learn the average income of a resident of El Salvador or Albania. But there is no systematic source of information on the average income of a Salvadoran or Albanian. We estimate a new statistic: income per natural—the mean annual income of all people born in a given country, regardless of where those people now reside. Income per natural often differs substantially from income per resident, both in its mean and in its distribution. A large part of this difference is caused by movement across borders. Indeed, for people from a number of developing countries, departing their country of birth is one of the most important sources of poverty reduction and material advancement. If economic development is that which raises human well‐being, then crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development; it is a form of economic development.     

Movement toward stability as a fundamental principle of population dynamics

Although convergence to stability is typically a complex and irregular process, the Kullback distance provides a measure that moves consistently to 0 as a population becomes stable. The roots of the Kullback distance are in information theory, but it is a meaningful demographic quantity. It reflects a population's log momentum, or the amount of growth built into a population's nonstable age distribution. The rate at which the Kullback distance moves toward 0 is neither constant nor monotonic. At any point in time, however, it decreases by the covariance between a population's age-specific growth rates and its log momentum. Although the present findings are couched in terms of movement toward stability, they are generally applicable because they relate to the behavior of any population at any instant. It is a fundamental principle of population dynamics that a population is always moving toward the stable population implied by its prevailing fertility and mortality rates, and that the extent of its movement is determined by the covariance between its age-specific growth and its log momentum.