Microarrays as a tool to investigate the biology of aging: a retrospective and a look to the future

The use of microarrays as a tool to investigate fundamental biological questions has become ubiquitous over the past several years. Microarrays are becoming as common as the polymerase chain reaction or any of the other tools in the molecular biologist's armory. Unlike experiments involving other tools, however, the design and analysis of microarray experiments present some unique problems to molecular biologists, problems with which statisticians have long been familiar. In this overview of microarrays and aging-related research, we will review selected highlights of microarray studies that have been carried out to study aging to date, as well as discuss some of the potential problems that routinely arise during these types of experiments, especially in the context of aging.     

Customer First and Customer Sexual Harassment: Some Evidence from the Taiwan Life Insurance Industry

Empirical research suggests that customer sexual harassment is a far more common problem than employee to employee harassment for female salespeople. However, to date, there has been relatively little research conducted on the problem of customer sexual harassment. Insurance salespeople sometimes need to meet customers outside the company, and customer sexual harassment problems may occur. Hence, by using Taiwan's life insurance industry as an example, this study explores three research questions: (1) When the idea of ‘customer first’ is fully recognized by insurance salespeople, does it make the salespeople more tolerant of customer sexual harassment problems? (2) When the idea of customer first is supported by the insurance company, will insurance salespeople expose customer sexual harassment problems? (3) Will insurance salespeople tend to be more tolerant of quid pro quo sexual harassment? A total of 223 full‐time and self‐employed insurance salespeople participated in and completed this study survey. The results showed that the company's attitude may significantly affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer sexual harassment, but the personal belief in ‘customer first’ may not affect the respondents' intention to expose the customer misconduct. Since the three research questions have been less studied in the literature, and customer sexual harassment problems could have serious effects on salespeople, we think the results of this empirical study may have some implications for researchers and practitioners.     

The prevalence of problem and pathological gambling: A critical analysis

Prevalence of pathological gambling refers to the percentage of cases of pathological gambling occurring in the community at a given time. Prevalence studies conducted in different principalities throughout the world are reviewed, and it is found that none of them conforms to this definition of prevalence. The major error in all but the most recent surveys conducted is identified as the use of questions which ask whether gambling-related problems have ever occurred rather than whether they are currently occurring. This error will lead to an over-estimation of the prevalence of pathological gambling in society. The second major error identified in nearly all studies involves the accuracy of the screens being used to assess whether or not an individual is a pathological gambler. Concerns about the efficiency of the South Oaks Gambling Screen have not yet been satisfactorily resolved. None-the-less, the widespread use of the South Oaks Gambling Screen has made a valuable contribution to international comparisons of prevalence studies. Future work that explores the emerging relationship between levels of personal expenditure on gambling, types of gambling product and gambling-related problems are recommended.     

Archiving cultures

This paper argues that to understand the legitimacy of a culture we need to investigate its relation to the archive, the site for the accumulation of records. Archive reason is a kind of reason which is concerned with detail, it constantly directs us away from the big generalization, down into the particularity and singularity of the event. Increasingly the focus has shifted from archiving the lives of the good and the great down to the detail of mundane everyday life. One implication here is that rather than see the archive as a specific place in which we deposit records, documents, photographs, film, video and all the minutiae on which culture is inscribed, should we not seek to extend the walls of the archive to place it around the everyday, the world? If everything can potentially be of significance shouldn't part of the archive fever be to record and document everything, as it could one day be useful? The problem then becomes, not what to put into the archive, but what one dare leave out. Some of the implications of these questions were considered by Georg Simmel, in his argument that there has been a build up and overload in the production and circulation of objective culture. This is now beyond our subjective capacity to assimilate and order, given the finite limits of the human life course we all face. It is something which confronts the individual with irresolvable dilemmas over selectivity, with each particular choice amounting to a wager which inevitably closes off others. Related questions about the difficulties of handling cultural completeness, were also addressed by Jorge Luis Borges in his discussion of the Library of Babel and the Aleph. Yet both could hardly have anticipated the full implications of the electronic archive: the development of new technologies for storing, searching and communicating information through the Internet with its databases and hypertext links. The electronic archive offers new possibilities for speed, mobility and completeness of access to cultures which have become digitalized, which raise fundamental questions about ownership, intellectual property rights, censorship and democratic access. The implications for culture are clear: the new electronic archives will not only change the form in which culture is produced and recorded, but the wider conditions under which it is enacted and lived as well.     

Whistleblowers: an essential resource for the sustainable prevention of risks in sociotechnical systems

Our world of industry and technology has, over the years, has seen undeniable successes in terms of safety and reliability. But major catastrophes and dramatic accidents continue, even today, to cause major human and material losses and to threaten the environment with pollution on a massive scale. Could these disasters and these accidents have been foreseen and avoided? Would it have been possible to anticipate their occurrence by detecting signals of potential hazards? It is unsettling to notice, through retrospective analysis of such events, that warnings had been issued long before the catastrophe or accident took place. This raises several questions, which we will attempt to address in this paper. Why are whistleblowers often not listened to, threatened, or simply ignored? Why are their warnings viewed as "bad omens" instead of essential resources to ensure safety? Do whistleblowers stand idly by, or do they implement individual and collective strategies to make themselves heard? Which managerial and organizational conditions are conducive to developing empowerment in whistleblowers? Based on four case studies, we attempt to address these questions, and offer a first level of analysis and explanation by proposing and defining two new concepts: operative resilience and strategic resilience.     

Troubling Times for British Social Work Education?

Although the creation of a new framework for qualifying education in social work combined with the introduction of a new framework for post qualifying education appears to have clarified and protected the future of social work in Britain, there remain a number of problems which these developments have not resolved. Indeed, as I will argue, their implementation has created a set of new questions that could derail the best intentions for the development of British social work. The purpose of this paper is to identify the scope of these problems, which potentially affect the provision both of qualifying and post qualifying education. It is suggested that while these issues may particularly impact upon social work education in England, it is probable that they will also present a problem for other countries in the United Kingdom.     

Introduction: a symposium on social justice

In recent years South African studies have been radically transformed by a new school of work. The essential thrust of this new Marxist school has been to reconceptualise, retheorise and reanalyse the relationship between the economic system and the racial system in South Africa. The traditional liberal school has failed to see the ways and the extent to which important forms of racial domination have actually been integral and functional components of South African capitalism. The Marxist school must not let its strengths in political economy numb it from a sensitivity to cultural, ideological and psychological factors that are not always reducable to, or subsumable within, questions of political economy.     

Expanding uses of building information modeling in life-cycle construction projects

BIM is targeted at providing information about the entire building and a complete set of design documents and data stored in an integrated database. In this paper, we study the use of BIM in two life-cycle construction projects in Kuopio, Finland during 2011. The analysis of uses of BIM and their main problems will constitute a foundation for an intervention. We will focus on the following questions: (1) How different partners use the composite BIM model? (2) What are the major contradictions or problems in the BIM use? The preliminary findings reported in this study show that BIM has been adopted quite generally to design use but the old ways of collaboration seem to prevail, especially between designers and between designers and building sites. BIM has provided new means and demands for collaboration but expansive uses of BIM for providing new interactive processes across professional fields have not much come true.     

Race and the Race for the White House: On Social Research in the Age of Trump

As it became clear that Donald Trump had a real base of political support, even as analysts consistently underestimated his electoral prospects, they grew increasingly fascinated with the question of who was supporting him (and why). However, researchers have also tended to hold strong negative opinions about Trump, and have approached research with uncharitable priors about the kind of person who would support him and what they would be motivated by. This essay presents a series of case studies showing how analyses of the roles of race and racism in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election seem to have been systematically distorted as a result. However, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, prejudicial study design, and failure to address confounds are not limited to questions about race (a similar essay could have been done on the alleged role of sexism/ misogyny in the 2016 cycle, for instance). And while Trump does seem to generate particularly powerful antipathy from researchers – perhaps exacerbating negative tendencies – ideologically-driven errors likely permeate a good deal of social research. Presented evidence suggests that research with strong adversarial or advocacy orientations may be most susceptible to systemic distortion. Activist scholars and their causes may also be among those most adversely impacted by the resultant erosion of research reliability and credibility. Ultimately, however, these are problems which all social scientists must remain vigilant against, and which we all have a stake in working to address.     

The Impact of Question and Respondent Characteristics on Comprehension and Mapping Difficulties

Behavior coding is one technique researchers use to detect problemsin survey questions, but it has been primarily explored as apractical tool rather than a source of insight into the theoreticalunderstanding of the cognitive processes by which respondentsanswer survey questions. The latter is the focus of the currentinvestigation. Using data from a large study in which face-to-faceinterviews were taped and extensive behavior coding was done,we tested whether sets of respondent behavior codes could beused to distinguish respondent difficulties with comprehensionof the question from difficulties associated with mapping ajudgment onto the response format provided, and whether characteristicsof the survey questions and respondents could be used to predictwhen and for whom such difficulties would occur. Sets of behaviorcodes were identified that reflected comprehension and mappingdifficulties, and these two types of difficulties were associatedwith different question and respondent characteristics. Thisevidence suggests that behavior coding shows promise as a toolfor researchers studying the cognitive processes involved inanswering survey questions.     

Brief Report: Attitudes About Responding to Survey Questions Concerning Childhood Sexual Abuse by Hispanic Female College Students

In no studies have research participants been asked how they feel about answering questions concerning childhood sexual abuse. We have performed searches from two different search engines again and have found nothing published which specifically addresses this question in the way we have. A questionnaire about childhood sexual abuse was administered to a sample of Mexican-American female college students. Over 32% reported positive histories of childhood sexual abuse before age 18. These subjects were more uncomfortable (37%) than those who did not experience childhood sexual abuse when answering questions about childhood sexual abuse (12%; p < 0.00001), but they were not more uncomfortable in answering questions about alcohol or drug use. Women who were sexually abused in childhood also readily disclosed childhood sexual abuse histories despite revealing discomfort about being asked questions concerning childhood sexual abuse. Our findings support concerns by researchers that childhood sexual abuse is neglected because researchers have an unwarranted perception about how fragile sexually abused subjects are as subjects.     

Before,during and after the cultural turn: a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey

This article, which is part of a broader attempt to construct a ‘Baedeker’ to IR's cultural journey, contributes to the contested debated on the (ir)relevance of cultural diversity to the study of international relations by providing a picture of where we come from, of where we are now situated and of some of the suggestions as to where we should be going in order not to get lost in this almost uncharted landscape. The first main section discusses why questions pertaining to cultural diversity traditionally have held a surprisingly marginal position within IR and shows how IR before the Cultural Turn was more ‘culture-blind’ than ‘cultureblank’. The second main section turns attention to IR during the Cultural Turn and examines how two influential bids for a culturalist alternative have been better at posing good questions than providing attractive answers, placing IR's cultural journey in a ‘blind-blinded stalemate’. Against this background, the last main section asks where the cultural journey should head after the Cultural Turn and identifies and evaluates four different suggestions for ‘routes’ to proceed by. While they may be at variance when it comes to the specific direction suggested, they all represent attempts to set a course between the culture-blind Scylla and the culture-blinded Charybdis, and indicate in this way that it would be premature to let the problems associated with the Cultural Turn lead to an expulsion of questions relating to cultural diversity from the IR agenda.     

Relational sociology,pragmatism, transactions and social fields

Starting from the idea that relational sociology has been founded on various and incompatible social ontologies, I argue that it is at risk of losing its raison d'être if we do not answer two fundamental practical and ontological questions: (1) Why do we need relational sociology? and (2) What do we study in relational sociology? In this respect, I propose a deep, transactional sociology partly and freely inspired by the work of J. Dewey which clearly detaches relational sociology from social determinism and co-determinism.     

Androgyny and the Supreme Court

Since 1971 the Supreme Court has decided a large number of cases presenting questions of gender-based discrimination and other issues of interest to feminists. While the cases have been decided on various constitutional and statutory grounds, it is argued that the Court, on the whole, has been guided by the principle of androgyny-defined here as the absolute equality of the sexes as concerns expectations, opportunities, choices, and treatment in private and public life. Cases which appear to be contradictory prove, upon closer examination, not to be so exceptional as to disprove the thesis of this paper.     

Old Chicago and new France

It is only when theories are located in history, when we view the demands for verification in highly particular contexts of a historical kind that we are freed from either dogmatism or capitulation to scepticism (MacIntyre 1977: 471). The world has problems; the university has disciplines whose boundary lines inhibit our abilities to address those problems. The boundaries acquire such seeming validity that it becomes necessary to defend problem-oriented research as “interdisciplinary,” when the real point is to examine social reality, rather than defer to academic turf (and scientistic scruples). Faced with the contemporary range of global problems, it is helpful to re-assess and re-construct our history. The artificiality of the disciplinary lineages within the U.S. has diminished Old Chicago. Yet the problems which it addressed have remained pertinent not only to the U.S., and not only to France, but throughout the world. Because the French disciplinary lines have been other than ours, and their nation has been confronting a set of social problems akin to those faced by the Chicagoans, some of their social scientists have sought to draw upon that heritage. The abstract and allusive discourses of a Derrida or Lacan tend to distract observers from the engaged character of the best French intellectual discourse. Park was engaged in the best sense, but he had observed too many campaigns of urban reform which simply clothed the attempt of a culturally dominant group to impose its ethos upon a socially subordinated populace. Underlying Park’s disparagement of “do-good” campaigns and “evangelical sociology” was a moral insistence on respecting the varieties of social life. 19 This is manifest in his life trajectory and in his role as teacher. To me he is cast in the heroic figure of Bernard Rieux in Camus’ The Plague. After undergraduate studies (B.S., 1942) at University of Chicago, Murray L. Wax returned there to teach and undertake doctoral studies (Ph.D., 1959)- He has taught at several universities and is now emeritus Professor, Washington University, St. Louis. The author wishes to express his gratitude for their advice and encouragement to Joan Cassell, Jean-Michel Chapoulie, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Paule Verdet.     

For a sociological philosophy

Conclusion Sociology, then, should prove to be relevant to a host of issues within the traditional purview of philosophy: Epistemology and philosophy of science, of course; the issue of solipsism and other minds (as Habermas has already seen, invoking Mead); ontological issues of the mind/body relation, of person/self/identity (on which there is a wealth of untapped materials, from Goffman, Mead, and in the lineage of Durkheim and Mauss now being rediscovered); and more deeply the questions of materialism/idealism, realism and anti-realism. All questions in the philosophy of ethics, ranging from conceptual analysis to critical and constructive ethics, make sense realistically only if handled with a sociological understanding of where moral ideals and feelings emerge from. The extent of possible success of sociological explanations is a crucial point for any discussion of determinism and indeterminism, and relatedly for the notion of will, free or otherwise. (Obviously the sociology of the self is implicated in the free-will issue as well.) The micro/ macro issue is a wonderful ground on which to consider questions of universals and particulars, of the different orders of causality, of reification and reductionism.Though it may seem presumptious to say so, sociology has implications right across the board in philosophy, even in its stronghold of metaphysics: space and time, existence and non-existence, the Ideal and the immediacy of lived experience are all parts of our current sociological controversies. As yet we have not been very bold in bringing such implications of sociology to attention. But there is recent work such as that of Preston on the sociology of Zen practice, which is relevant to a philosophy of ontology at its deepest levels. Furthermore, I feel optimistic about sociology's capacity to contribute to these issues philosophically, that is to say within the problem-space of philosophy itself.Tools like Goffmanian frame analysis, with a nested and grounded relation among levels, should cast light even on tricky issues such as infinities and logical indeterminacies, ontological foundations and unfoundedness. After all, if reality is socially constructed, why shouldn't our professional understanding of society reveal something central about the universe? As of now, these implications remain only potential. But to buttress my claim for the relevance of sociology in just one area, epistemology and the reflexive issues that arise within it, let me close with a brief reflection on what the sociology of science implies about the nature of philosophy itself. We can hardly expect that sociology will give a final and definitive answer to philosophy's problems. I say that, not because of any pessimism about our intellectual tools, but because of the very nature of intellectual communities. Intellectuals make careers by gaining fame for their original contributions; there must be problems to solve if there is to be something to contribute. This of course is true of all areas of science and scholarship. But whereas the empirical disciplines can go on to create new specialties and research areas, philosophers do not have the same way out of the professional problem posed by a field's own past success.Philosophy has handled this problem in a deeper way. For philosophers have taken as their turf precisely those problems that are themselves inherently deep and, in some sense, intractable. Philosophers have traditionally been concerned with the understanding of knowledge itself, with the most fundamental categories of existence and experience, with the bases of value. These are the boundary problems of all the other fields of intellectual inquiry, and of human life itself. They are intractable, not because significant things cannot be said about them, but because they are located at the open edges of everything; they reveal themselves full of reflexivities, which constantly reemerge at a new level whenever a conceptual solution is proposed, much as in Gödel's incompleteness theorem - and in the most highly transformed level of Goffmanian frames.It is for this reason that the history of philosophy is full of complaints that previous philosophers have come to no agreement, along with new beginnings that attempt to finish its business at last. There is a striking repetitiveness to these claims: we hear them from Descartes, and again from Kant, from the Logical Positivists, from Wittgenstein, in their different ways; there is more than an echo of this intellectual strategy in today's extremists, such as Rorty and Derrida, who again are abolishing philosophy. But philosophy has not been abolished; each previous claim to bring the uselessly warring sects of the past into a final resolution has failed to stifle philosophy's perennial inquiries. Just as strikingly, each such effort at ending philosophy has given rise to a period of renewed philosophical creativity.I think this is not an accident. It is because the structure of the intellectual field in general (across the disciplines, not only philosophy) is being restructured at a particular historical time that figures like Descartes, Kant, and others appear; the crisis of intellectual restructuring is what gives them the intellectual capital (and the creative energy) to reconceptualize the fundamental boundary problems in a new way. In this sense, philosophy is indeed foundational; it concerns itself with the ultimate questions, the borderlines of all inquiry and all of life. But there is another sense of foundational, the claim that philosophy is the discipline necessary for putting all other knowledge upon a secure foundation. This is certainly not true in a practical and historical sense; the other disciplines have gone ahead quite well without guidance from philosophy. Kant's claim to provide a secure foundation for the physical sciences against Hume's scepticism was really a rhetorical ploy, a way of building up the importance of what philosophy is doing; it really made no difference to the growth of science in Hume's day, or in Kant's, just what the philosophers said about the foundations of their knowledge. The same is true for all such claims about the significance of foundational issues.But this is not to dismiss the importance of what philosophers are doing. Theirs is the great intellectual adventure into the edges of things. The rest of the disciplines, the rest of what we consider to be knowledge, nestled in a pragmatic acceptance of whatever seems to work for us as intellectual practitioners, do not rest upon philosophy. The structural relation among intellectual fields is more the other way around, as far as the dynamics of intellectual change are concerned. But philosophy has nevertheless positioned itself in the intellectual space where the deepest explorations are launched. This will continue to be so, even as sociology adds its own impetus to the philosophical project.

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Ontological Politics. A Word and Some Questions

This is a chapter that asks questions about where we are with politics now that actor network theory and its semiotic relatives have reshaped ontology . They have reshaped it by underlining that the reality we live with is one performed in a variety of practices. The radical consequence of this is that reality itself is multiple. An implication of this might be that there are options between the various versions of an object: which one to perform? But if this were the case then we would need to ask where such options might be situated and what was at stake when a decision between alternative performances was made. We would also need to ask to what extent are there options between different versions of reality if these are not exclusive, but, if they clash in some places, depend on each other elsewhere. The notion of choice also presupposes an actor who actively chooses, while potential actors may be inextricably linked up with how they are enacted . These various questions are not answered, but illustrated with the example of anaemia, a common deviance that comes in (at least) clinical, statistical and pathophysiological forms.     

Does Studying with the Local Students Effect Psycological Symptoms in Refugee Adolescents? A Controlled Study

Integration of refugees into the education system at the resettlement country is a significant issue. In this study, we investigated how refugee students are affected in terms of psychological symptoms by studying in the same classroom with their local peers. This cross-sectional study was conducted during the school year in Mardin, Turkey. Participants consisted of 105 Syrian refugee adolescents and 66 Turkish adolescents attending a secondary school. The participants completed the socio-demographic data form, war-related traumatic experiences questions, and the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). Syrian refugees had lived for an average of 5 years in Turkey. Number of adolescents who have more than one traumatic experience was 50 (47.6%). As quantified by the SDQ, it has been found that children who experience more than one traumatic event have more psychological problems than those who experienced only one traumatic event in all areas except the social problems subscale. Emotional Problems Subscale, Peer Problems Subscale and Total SDQ scores have shown statistically significant differences according to classroom typology. Experiencing a traumatic moment in war increased the psychiatric symptoms of adolescents as quantified by the SDQ. If refugee children study in the same classes as non-refugee children, their psychiatric symptoms were less frequent.

     

The Decision to Divorce

The decision to terminate an unhappy marriage through obtaining a divorce is almost never an easy decision for either spouse. It is usually reached only after other options and alternatives have been considered and then rejected as non-viable solutions to the problems that have developed between the spouses. As Bernard (1970: 3) has noted, despite the increasing frequency of its occurence, "It is not likely that divorce will ever become matterof- fact, nor that it will ever become painless or casual or nonchalant . . . It will probably always be an extremely painful experience for most people, as breaking close ties always is, even outside marriage." From this perspective, our coming to terms with divorce means only that we recognize its inevitability in many cases and try to mitigate some of the worst of its consequences. In this paper we review the process through which a sample of 500 respondents reached the decision to obtain a divorce. Specifically, major problems that existed in their relationship that prompted them to finally seek a legal termination of their union will be considered. In addition, we will examine barriers that had to be overcome before that decision was finally reached as well as major sources of social support that encouraged the decision. We will begin with a brief theoretical review of the major orientations that have been developed in the literature to account for the process through which the individual ultimately decides to seek a divorce.