A cautionary tale

Anthony Edwards wrote this cautionary tale for genetics students at Stanford University whom he was teaching in 1965. It has not previously been published. "Its appearance now is due to my having been asked whether a copy from the papers of the Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg might be put on the web by the US National Library of Medicine", he says. "Lederberg was Professor of Genetics at Stanford at the time and I must have given him a copy. More remarkably, he thought it worth keeping." It concerns what is known as Simpson's paradox.     

An Observational Study of Early Heterosexual Interaction at Middle School Dances

In this longitudinal, observational study of heterosexual interaction at middle school dances we examined the degree to which boys' and girls' groups became more gender integrated over time. The results show groups became more integrated over time with the pattern differing by gender. Boys had a relatively low level of contact with girls over the early months with an accelerated increase in the latter months. Girls had an increase in contact with boys over the early months but then a decrease in contact over the latter months. Further, changes in the dynamic covariate, aggression, were associated with changes in integration, and the static covariate, initial physical attractiveness, was predictive of integration trajectories. Physical attractiveness and aggression did relate to gender integration, but counter to our hypotheses, each strategy did not vary by gender, as predicted by sexual selection theory. Results are discussed in terms of different methods in assessing the roles of aggression and physical attractiveness in gender integration.     

Capitalist Coordination of Agriculture: Food Processing Firms and Farming in Central Canada1

Abstract This paper is concerned with the restructuring of petty commodity producers in agriculture and, more specifically, the role of food processing firms in this process. Two mechanisms by which processors secure their agricultural supplies—corporate farming and contract farming—are examined in central Canada. Although fairly widespread, corporate farming by processors is slowly declining and is unlikely to have a major impact on petty producers. By comparison, this study indicates that, in the context of corporate consolidation, the behavior of food processors in granting production contracts to formally independent farm operators is furthering the social differentiation of the latter.     

External legitimacy of unions: Trends in New Zealand

Just 5 years ago, at the pinnacle of their success, New Zealand unions negotiated collective agreements covering over 720,000 employees and were successful in persuading some 603,000 of these employees to join. In May 1991, the Employment Contracts Act, which withdrew totally any state-endorsement or sponsorship of union activity, radically altered their position. Union membership fell by around 40 percent in the four years since the enactment of the Act — from 603,000 to 376,000 members in December 1994; the overall number of unions remaining has declined to around 80; a number of unions have become insolvent and have filed for liquidation; staff retrenchments within unions has been widely reported and, in some cases, this has led to a reduction in services and capacity. Data for 1993 suggest that union decline may have “bottomed out” with unions losing fewer than 20,000 members in that year. However, decline is again apparent in the 1994 data. The removal of external legitimacy has had a significant impact on unionization rates. We review the conditions under which the restoration of legitimacy would bring about a reversal of union decline.     

Governing the Quango: An Auditing and Cheating Model of Quasi-Governmental Authorities

The New Public Management has a paramount implication for thedelegation of authority to implement public policy, namely,that efficient delegations are designed according to the substanceof the task to be performed. In other words, the governmentmust be able to choose the best agent to carry out a particulartask, which implies that the set of agents must not be confinedto actors and departments within the bureaucracy. This flexibilityof form creates the incentives behind the quango, and increasesthe importance of ex ante design for the legislature to avoidmisuse of public funds. It also has the potential to increaseex post enforcement activity by the government. This articleexamines ex ante design from the perspective of auditing, presentinga formal model of the construction of auditing procedures asa response to expectations of the misuse of funds. By creatingrequirements such as the requisite submission of annual plans,reports, and accounts, governments attempt to create a compliance-inducingscheme much like that present in tax enforcement. The theoreticalmodel generates empirical predictions that are statisticallyexamined using data on public bodies in the Netherlands createdbetween 1946 and 1993. Empirical results demonstrate strongsupport for the theory.     

Quantifying Potential Health Impacts of Cadmium in Cigarettes on Smoker Risk of Lung Cancer: A Portfolio-of-Mechanisms Approach

This article introduces an approach to estimating the uncertain potential effects on lung cancer risk of removing a particular constituent, cadmium (Cd), from cigarette smoke, given the useful but incomplete scientific information available about its modes of action. The approach considers normal cell proliferation; DNA repair inhibition in normal cells affected by initiating events; proliferation, promotion, and progression of initiated cells; and death or sparing of initiated and malignant cells as they are further transformed to become fully tumorigenic. Rather than estimating unmeasured model parameters by curve fitting to epidemiological or animal experimental tumor data, we attempt rough estimates of parameters based on their biological interpretations and comparison to corresponding genetic polymorphism data. The resulting parameter estimates are admittedly uncertain and approximate, but they suggest a portfolio approach to estimating impacts of removing Cd that gives usefully robust conclusions. This approach views Cd as creating a portfolio of uncertain health impacts that can be expressed as biologically independent relative risk factors having clear mechanistic interpretations. Because Cd can act through many distinct biological mechanisms, it appears likely (subjective probability greater than 40%) that removing Cd from cigarette smoke would reduce smoker risks of lung cancer by at least 10%, although it is possible (consistent with what is known) that the true effect could be much larger or smaller. Conservative estimates and assumptions made in this calculation suggest that the true impact could be greater for some smokers. This conclusion appears to be robust to many scientific uncertainties about Cd and smoking effects.     

Attributional Retraining Increases Career Decision-Making Self-Efficacy

This study examined whether 60 college students (41 women and 19 men), grouped according to their career locus of control, were differentially affected by a videotaped career intervention. The intervention was an attributional retraining procedure designed to persuade students to attribute low levels of confidence in making career decisions and career-related failures to a lack of effort. Results indicated that the career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE) of students who initially exhibited an external career locus of control significantly increased after the attributional retraining procedure (p < .05), whereas the students who initially exhibited an internal career locus of control demonstrated no significant increase in CDMSE after attributional retraining.     

SYSTEMIC TREATMENT OF SUBSTANCE ABUSE: A GRADUATE COURSE

Today, family therapists should have an understanding of the development and maintenance of substance abusing patterns in families. In this paper, the authors describe a graduate course for teaching therapists about the contributions that have been made to the understanding and treatment of substance abuse by family researchers, theorists and clinicians. Course purpose, student selection, instructional methods and course content are delineated.