THE TYRANNY OF DEAD IDEAS IN TEACHING AND LEARNING: Midwest Sociological Society Presidential Address 2010

Clinging to dead ideas about teaching and learning limits our practice as professors. The resulting tyranny means we fail to educate our students as effectively as we might. This address challenges faculty to reconsider their understanding and habits in three areas: the preparedness of students, the impact of grading policies on learning motivation, and the role of technology in teaching. The good news is that learned behaviors, sociologically informed reflection, and the application of the research in the scholarship of teaching and learning can liberate us and improve the experiences of teachers and learners alike.     

The probability density function of process capability index Cpmk

We derive an explicit and computationally convenient form for the probability density function of the estimator of the process capability index C_pmk ( Pearn, Kotz and Johnson ), when sampling from a normal distribution.     

Family migration and changes in women's earnings: A decomposition analysis

Married women who migrate with their families experience relative earnings losses after migration. In this study, we use data from the 1987 Wave of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explicitly examine the relative importance of three sources of those losses: labor force participation, hours of labor supplied, and wages. We estimate earnings models with Heckman's sample selection method for each of four years following migration. The results and subsequent coefficient decomposition methods show that labor force exit and a reduction of labor supplied contribute the largest share to the earnings penalty attached to migration for married women. The participation effect, although reduced in size, is significant for three years following migration. The wages of employed married women who migrate appear to be unaffected in any year following migration.     

The Role of Openness to Experience and Sexual Identity Formation in LGB Individuals: Implications for Mental Health

Openness to experience has been shown to have a positive impact on mental health in the general population, but there is a dearth of information both about why this is the case and on LGB populations in this area. The present article explores the relationship between openness to experience, LGB identity development, and mental health. The results revealed a full mediation model, where the positive impact of openness to experience on mental health is fully mediated by positive LGB identity development. Limitations and implications are discussed.     

Knowledge of Community Services Amongst The Aged

Knowledge of community services is clearly an important determinant of their use by the frail or disabled elderly. This paper describes the levels of knowledge amongst the aged in Sydney concerning such services, and explores the pathways by which information is disseminated. Awareness of community services was quite limited amongst the sample studied. The data suggest that many of the elderly may be inadequately informed of services which could serve as alternatives to institutional care.     

The Relationship Between Psychological Understanding and Positive Social Behaviors

This research investigates the relationship between psychological understanding and positive social behavior in preschool children. A sample of 67 children were given measures of mental state understanding and emotion understanding. Positive social behavior was measured by classroom observation, teacher report and peer ratings. Both mental state understanding and emotion understanding were positively related to teacher ratings of social skills, behavioral observers’ global ratings of social skills and peer popularity. When language ability was partialled out of these relationships, many of the significant correlations disappeared; however, for variables related to peers’ perceptions, psychological understanding continued to predict unique variance. The results are discussed in terms of the multiple determinacy of positive social behaviors and the potential role of language in these processes.     

“Chocolate city,vanilla suburbs:” Will the trend toward racially separate communities continue?

Almost a decade ago, the Kerner Commission warned that this country was moving toward two societies—one white and one black. Data on residential segregation indicate clear-cut boundaries for these two societies—large cities are becoming black but most suburban areas remain white. Detroit is a case in point and this led the 1976 Detroit Area Study to investigate the sources of racial residential segregation. Our approach was guided by three hypothesized causes of this segregation: (i) the economic status of blacks, (ii) the preference of blacks to be with their own kind, and (iii) the resistance of whites to residential integration. We developed several new measurement techniques and found that most evidence supported the third hypothesis. Blacks in the Detroit area can afford suburban housing and both blacks and whites are quite knowledgable about the housing market. Most black respondents expressed a preference for mixed neighborhoods and are willing to enter such areas. Whites, on the other hand, are reluctant to remain in neighborhoods where blacks are moving in and will not buy homes in already integrated areas. This last result has been overlooked by traditional measures of white attitudes toward residential integration but emerges clearly with the new measure.     

Necropolitics, narcopolitics, and femicide: gendered violence on the Mexico-U.S. border

In 1993, a group of women shocked Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with the news that dozens of girls and women had been murdered and dumped, like garbage, around the city during the year. As the numbers of murders grew over the years, and as the police forces proved unwilling and unable to find the perpetrators, the protestors became activists. They called the violence and its surrounding impunity "femicide," and they demanded that the Mexican government, at the local, state, and federal levels, stop the violence and capture the perpetrators. Nearly two decades later, the city's infamy as a place of femicide is giving way to another terrible reputation as a place of unprecedented drug violence. Since 2006, more than six thousand people have died in the city, as have more than twenty-eight thousand across the country, in relation to the violence associated with the restructuring of the cartels that control the production and distribution of illegal drugs. In response to the public outcry against the violence, the Mexican government has deployed thousands of troops to Ciudad Juárez as part of a military strategy to secure the state against the cartels. In this essay, I argue that the politics over the meaning of the drug-related murders and femicide must be understood in relation to gendered violence and its use as a tool for securing the state. To that end, I examine the wars over the interpretation of death in northern Mexico through a feminist application of the concept of necropolitics as elaborated by the postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. I examine how the wars over the political meaning of death in relation both to femicide and to the events called "drug violence" unfold through a gendering of space, of violence, and of subjectivity. My objective is twofold: first, to demonstrate how the antifemicide movement illustrates the stakes for a democratic Mexican state and its citizens in a context where governing elites argue that the violence devastating Ciudad Juárez is a positive outcome of the government's war against organized crime; and second, to show how a politics of gender is central to this kind of necropolitics.     

Debunking misconceptions about weight loss surgery

The recent and steady rise in the U.S. obesity index has resulted in a consumer-driven market for more effective treatment interventions for the morbidly obese population. Given the relatively poor outcomes associated with traditional approaches for treating obesity, such as diet programs, behavioral modification, and pharmacotherapy, weight loss surgical procedures represent a safe and effective option for those who meet selection criteria. To provide optimal treatment and consumer education, psychiatric nurses need to be well informed about the psychological and physiological aspects of these surgical procedures. This article clarifies six common misconceptions related to weight loss surgery.