Workshop to Orient Students to Career Planning Services

This article describes a 1-hour workshop designed to orient students to a career resource center and assist them with career decision making.     

Additive and Multiplicative Models and Multistage Carcinogenesis Theory

In light of the Armitage-Doll multistage carcinogenesis theory, this paper examines the assumption that an additive relative risk relationship is indicative of two carcinogens that affect the same stage in the cancer process. We present formulas to compute excess cancer risks for a variety of patterns for limited exposure durations to two carcinogens that affect the first and penultimate stages; and using an index of synergy proposed by Thomas (1982), we find a number of these patterns to produce additive, or nearly additive, relative risk relationships. The consistent feature of these patterns is that the two exposure periods are of short duration and occur close together.     

Modelling multibrand consumption

In this article a model for the multibrand consumption of fast moving non-durable consumer goods is presented. The model is derived by the mixing of a multinomial distribution (representing the brand consumption probabilities of an individual household) with the continuous multivariate Beta (Dirichlet) distribution (which allows for differences between households). The core of the analysis involves the use of complete bivariate tables. The model is shown to provide an adequate representation of a set of consumption data and to satisfactorily estimate the various brand market shares.     

Topological aggregation of preferences: the case of a continuum of agents

 This paper studies the topological approach to social choice theory initiated by G. Chichilnisky (1980), extending it to the case of a continuum of agents. The social choice rules are continuous anonymous maps defined on preference spaces which respect unanimity. We establish that a social choice rule exists for a continuum of agents if and only if the space of preferences is contractible. We provide also a topological characterization of such rules as generalized means or mathematical expectations of individual preferences. Received: 30 November 1994/Accepted: 22 April 1996     

Interest Organizations,Information, and Policy Innovation in the U.S. Congress1 2

Interest organizations are hypothesized to strongly affect public policy, but the evidence that they do so is mixed. This article argues that one reason for the disparity is a gap between theory and research: theory suggests that information provided by interest organizations should strongly influence elected officials, but there is no systematic research on its impact. We examine a potentially important source of information for members of the U.S. Congress—testimony at committee hearings—to ascertain if it affects the enactment of policy proposals. The data, based on content analysis of almost 1,000 testimonies on a stratified random sample of policy proposals, describe who testifies, their arguments, and the evidence they provide. Supporters of a proposal emphasize the importance of the problem being addressed, while opponents claim the proposed policy will be ineffective and try to reframe the debate. Information—particularly information regarding policy effectiveness—does affect the likelihood that a policy proposal will be enacted.     

Introduction of a child sexual abuse policy in a health district

SUMMARY. Three one day workshops for 40 senior clinical staff were held to introduce a new Operational Policy on Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) and to provide them with a teaching package to enable them to run ‘cascade’ teaching sessions for other staff and colleagues. Part I of this paper describes an evaluation of the workshop; Part II describes an evaluation of the cascade The workshop evaluation showed that knowledge about CSA and policy issues was already good, but although that knowledge did improve after the workshop, attitudes about sexual behaviour were not changed by the workshop. Evaluation of the cascade also showed an increase in knowledge after the dissemination exercise