Whose sexuality is it anyway? Women’s experiences of viewing lesbians on screen

While critical analyses of media representations of lesbians continue to grow, less attention is paid to audience responses to those representations. This paper explores women’s experiences of viewing lesbians on screen, analysing qualitative data from focus groups with audiences of a women-only film season screened in a UK cinema: “Lesbians on Screen: How Far Have We Come?” We consider how the internalisation of the “male gaze” complicates some women’s viewing of lesbian characters and how women attempt to challenge and resist that gaze through their viewing practices and strategies. We discuss audience creativity in re-signifying representations of women, as well as other strategies including choosing to view privately or in women-only spaces. These acts of resistance disrupt the dominance of the male gaze, patriarchal cinema spaces, and reception of images on screen. By examining women’s reflections on the experience of being in a women-only audience, a unique cinema space that “felt free” of conventional constraints of heteronormativity and patriarchy, this paper also examines how the gendered cinema space affects audience experiences.     

Resolving a Multi-Million Dollar Contract Dispute With a Latin Square

The City of New York negotiated a dispute over the performance of new garbage trucks purchased from a vehicle manufacturer. The dispute concerned the fulfillment of a specification in the purchase contract that the trucks load a minimum full-load of 12.5 tons of household refuse. On behalf of the City, but in cooperation with the manufacturer, the City's Department of Sanitation and consulting statisticians tested fulfillment of the contract specification, employing a Latin Square design for routing trucks. We present the classical analysis using a linear model and analysis of variance. We also show how fixed, mixed, and random effect models are useful in analyzing the results of the test. Finally, we take a Bayesian perspective to demonstrate how the information from the data overcomes the difference between the prior densities of the city and the manufacturer for the load capacities of the trucks to result in much closer posterior densities. This procedure might prove useful in similar negotiations. Supplementary material including the data and R code for computations in the article are available online.     

Million Dollar Maybe? The Effect of Female Presence in Movies on Box Office Returns

This study examines processes that contribute to the underrepresentation of women in film by linking the depiction of gender in film to its impact on domestic box office returns. Drawing on a sample of widely distributed movies from 2000 to 2009 (n = 974), we test whether the box office under‐performance of films with an independent female presence results primarily from “downstream” public rejection or from an gendered “upstream” division of resources that provides greater studio support to movies about men. Using a series of multivariate regression analyses and controlling for genre, critical appraisal, arthouse label, being a sequel, and including a popular star, films with a female presence earn less at the box office. This effect, however, appears to be largely the consequence of movies that feature women having smaller production budgets, suggesting that the underrepresentation of women in film stems from “upstream” routines of film industry gatekeepers, not a lesser interest in stories about women in the minds of the public.     

The Human Right to Safe Exit: University Evacuation Policy and Mobility Impairment

The case of Gustafson v. Regents of the University of California suggests that students with mobility impairments may face great peril when needing to evacuate multi-level university buildings, yet this problem is rarely considered in the research literature. To address this gap, the extent of this problem was assessed in a sample of 210 universities that house MSW programs. Documents representing university evacuation policy were obtained from university websites and analyzed with respect to three domains of disability rights. Results indicate that the failure to adequately respect these rights was widespread within the sample. To support the advocacy efforts of those seeking to change university policy, model language was extracted from university documents and presented as a goal.     

Effects of Person‐ and Process‐focused Feedback on Prosocial Behavior in Middle Childhood

The effects of person‐ and process‐focused feedback, parental lay theories, and prosocial self‐concept on children's prosocial behavior were investigated with 143 9‐ and 10‐year‐old children who participated in a single session. Parents reported entity (person‐focused) and incremental (process‐focused) beliefs related to prosocial behavior. Children completed measures of prosocial self‐concept, then participated in a virtual online chat with child actors who asked for help with service projects. After completing the chat, children could assist with the service projects. In the first cohort, children were randomly assigned to receive person‐focused, process‐focused, or control feedback about sympathy. In the second cohort, with newly recruited families, children received no feedback. When given process‐focused feedback, children spent less time helping and worked on fewer service projects. When given no feedback, children spent less time helping when parents held incremental (process‐focused) beliefs. Children with higher prosocial self‐concept who received no feedback worked on more service projects.     

Joining forces,fortunes, and futures: Restructuring and adaptation in nonprofit hospice organizations

Nonprofit organizations operate in tumultuous times characterized by constrained funding, increased competition, and greater demand for social services. Existing bases of intangible and tangible assets often are insufficient to fulfill service missions. These organizations appear to be responding by joining forces and restructuring to better accommodate diminished resources. Relatively little is known about the reorganization strategies being employed. The study described in this chapter examined the phenomenon of organizational restructuring among nonprofit hospice organizations. In particular, it identified the factors that propel nonprofits to pursue restructuring as a strategic solution, the elements that impede such restructuring efforts, and how organizations that pursue and implement restructuring differ from those that do not. The study found that an organization's relative placement along a continuum of political and economic strength is determinative in the outcome of its restructuring efforts. Those that take affirmative steps operate from a position of economic strength and exhibit independence in governance and decision making; those that do not are impeded by internal political factors.     

Pathways to Independent Living in Early Adulthood: Marriage,Semiautonomy, and Premarital Residential Independence

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 are used to examine factors influencing young adults' departure from the parental home and the initial pathways taken, including leaving home for marriage, residential semi-autonomy (Semi), and premarital residential independence (PRI). Parents' education and continuing in school decrease the likelihood of leaving home via marriage and increase the likelihood of leaving home via Semi or PRI. All other factors considered affect all pathways out of the parental home in the same direction, but in differing magnitudes. The predominant influences on PRI are indicators of modern family values, whereas the predominant influences on leaving home for marriage are measures of resources, both those of the parents and those of the young adults.     

Insurance supply with capacity constraints and endogenous insolvency risk

Negative shocks to industry capital and significant capital adjustment costs have been offered as an explanation of periodic “crises” in the property-liability insurance market. According to these capacity constraint models, in which post-shock production must meet a solvency constraint, increases in price can cause some or perhaps all of the cost of a negative shock to capital to be shifted to policyholders. This article develops a model of insurance supply with capacity constraints and endogenous insolvency risk that incorporates limited liability and potential loss of insurer intangible capital. If industry demand is inelastic with respect to price and capital, the model predicts that price will increase following a negative shock to capital, but by less than the amount needed to fully offset the shock. Equity value and the expected recovery by policyholders for post-shock production are predicted to decline. Elastic demand mitigates shock-induced price increases.     

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FAMILY THERAPY IN THE TREATMENT OF ADOLESCENTS WITH CONDUCT DISORDERS AND DELINQUENCY

A literature review was conducted on recent studies using family therapy approaches to the treatment of conduct disorders in adolescents. Results from studies conducted since the Shadish et al. (1993) meta-analysis on the effects of family and marital therapies are included. Barriers to effective treatment are identified, costs of care are discussed, and a variety of systems of care in which family interventions are embedded are reviewed.     

Benchmark Dose Risk Assessment for Formaldehyde Using Airflow Modeling and a Single-Compartment, DNA-Protein Cross-Link Dosimetry Model to Estimate Human Equivalent Doses

Formaldehyde induced squamous-cell carcinomas in the nasal passages of F344 rats in two inhalation bioassays at exposure levels of 6 ppm and above. Increases in rates of cell proliferation were measured by T. M. Monticello and colleagues at exposure levels of 0.7 ppm and above in the same tissues from which tumors arose. A risk assessment for formaldehyde was conducted at the CIIT Centers for Health Research, in collaboration with investigators from Toxicological Excellence in Risk Assessment (TERA) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) in 1999. Two methods for dose-response assessment were used: a full biologically based modeling approach and a statistically oriented analysis by benchmark dose (BMD) method. This article presents the later approach, the purpose of which is to combine BMD and pharmacokinetic modeling to estimate human cancer risks from formaldehyde exposure. BMD analysis was used to identify points of departure (exposure levels) for low-dose extrapolation in rats for both tumor and the cell proliferation endpoints. The benchmark concentrations for induced cell proliferation were lower than for tumors. These concentrations were extrapolated to humans using two mechanistic models. One model used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) alone to determine rates of delivery of inhaled formaldehyde to the nasal lining. The second model combined the CFD method with a pharmacokinetic model to predict tissue dose with formaldehyde-induced DNA-protein cross-links (DPX) as a dose metric. Both extrapolation methods gave similar results, and the predicted cancer risk in humans at low exposure levels was found to be similar to that from a risk assessment conducted by the U.S. EPA in 1991. Use of the mechanistically based extrapolation models lends greater certainty to these risk estimates than previous approaches and also identifies the uncertainty in the measured dose-response relationship for cell proliferation at low exposure levels, the dose-response relationship for DPX in monkeys, and the choice between linear and nonlinear methods of extrapolation as key remaining sources of uncertainty.