Introduction: “There Is a Person Here”: An Interview with Judith Butler

In this interview, the coeditors, along with other contributors, ask Judith Butler a variety of questions regarding queer theory, gender identities, scientific and legal discourse, bodily abjection, race and class positioning, and political organizing. This range of subject matter suggests not only the breadth of Butler's work, but also its applicability to any number of people, whose relation to theory ranges from highly politicized to politically indifferent. The interview demonstrates the responsiveness of Butler's work to cultural translation and political action.     

The Politics of Hope and Despair: The Effect of Presidential Election Outcomes on Suicide Rates*

Objectives. This article examines the effect of election outcomes on suicide rates by combining the theory of social integration developed by Durkheim with the models of rational choice used in economics. Methods. Theory predicts that states with a greater percentage of residents who supported the losing candidate would tend to exhibit a relative increase in suicide rates. However, being around others who also supported the losing candidate may indicate a greater degree of social integration at the local level, thereby lowering relative suicide rates. We therefore use fixed‐effects regression of state suicide rates from 1981 to 2005 on state election outcomes during presidential elections to determine which effect is stronger. Results. We find that the local effect of social integration is dominant. The suicide rate when a state supports the losing candidate will tend to be lower than if the state had supported the winning candidate—4.6 percent lower for males and 5.3 percent lower for females. Conclusion. Social integration works at many levels; it not only affects suicide risk directly, but can mediate other shocks that influence suicide risk.     

Conditional interval estimation of the mean following rejection of a two sided test

The effect of rejecting a two-sided preliminary test of significance for the mean of a normal distribution upon subsequent interval estimation of the mean is examined. For the case where the variance is known, conditional confidence intervals may be shorter than unconditional intervals, in contrast to the one-sided preliminary test case examined by Meeks and D’Agostino (1983, The American Statistician, 7, 134-136) . For the case where the variance is unknown and must be estimated by the sample variance, it is shown that customary intervals do not offer uniformly greater or lesser coverage than the nominal level.     

Attributions and Avowals of Motive in the Study of Deviance: Resource or Topic?

In explaining human actions, scholars and laypeople alike employ explanatory devices such as 'motives'. This paper critically reevaluates the relationship between 'professional' and 'lay' invocations of motive, proposing a general reorientation of theory and research. This reorientation emphasizes the mundane 'practical grammar' of motives, and argues that motive deployment is inextricably tied to deviance, and therefore irremediably moral. It is argued, therefore, that motives should serve as a topic for scholarship, not a resource for scholarly use. Several landmark theories of motives, deviance, and explanations are critically reviewed from the proposed vantage. Finally, a brief survey of similarly-minded work is offered, focussing on ethnomethodological arguments and findings, as illustrations of the heuristic power and promise of the outlined approach.     

THE PROCESS OF CHANGE IN COUPLES THERAPY: A QUALITATIVE INVESTIGATION

Open-ended interviews with 24 couples therapy clients regarding their experience of the process of change revealed shifts in clusters of affect, communication, and cognition. Six additional contextual preconditions for change were also identified. The change process within couples was uniformly reported to be gradual.     

The nature of living systems

Living systems theory (LST) is concerned with eight levels of living systems, each of which is composed of 20 critical subsystems that carry out essential life processes. As a result of a continuous biosocial evolution involving progressive fray-out of components, the more recently developed levels in this hierarchy have become very complex. A brief summary of LST is presented in this article. Following this is a detailed analysis of current knowledge about the timer, which we have recently included in our list of subsystems.     

Urban tree cover: an ecological perspective

Analysis of urban tree cover is generally limited to inventories of tree structure and composition on public lands. This approach provided valuable information for resource management. However, it does not account for all tree cover within an urban landscape, thus providing insufficient information on ecological patterns and processes. We propose evaluating tree cover for an entire urban area that is based on patch dynamics. Treed patches are classified by their origin, structure, and management intensity. A patch approach enables ecologists to evaluate ecological patterns and processes for the entire urban landscape and to examine how social patterns influence these ecological patterns and processes.     

Conservatism of the Accident Sequence Evaluation Program HRA Procedure

This paper presents a limited assessment of the conservatism of the Accident Sequence Evaluation Program (ASEP) human reliability analysis (HRA) procedure described in NUREG/CR-4772. The data for this study are derived from simulator examination reports from the NRC requalification examination cycle for nuclear power plant operators. The ASEP procedure was used to estimate human error probability (HEP) values for critical tasks, and the HEP results were compared with the failure rates observed in the examinations. The ASEP procedure was applied by PNNL operator license examiners who supplemented the limited information in the examination reports with expert judgment based upon their extensive simulator examination experience. Comparison of the average of the ASEP HEP values with the fraction of the population actually failed and demonstrated that the ASEP HEP values are larger (conservative) by a statistically significant average factor of two. Partitioning of tasks into subgroups based on the ASEP HEP values and comparison of the subgroup average ASEP HEP values with observed subgroup failure rates showed little or no conservatism for small ASEP HEP values, but considerable conservatism for larger ASEP HEP values.