“Habits of employees”: smoking, spies, and shopfloor culture at Hammermill Paper Company

As cigarette smoking expanded dramatically during the early twentieth century, it brought more and more workers into conflict with the policies and demands of the manufacturers who employed them. As this paper shows, addiction to nicotine ignited daily struggles over workers’ shopfloor rights and the ability of employers to set rules, establish discipline, and monitor behavior. A specific set of records from the archives of the Hammermill Paper Company, a paper manufacturer once based in Erie, Pennsylvania, provide a unique opportunity to explore the impact of cigarette consumption on labor relations during the era of mass production, as two nosy factory spies probed and documented worker actions and attitudes in the summer of 1915. As a result of their intelligence gathering, the spies discovered a factory-wide work culture rooted in the addictive pleasure of cigarette smoke. This discovery worried them. Worker-smokers needed to dampen their hunger for nicotine with frequent, and often clandestine, breaks from work, typically in defiance of “no-smoking” rules, employer designations for the uses of factory space, and bosses’ demands for continuous production. Highlighting the intersections of the histories of labor, smoking, and addiction, this paper argues that cigarettes were a key battleground in workers’ and managers’ intensifying struggles over who really controlled the industrial shopfloor during the early 1900s.     

Linearity of the electromechanical penile plethysmograph's output at large expansions

Despite the widespread use of the Barlow‐type electromechanical plethysmograph for monitoring changes in penile circumference, doubts have arisen about its sensitivity at large expansions. This study investigated the linearity of both a used and unused gauge over a wide range of standardized expansions. For both gauges, the relationship between electrical output and physical expansion was almost linear. A logarithmic 10 transformation on the physical expansion data did not for either gauge achieve perfect linearity. Contrary to suggestions in the literature, therefore, such a transformation is not required when using this gauge.     

Neuropsychological Profiles of Victims of Financial Elder Exploitation at the Los Angeles County Elder Abuse Forensic Center

The current article examines neuropsychological correlates of financial elder exploitation in a sample of older adults who have been documented victims of financial elder exploitation. The purpose of this exploratory study was twofold. First, a subsample of the referrals at the Los Angeles County Elder Abuse Forensic Center (LACEAFC) was compared to community dwelling adults in terms of the specific cognitive domains linked to financial capacity including memory, calculation, and executive functioning. Next, the correlation between presence of neuropsychological data and the likelihood of filing a case with the LA County’s District Attorney office was examined. Twenty-seven LACEAFC cases and 32 controls were assessed. Overall, the forensic center group performed worse than a community-based age-matched control group on the MMSE, calculation, and executive functioning (ps < .01). The presence of neuropsychological data was significantly correlated to an increased likelihood of a case being filed.     

The dislocation of agriculture and food: a network analysis of interlocking directorates in New Zealand's corporate economy

Abstract

As a political project, ‘agri-food’ calls for improved communication between New Zealand's land-based industries and the business of food. Such communication may be enhanced by the sharing of company directors, a social practice whose interlocks create information flows across the economy. These flows can overcome market fragmentation and help establish a common sense of purpose. However, a social network analysis of interlocks between New Zealand's largest businesses shows few signs of the communication structures that agri-food requires. Food is the most isolated sector, primary production the most connected. Brokerage and clique analysis shows that primary production's major partners are the consumer and finance sectors. These two sectors have very different profiles and their differences drive primary production networks in two opposed directions. Primary production is not only dislocated from food, it is also deeply divided between relatively small locally-owned consumer companies and large overseas-owned banks.     

The Teaching of Statistics in England: Report of the Royal Statistical Society

Some experiences with the use of student projects in experimental design courses at Wisconsin are described. Each student is given the opportunity of selecting a problem of direct interest to him/her, designing and performing an experiment, collecting and analyzing the data. Some ideas with regard to pedagogy and the use of simulated data are also discussed.