Psychotherapy as an eductional process

Clients in psychotherapy with social workers, psychiatrists and psychologists learn things that they did not know previously. This learning modifies their view of reality and themselves. Clients learn that their problems are, to an extent universal, interpersonal—both out from themselves and to themselves from others, due to experiences in their past in their families, perhaps solvable by identifying with successful others, often due to unrealistic expectations about themselves, others and existence in general. Successful therapy is marked by culture-building interaction by the client and the therapist with the client's subjective understanding modified to enable greater autonomous action.     

Model Misspecification Effects Within A Family of Alternative Discrete Reliability-Growth Models

We describe a family of related discrete reliability-growth methodologies potentially applicable to one-shot systems undergoing a test-analyze-and-fix development process. The common feature shared by the models is their connection to Duane's renowned learning-curve property. The major difference, however, lies in their applicability in the context of two intrinsically different sampling schemes. For each model, a summary of the statistical properties of various estimators of the parameters as well as the reliability of the system, are reported. For purposes of assessing model misspecification, a particular test execution scenario conforming to a inverse sampling scheme is adopted. In reliability applications, it is not an uncommon practice to borrow inference results from models which are inappropriate in this setting. A detailed study of the potential impact of such misspecification on the estimation of system reliability is presented. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An Exactly aggregable trigonometric engel curve demand system

Gorman's (1981) characterization of Engel curves includes the possibility of demand systems that are, linear in trigonometric functions of income, but the actual existence of such systems has been questioned. This paper shows that such systems exist, and can have large regular regions.     

Future warming for U.S. cities

In this study, a model is developed to predict future warming for metropolitan areas in the United Sates to the year 2035. According to model results, most U.S. cities of 200,000 population or more can expect significant local warming. The average predicted warming for 104 cities analyzed is .34 degrees Farenheit. The greatest warming can be expected in sunbelt cities experiencing rapid population growth. Such localized warming is in addition to any heating which might occur from an enhanced greenhouse effect. Most cities can expect changes in energy demand, human health, and water supply.The author wishes to thank Stuart Simpson of the George Washington University's Center for Administrative and Academic Computing for his generous support and cooperation.     

Conversion to the world view of Alcoholics Anonymous: A refinement of conversion theory

Most empirical studies of the conversion process have focused on individuals who have come to espouse the world view of a deviant religious denomination or sect. Using observational data our research analyzes the conversion process by which individuals come to identify with the ideology propounded by Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.). A.A. provides prospective alcoholics with both a solution to drinking problems and an overarching world view with which to reinterpret their past experience. The A.A. conversion process can be divided into six phases: hitting bottom, first stepping, making a commitment, accepting your problem, telling your story, and doing Twelfth Step work. Each of these phases is described in detail. Similarities and differences are noted between the observed A.A. conversion process and the model generally described in the sociological literature on religious conversion. Our analysis indicates certain weaknesses in the process-model explanation of conversion and points to the necessity of taking into account organizational context and situational variables.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, San Antonio, Texas, October, 1979.     

Remembering Sartre

In this article reviewing three books on Sartre written by Ronald Aronson, Bernhard-Henri Lévy, and Ronald Santoni, I note that an enduring interest in Sartre’s life and philosophy centers on the justifiability of revolutionary violence and terror. I argue that critics too often, and sometimes obsessively, focus on the same texts and actions, typically related to his support for communism in the 1950s. They thus often reproduce a Cold War narrative of his life and work, wrongly obscuring his other great political engagement on behalf of national liberation and anticolonial resistance movements around the world. When critics do, however, consider his views in relationship to decolonization, they are often reduced to the muckracking pages of his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a text that is in fact unrepresentative of positions he took in more sustained works, such as The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the 1964 “Rome Lecture” on ethics. I suggest that this “Cold War lens” ought to be removed, so that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of Sartre’s views on political violence might be achieved. Indeed, Aronson’s book is the only one among the three that begins to make this move.

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