Between family and friends: a longitudinal study of friendship choice

The increasing role for chosen friends is a key element in current debates on individualization and the transformation of intimacy. This paper describes the changes in friendship choices over time and demonstrates how life events subsequently impact on those choices. We primarily distinguish between kin and non-kin nominations of friends and how these may be related to the social and economic turbulence inherent in late modernity. Analyses of data from ten years of the British Household Panel Survey showed that kin nominations still form a significant proportion of all friends but increasingly so with age and over time as people age. Life events, such as divorce or death of a partner, have large effects on the likelihood of changes in friendship choices as did gender, age, marital status and social class. We frame these results in a discussion of the saliency and nature of friendship at stages of the life course and conclude that the case for a general secular shift to choosing non-kin friendships rather than kin-based friendship is not demonstrated.     

Resource allocation for restoration of compromised systems

Computer systems are constantly under the threats of being attacked and in many cases these attacks succeed. Today’s networked systems are thus built to be intrusion tolerant. In a large scale, the progresses of compromising the networked system and recovering the damage will carry on in parallel, allowing services to be continued (at a degraded level). One of the key problems in the restoration procedure regards to the resource allocation strategies and the cost associated with, specifically, a minimal cost is desired. In this paper we model the cost as a sum of service loss and resource expense that incur during the restoration procedure. We investigate the achievable minimal total cost and corresponding resource allocation strategy for different situations. The situations include both constant rates and time-variant rates in terms of the speed of compromising and recovering. We also consider the fact that the restoration rate is constrained by the resource allocated. The relationship can be either linear or obeying the law of diminishing marginal utility. We present both analytical and numerical results in the paper. The results show the impact from various system parameters on the critical conditions for a successful system restoration and on the minimal cost. Dr. Ray is currently with Google Inc., 604 Arizona Avenue, Santa Monica, CA 90401, USA. His e-mail contact is sibu@google.com, siburay@gmail.com     

Physical quality of life index: Some international and Indian applications

In this paper, an attempt has been made to construct the physical quality of life index (PQLI) for some countries and for the Indian States as well. Three important indicators, viz. literacy rate, infant mortality rate and life expectancy at birth, reflecting the quality of life have been chosen and combined with equal weights to obtain PQLI. The rationale of equal weights, apart from any subjective judgement, may also be found in a mathematical model presented here. It is observed that PQLI rises sharply with per capita GNP but after a certain stage, an increase of per capita GNP is not accompanied by an increase of PQLI.     

Book Review: Civility: Manners,Morals, and the Etiquette of Democracy. By Stephen L. Carter. Harper Perennial,New York, 1998

Sociological Practice -     

Beyond Assessment: Social Work Intervention in Family Court Enquiries

Most parents or carers who separate or divorce are able to makearrangements themselves about where their children will resideand how the children’s contact with the non-resident parentwill be managed. A further group of parents or carers are ableto come to agreement with the assistance of community- or court-baseddispute resolution/ mediation services. There are times, however,when disputes cannot be resolved without recourse to the courtsand, when this happens, the court will normally request thata welfare report be prepared by a CAFCASS (Children and FamilyCourt Advisory and Support Service) practitioner. While theboundary between assessment and intervention in social workis often less than clear, the commissioning of a court welfarereport in family proceedings strongly suggests an assessmentfocus and appears to carry little expectation that the practitionershould intervene in order to meet the needs of the childrenor adults involved. This article presents recent research findingsthat illustrate ways in which CAFCASS practitioners do go beyondthe assessment role expected of them in the course of the enquiriesthey undertake. Implications for policy and practice in thisarea of social work are then discussed.     

ESTIMATING TEMPORAL FARM INCOME DISTRIBUTIONS USING SPATIAL SMOOTHING TECHNIQUES

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural & Resource Economics (ABARE) has conducted the annual Australian Agricultural and Grazing Industries Survey, covering the broadacre sector, in a consistent format since 1978/79. In this period the incomes of farmers have fluctuated considerably. Interest has focused on temporal income variation because of its relationship to the inherent riskiness of farming. Part of these income fluctuations can be explained by changing commodity prices and by highly variable climatic conditions. This paper outlines a method of measuring the magnitude of this income variation and how it relates to other variables. Due to rotation within the sample of farms surveyed, data are limited for determining the income variability of any particular farm. This paper, using spatial locations of surveyed farms, shows how kernel smoothing techniques can be adapted to estimate the distribution of a farm's income. This analysis uses data collected from 1978/79 to 1991/92. Summary information from these distributions is cross-tabulated against several other variables. This shows that income variability is strongly related to the production mixture of farming businesses.