Studying Hate Crime with the Internet: What Makes Racists Advocate Racial Violence?

We conducted semistructured interviews with 38 participants in White racist Internet chat rooms, examining the extent to which people would, in this unique environment, advocate interracial violence in response to purported economic and cultural threats. Capitalizing on the anonymity and candor of chat room interactions, this study provides an unusual perspective on extremist attitudes. We experimentally manipulated the nature and proximity of the threats. Qualitative and quantitative analyses indicate that the respondents were most threatened by interracial marriage and, to a lesser extent, Blacks moving into White neighborhoods. In contrast, job competition posed by Blacks evoked very little advocacy of violence. The study affords an assessment of the advantages and limitations of Internet-based research with clandestine populations.     

Veteran Status and Body Weight: A Longitudinal Fixed-Effects Approach

About 10–12 % of young men (and increasingly, women) have served a term in the military. Yet, we know relatively little about the consequences of military service for the lives of those who serve. In this article, we provide estimates of the relationship between men’s peacetime military service during the all-volunteer era (AVE) and body weight using longitudinal data on 6,304 men taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of 1979 (NLSY-79). Using fixed-effects estimators on up to 13 years of data and numerous controls for time-varying life-course characteristics linked to body weight, we find that veterans of active-duty military service have higher levels of BMI and obesity. We argue that eating habits learned during service, coupled with patterns of physical activity, lead to a situation whereby veterans making the transition to less active civilian lifestyles gain weight that is not lost over time.     

Estimation of the sum of differences distribution

Consider the distribution of Z_i d_iwhere the d.d_i?s are 1=1 lldifferences independently, identically and symmetrically distributed with mean zero. The problem is to determine properties of the sdd given the distribution of the d._i?fs and the sample size n. The standardized moments as a function of the moments of the d._i!s are developed. A variance reduction technique for estimating the quantiles of the sdd using Monte Carlo methods is developed based on using the randomization sample consisting of the 2ⁿ values of Z _i+d. rather than the single observation i=l lZ d. corresponding to each sample d_id_n. The randomization sample is shown to produce unbiased and consistent estimators.     

The contribution: Case study and teaching note

Huntington University has depended on its tuition for most of its operations and thus was not prepared for the gift it was about to receive. After considerable discussion at the Board of Visitors meeting of Huntington's School of Management about the importance of ethics in the curriculum, one retiring corporate head, Dan Jordan, challenged the school to make a significant effort to assume responsibility for the ethical qualities of its graduates. Jordan offered the school its largest contribution ever—which he restricted to the area of ethics. The dean of the college of management, Peter McElroy, now faced an enviable problem: how to spend the income from this gift in a way that conformed to the wishes of the donor and best served the needs of his college.     

Student-Athletes and Gambling: An Analysis of Attitudes Towards Risk-Taking

Gambling scandals at Arizona State University, Boston College, and Northwestern University have made gambling prevention a point of emphasis in the NCAA and throughout colleges and universities across the nation. Despite this emphasis, there is minimal research at any level regarding gambling and student-athletes. This research examines attitudinal differences towards risk-taking among student-athletes who gamble on college sports and those who indicate no such gambling activity. Our findings indicate that student-athletes who gambled were more likely to have attitudes supportive of risk taking behavior than their student-athlete peers who did not gamble.