Perceived Risks of Radioactive Waste Transport Through Oregon: Results of a Statewide Survey

Transportation of hazardous materials, and particularly radioactive wastes, on public highways has become an important risk management issue. The unfavorability of public attitudes regarding hazardous and nuclear wastes signals the potential for strong public opposition to programs for transporting these materials. This paper presents the results of a survey conducted to assess public reactions to a long-term nuclear waste transport program planned to follow a route through a portion of rural Oregon. The survey assessed a number of key risk perception issues, including perceived health and safety risks of nuclear waste transport, relative risks of transport vs. storage at an existing site, trust in state officials, and satisfaction with life in communities along the transport route. The survey identified a number of attitudes and concerns that need to be understood and considered by those in charge of designing and implementing the waste-transportation program.     

Sources of Mathematics Self-Efficacy in High School Students

The relation of four hypothesized sources of self-efficacy information to high school students' math self-efficacy was explored. Results indicated that (a) of the hypothesized sources, prior performance was the most efficient predictor of self-efficacy; (b) global academic self-concept did not explain unique self-efficacy variation beyond prior performance; and (c) the effect of self-efficacy on the perceived utility of math to future life and work plans was mediated by students' math/science interests.     

The many meanings of sleep

Reductions in sleep are concomitant with night shift work. Data are presented showing that these robust differences in sleep are even present in experienced permanent night shift workers who most prefer to work nights. A model is presented which relates these reductions to chronic sleep deprivation. This, in turn, may be associated with performance decrements, and lead to accidents and illness. Better work schedule selection, worker training programs, and preventive medical action are unproven but promising approaches to overturning this model.     

Business ethics and philosophical pragmatism

Today it is common for business people to refer to themselves as pragmatists. There is, however, at least one significant difference between business pragmatism and traditional philosophical pragmatism: the attitude towards ethics. In this paper we discuss several approaches business pragmatists have taken toward ethics in business. We then describe the approach taken by one philosophical pragmatist, William James. We conclude that, pragmatically speaking, philosophical pragmatism is the superior view.     

Pathological gambling: Psychosomatic,emotional and marital difficulties as reported by the spouse

Two parallel self-administered surveys were distributed at three conferences of Gamblers Anonymous. One survey was for members of Gamblers Anonymous and the other was for members of GamAnon. Approximately 500 respondents completed the surveys, with 215 having completed the questionnaire for the spouse. This article is a report of some of the data from the spouse's survey. This survey focused on two time periods of the spouse's life — during the desperation phase of the gambler's illness (Custer, 1982) and the phase following a period of abstinence from gambling. Specific areas covered in this report focus on the psychosomatic problems and emotional difficulties encountered by the spouse, marital and familial estrangement, financial management, and the need for mental health services. It is anticipated that some of these needs can be met through training or therapy sessions in professional gambling treatment centers and at Gamblers Anonymous conferences.The work on this spouse survey represents a collective effort to enhance the understanding of the relationship between the pathological gambler and the spouse during the desperation phase of the illness and during recovery. Dr. Lorenz developed and implemented the survey. Yaffee organized the data processing, statistical programming, and analysis of the survey. For dedicated and outstanding assistance, special thanks must be given to our senior research assistants, who prepared the codebook and program for this spouse survey: Maria Ycasiano, Leslav Giermanski, Roger Meier, Raisa Rot and Steven Rubenstein. Thanks must also be given to Norberto Colon, Paula Diamond, Edwin Castro, Abdul Beydoun, and Fallan Rhim for their valuable assistance in entering, checking, and cleaning the data prior to analysis. Appreciation for the program written by Joseph Lautner, to check for misalignments in the data file, and the assistance provided by Deborah Becker on this project, is also gratefully acknowledged. To Dr. Thomas Wesselkamper, Chairman of the Hunter College Science Department, for permission to run this project, and all of the aforementioned research assistants, the authors express their sincere gratitude.     

Bribes,power, and managerial control in corporate voting games

Proxy fights have received comparatively little attention relative to the more popular methods for corporate control transfer: merger and tender offers. This paper presents an analytic model of the proxy contest as a cooperative game with four players: management, passive shareholders, insurgent shareholders and a trust fund. The power of the players and the effectiveness of certain managerial actions is discussed.     

Children of problem gamblers

An anonymous 37-item Health Survey was administered to 844 randomly selected ninth- to twelfth-grade students in four Southern California public high schools. Systematic information was gathered about their general health, quality of life, school and work adjustment, involvement with a range of potentially addictive substances and activities, and indications of psychosocial maladjustment, including difficulties with the law and suicide attempts. A series of self-ratings of students who characterized one or both of their parents as having a compulsive gambling problem (N=52) were contrasted with those of their classmates who reported no gambling problem among their parents (N=792). Findings have been grouped into three major areas: (a) comparative levels and reported effects of involvement with health-threatening behaviors (i.e., smoking, drinking, drug use, overeating, and gambling); (b) comparative incidence of psychosocial risk indicators (i.e., broken home, unhappy childhood and teenage years, legal action pending, overall quality of youth rated as poor); and (c) comparative incidence of dysphoria, school and work problems, and suicide attempts. Across each of these areas children of parents said to gamble excessively were found to be at consistently greater risk than their classmates who did not describe their parents as having a problem with compulsive gambling. These findings strongly suggest that without early and competent intervention, children of parents who gamble excessively: (a) will be seriously disadvantaged when attempting to solve their present adolescent and future adult problems of living; and (b) as a consequence are, themselves, high-risk candidates for developing one or another form of dysfunctional adjustment, including an addictive pattern of behavior.     

Modeling Benzene Pharmacokinetics Across Three Sets of Animal Data: Parametric Sensitivity and Risk Implications

Typically, the uncertainty affecting the parameters of physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) models is ignored because it is not currently practical to adjust their values using classical parameter estimation techniques. This issue of parametric variability in a physiological model of benzene pharmacokinetics is addressed in this paper. Monte Carlo simulations were used to study the effects on the model output arising from variability in its parameters. The output was classified into two categories, depending on whether the output of the model on a particular run was judged to be generally consistent with published experimental data. Statistical techniques were used to examine sensitivity and interaction in the parameter space. The model was evaluated against the data from three different experiments in order to test for the structural adequacy of the model and the consistency of the experimental results. The regions of the parameter space associated with various inhalation and gavage experiments are distinct, and the model as presently structured cannot adequately represent the outcomes of all experiments. Our results suggest that further effort is required to discern between the structural adequacy of the model and the consistency of the experimental results. The impact of our results on the risk assessment process for benzene is also examined.