A model of numbers of births in three countries,with persistent forty-year cycles

This paper describes a model which relates fertility to partner availability, an aspect of relative cohort size. Partner availability is affected by the tendency for males to reproduce at a later age than females. For women born at a time of rising birth rates, there is a shortage of slightly older men as potential partners. Women born when birthrates are falling enjoy a surplus of older men from which to choose. This model is believed to be the first non-linear demographic feedback model involving feedbacks through marriage squeezes in which empirically estimated values of the parameters imply persistent limit cycles. The deterministic model makes births in each five-year period a function of births in previous five-year periods. The form of the function is chosen to model the effect of partner availability upon entry into reproductive relationships, and therefore on age-specific fertility. Marriage rates are not modeled directly. The model was developed from data for more than a century from England and Wales, New Zealand, and the US. The demographic transition is modeled with a logistic function and age-specific fertility rates are estimated using lognormal distributions. The stepwise inclusion of a partner availability estimate in the model showed that it accounts for 29% of otherwise unexplained variance. Projected future births stabilize in sustained or limit cycles with periods a little longer than 40 years, and amplitudes of at least 7% of the mean. The necessary conditions for cycle persistence are outlined on a graph of maximum and minimum fertility parameters.     

管理中的魔鬼细节

我之所以花那么多精力来研究成功人士的人际交往问题，主要是因为：一个人的社会地位越高，他的缺点就越会表现在行为上。     

交际能力助你脱颖而出

如果每个应聘者都技能高超，受过良好教育且毕业于同一所学校，过往的成就也不相上下，委派受命的机率也均等，你将如何抉择？谁将成为幸运儿，谁又将出局？     

The relationship of intimate partner aggression to head injury, executive functioning, and intelligence

Measures of head injury, executive functioning, and intelligence were given to a community sample composed of 102 male perpetrators of intimate partner aggression (IPA) and 62 nonaggressive men. A history of head injury and lower mean score on a measure of verbal intelligence were associated with the frequency of male-perpetrated physical IPA as reported by male perpetrators and their female partners. Lower mean scores on a measure of verbal intelligence also predicted frequency of psychological IPA perpetration. Using the perpetrator subtypes outlined by Holtzworth-Munroe et al. (2000), analyses revealed that compared with other groups, the most severely aggressive subtypes (i.e., borderline-dysphoric and generally violent-antisocial) were the most likely to report a history of head injury and to have significantly lower mean scores on a neuropsychological test of verbal intelligence. The possible role of neuropsychological factors in IPA perpetration and implications for prevention and intervention programs are discussed.     

成功继任秘笈

为什么领导者继任规划总让人觉得是在浪费时间呢？我和我的朋友吉姆·摩尔在高层管理者的培训和继任方面进行了大量的研究。吉姆曾在大型企业担任首席学习官。以下是我们关于如何使领导者继任规划成为企业管理重要手段的一些观点。     

完美卸任！

对很多领导者而言，宣布把手里的指挥棒交给自己的继任者，是一件很难的事情。最常见的顾虑就是，一旦宣布自己即将卸任，他们就会成为跛脚鸭——英语中所谓的没用的人。没人愿意面对这样的窘境。     

The Social Structuring of Mental Health over the Adult Life Course: Advancing Theory in the Sociology of Aging

The sociology of aging draws on a broad array of theoretical perspectives from several disciplines, but rarely has it developed its own. We build on past work to advance and empirically test a model of mental health framed in terms of structural theorizing and situated within the life course perspective. Whereas most prior research has been based on cross-sectional data, we utilize four waves of data from a nationally representative sample of American adults (Americans' Changing Lives Study) collected prospectively over a 15-year period and find that education, employment and marital status, as well as their consequences for income and health, effectively explain the increase in depressive symptoms after age 65. We also found significant cohort differences in age trajectories of mental health that were partly explained by historical increases in education. We demonstrate that a purely structural theory can take us far in explaining later life mental health.     

Social mobility and personal satisfaction: evidence from ten countries

This paper examines survey data relating class mobility to satisfaction and dissatisfaction with seven different domains of everyday life among nationally representative samples of men and women living in ten industrialized nations. The evidence is set against competing pessimistic and optimistic accounts of the mobility experience found in earlier literature. Results show that individuals who move from working-class origins to middle-class destinations are no more likely to be systematically satisfied or dissatisfied with life than are the socially immobile or even those downwardly mobile from advantaged backgrounds into the working class. Indeed, in all nations, the overall association between class experience and satisfaction with life is both weak and uneven across the different life-domains. The study also serves to illustrate an important principle of research methodology more generally.