DEBATE A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The publication of Jonathan Swift's original Modest Proposal in 1729 caused outrage. His suggestion that, to survive, the Irish poor should make food of their own children (whether ‘stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled… in a fricassee or a ragout’) carried the logic of the government of his day to its brutal extreme. Polite society was not amused. But as the critic David Ward has noted: ‘Swift employs pessimism as a weapon to scourge away the smug credulity of most optimists, just as he employs the language of evil … to make us fear the worst in ourselves. ‘ In this piece Rodney Allen and Ian Hunt of the Centre for Applied Philosophy, Flinders University, find inspiration in Swift's pamphlet to make their own contribution to one of the the great debates of our day.     

II. The Conclusions and Recommendations of the Commission on the Social Studies of the American Historical Association

Abstract

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: Modern Business Geography. By Ellsworth Huntington and Sumner W. Cushing. World Book Company, Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York, 1925. viii, 352 pp. $2.00. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: A Smaller Commercial Geography. By G. G. Chisholm and J. H. Birrell. Longmans, Green and Company, New York, 1924. xiv, 302 pp. $1.65. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: High Lights of Geography: North America. By David Starr Jordan and Katherine Dunlop Cather. World Book Company, Yonkers-on-Hudson, New York, 1925. xv, 358 pp. $1.44. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: Human Geography by Grades: Book Three. The World. By James Fairgrieve and Ernest Young. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1925. x, 304 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: First Lessons in Geography. By Philip A. Knowlton. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1924. vi, 257 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

Some Recent Geography Textbooks: The Story Key to Geographic Names. By O. D. von Engeln and Jane McKelway Urquhart. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1924. xvi, 279 pp. Reviewed by: John E. Orchard

The War for Southern Independence, being vol. VI of The History of the United States. By Edward Channing. The Macmillan Company, New York, 1925. 645 pp. $4.75. Reviewed by: B. B. Kendrick

Ethics and Citizenship. By John W. Wayland, Head of the Department of History and Social Science, State Teachers College, Harrisonburg, Va. The McClure Co., Staunton, Va., 1924. 251 pp. $1.85. Reviewed by: H. W. Schneider

History of the 151st Field Artillery. (Minnesota in the World War, Volume I.) By Louis L. Collins. Edited by Wayne E. Stevens. Minnesota War Records Commission, St. Paul, 1924. xxv, 427 pp. Reviewed by: Elbridge Colby

History of the Philippines. By David P. Barrows. The World Book Company, Yonkers, New York, 1924. xiv, 406 pp. $1.60. Reviewed by: Paul V. Shaw     

The Discourse of Dress and Appearance: Identity Talk and a Rhetoric of Review

This article examines how identities are constructed and maintained via talk about personal dress and appearance. In this article, we introduce the concept of rhetoric of review, which is defined as the taken-for-granted rules that guide the evaluations of the appearances of self and others. Three basic components of a rhetoric of review are identified: moral precepts, program neutralizations, and review neutralizations. Data were derived from eight in-depth interviews with eighteen sorority members from a single university in the Southeastern United States. These data were used to expand Stone's (1962) conceptual framework of program and review by including Sykes and Matza's (1957) neutralization techniques. The purpose of this article is to bridge the interactionist perspectives on appearance and identity talk so as to augment our understanding of the discourse of appearance.     

Modeling developmental data using U-shaped threshold dose-response curves

This paper develops threshold models for developmental toxicity data. The distinguishing feature of these threshold models is their flexibility in modeling data below threshold with a U-shaped function if the data warrants. The method is applied to actual data from a developmental study which exhibits U-shaped behavior in early dose groups. Results from a simulation study demonstrate the flexibility of the threshold model to pick up on U-shaped trends in the data. In addition, the simulation study reveals important considerations in design of developmental studies.     

Semi-iterative missing value estimation

Several iterative methods for calculating the least squares estimates of missing values in a designed experiment are reviewed. Problems of slow convergence, unreliability and undue complexity are exposed. A new method is proposed which largely overcomes these problems.     

A Parametric Model for Detecting Hormetic Effects in Developmental Toxicity Studies

Hormetic effects have been observed at low exposure levels based on the dose-response pattern of data from developmental toxicity studies. This indicates that there might actually be a reduced risk of exhibiting toxic effects at low exposure levels. Hormesis implies the existence of a threshold dose level and there are dose-response models that include parameters that account for the threshold. We propose a function that introduces a parameter to account for hormesis. This function is a subset of the set of all functions that could represent a hormetic dose-response relationship at low exposure levels to toxic agents. We characterize the overall dose-response relationship with a piecewise function that consists of a hormetic u-shape curve at low dose levels and a logistic curve at high dose levels. We apply our model to a data set from an experiment conducted at the National Toxicology Program (NTP). We also use the beta-binomial distribution to model the litter response data. It can be seen by observing the structure of these data that current experimental designs for developmental studies employ a limited number of dose groups. These designs may not be satisfactory when the goal is to illustrate the existence of hormesis. In particular, increasing the number of low-level doses improves the power for detecting hormetic effects. Therefore, we also provide the results of simulations that were done to characterize the power of current designs in detecting hormesis and to demonstrate how this power can be improved upon by altering these designs with the addition of only a few low exposure levels.