The Renewed Search for Social Trusteeship: Cohen and Fitch on Social Justice and the City

It has become a commonplace to argue that in the face of a discredited Marxism, socialism must find an alternative basis for a renewed project. This article investigates two of these claims by Gerald Cohen and Bob Fitch. It does so with particular reference to the attempt by these authors to re-invoke, both wittingly and unwittingly, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Henry George, and Auguste Comte among others as the source of a renewed left project. It takes as its special concern the way in which the supposed need to revivify "industry" in the late twentieth century parallels the often voiced need to revivify "agriculture" in the late nineteenth century as a means of staving off "underdevelopment."     

Hunger strikes: preventing harm to students.

When the health center encountered a student hunger strike, an initial search for medical information regarding fasting provided very little on which to build management decisions. The result of a more thorough evaluation of starvation literature is presented, along with survey responses from students who fasted. Starvation may produce many adverse events, including death. Yet, according to reports, acaloric fasts that include full water intake seem to be readily tolerated for 2 weeks in young, healthy adults. Our students included juice, sports drinks, and vitamins in their diets and completed their strike without major problems. Supplementation with carbohydrates and vitamins may improve the safety or comfort of a hunger striker, but clear proof of this effect does not exist.     

America's Most Important Problem--A Trend Analysis, 1946-1976

Using an extremely rich data series, this paper traces trendsin America's most important problem from 1946 to 1976. Bothlong-term and short-term changes in public concern are charted.Additionally, the problem profiles of major sociodemographicgroups are analyzed. Changes in the problem concerns of thesegroups are also followed across time.     

Conceptual frameworks and the philosophical foundations of general living systems theory

The continued expansion and fragmentation of biological disciplines impede education, communication, and efficient advance of biological research. Reversing these trends may require a unification of theories and concepts from all levels of biological organization. One form of this unification is the statement of generalizations that apply to all living systems. We explore the philosophical foundations of general theories of living systems by analyzing conceptual frameworks as they apply to biology. This analysis examines the relation of empirical observation, theories, and conceptual frameworks within the context of an individual scientist's conceptual continuum. Also presented are a small set of translevel generalizations that articulate our conceptual framework of living systems in terms of organismic system organization, the environmental system-organismic system dyad, system capacity, and system incorporation. A set of procedural rules are stated which suggest minimum criteria for the evaluation of the explanatory adequacy of biological theories. The relation of this work to other similar analyses and syntheses of biological knowledge is discussed.     

Cancer risk estimation for mixtures of coal tars and benzo(a)pyrene.

Two-year chronic bioassays were conducted by using B6C3F1 female mice fed several concentrations of two different mixtures of coal tars from manufactured gas waste sites or benzo(a)pyrene (BaP). The purpose of the study was to obtain estimates of cancer potency of coal tar mixtures, by using conventional regulatory methods, for use in manufactured gas waste site remediation. A secondary purpose was to investigate the validity of using the concentration of a single potent carcinogen, in this case benzo(a)pyrene, to estimate the relative risk for a coal tar mixture. The study has shown that BaP dominates the cancer risk when its concentration is greater than 6,300 ppm in the coal tar mixture. In this case the most sensitive tissue site is the forestomach. Using low-dose linear extrapolation, the lifetime cancer risk for humans is estimated to be: Risk < 1.03 x 10(-4) (ppm coal tar in total diet) + 240 x 10(-4) (ppm BaP in total diet), based on forestomach tumors. If the BaP concentration in the coal tar mixture is less than 6,300 ppm, the more likely case, then lung tumors provide the largest estimated upper limit of risk, Risk < 2.55 x 10(-4) (ppm coal tar in total diet), with no contribution of BaP to lung tumors. The upper limit of the cancer potency (slope factor) for lifetime oral exposure to benzo(a)pyrene is 1.2 x 10(-3) per microgram per kg body weight per day from this Good Laboratory Practice (GLP) study compared with the current value of 7.3 x 10(-3) per microgram per kg body weight per day listed in the U.S. EPA Integrated Risk Information System.     

Six‐Month‐Olds' Detection of Clauses Embedded in Continuous Speech: Effects of Prosodic Well‐Formedness

Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six‐month‐olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well‐formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill‐formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages. One included the well‐formed unit, and the other included the ill‐formed sequence. In Experiment 1, infants listened longer to the passage containing the well‐formed unit, suggesting that such units, even when they are embedded, are better recognized. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this better recognition does not depend on an acoustic match between the familiarized sequences and their later embeddings. This suggests that the advantage of the well‐formed unit is at least partially due to infants' use of prosody to parse continuous speech.     

Prosoziales Arbeitsverhalten: Entwicklung und Überprüfung eines Messinstruments zur Erfassung des freiwilligen Arbeitsengagements

A German version of the Organizational Citizenship Behavior Questionnaire (GOCBQ) is developed and tested. Study 1 was conducted with 150 students working together in 39 project groups. The results show that the internal consistency and test-retest-reliability of the GOCBQ are good. Moreover, the GOCBQ measures a general altruism orientation which can be interpreted as a stable trait. The GOCBQ does neither correlate substantially with demographical variables nor with extroversion or neuroticism. Instead, substantial correlations are registered with mood and group atmosphere. In study 2 results from study 1 were cross-validated with data from 128 voluntary and professional helpers, in study 3 with data from 43 professionals. Implications for future research and applications in working life are discussed.