Short Notices

Allen G. Debus (ed.), Medicine in Seventeenth Century England. A Symposium Held at UCLA in Honor of C. D. O'Malley (1974), xiii+485 (University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, £8.50).

R. Quinault and J. Stevenson (eds.), Popular Protest and Public Order (1974), 242 (Allen and Unwin, £5.25).

Michael S. Cross (ed.), The Workingman in the Nineteenth Century (1975), xii+316 (Oxford University Press, Toronto, paperback £3.80).

Charles Rearick, Beyond the Enlightenment. Historians and Folklore in Nineteenth‐Century France (1974), xiv+206 (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, £3.65).

Malcolm I. Thomis, The Town Labourer and the Industrial Revolution (1974), vi + 247 (Batsford, £4.00, paperback £2.00).

John Woodward, To Do The Sick No Harm. A Study of the British Voluntary Hospital System to 1875 (1974), xii + 221 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, £5.50).

Alison Ravetz, Model Estate: Planned Housing at Quarry Hill, Leeds (1974), xvi + 251 (Croom Helm, £5.50).

Sergio Columbeanu, Granges exploitations domaniales en Valachie au XVIIIe siècle (Wallachian great estates in the eighteenth century) (1974), 199 (Editura Acadcmiei Republicii Socialiste Romania, Buearest, paperback Lei 8.75).     

A visual interactive approach to classical and mixed vehicle routing problems with backhauls

In this paper a new visual interactive approach for the classical vehicle routing problem with backhauls (VRPB) and its extensions is presented. The classical VRPB is the problem of designing minimum cost routes from a single depot to two type customers that are known as Backhaul (pickup) and Linehaul (delivery) customers where deliveries after pickups are not allowed. The mixed VRPB is an extension of the classical VRPB where deliveries after pickups are allowed.     

Effects of child support pass-through and disregard policies on in-kind child support

This paper examines whether states’ elimination of child support disregards for welfare payments after welfare reform caused non-custodial parents to increase in-kind support. I use longitudinal data from the Survey of Program Dynamics and take advantage of state and year variation in child support disregard policies before and after the 1996 welfare reform to identify effects of the disregard on in-kind support. I find that a $100 decrease in the disregard corresponds to a 3.2 percentage point increase in the probability a child will receive in-kind child support.     

CHANGE IN SPOUSE AGE DIFFERENCE AT MARRIAGE: A CHALLENGE TO TRADITIONAL FAMILY AND SEX ROLES?

We speculate that four broad societal changes (postponement of marriage by large numbers of women, dispersion of divorce throughout the life cycle, more equitable distribution of power between men and women, and wide swings in fertility) should eventually affect male-female age difference at marriage—i.e., the age-mating gradient. Examination of age difference at marriage from 1930–1980 in a central Florida county shows a trend toward increasing percentages of women marrying men younger than themselves. Data on all marriages for 1985 for this same county ( N = 7,021) indicates a continuation of this trend. Previous investigation of the age-mating gradient disclosed that age at marriage and marriage parity are related to the percentage of marriages in which the age-mating gradient is "followed.' Using the proportion marrying mates older or younger by three or more years as a conservative measure of the violation of the age-mating gradient, we find that the persons most likely to deviate from the traditional age-mating gradient were men ages 24–29, women over 30, and those persons who were marrying for the second, third, or later time. Some suggested explanations for these patterns are offered.     

TOXIC CONTAMINATION AND COMMUNITIES:

The ecological-symbolic perspective posits that community response to toxic contamination is shaped by both the nature of the environmental disruption and the interpretive frames through which those disruptions are apprehended. Full utilization of this perspective has been hampered by the deterministic underpinnings of the current chronic technological disaster model, which presents local conflict as a virtually inevitable outcome of these events. We draw upon the more contingent framing of the ecological-symbolic perspective to analyze the experiences of two communities that displayed consensual response patterns. We identify ecological and organizational factors that facilitated an interpretive framing of "limited danger".     

Theoretical stances and environmental debates: Reconciling the physical and the symbolic

Several sociologists arc currently debating the relationship of sociology to the physical environment. Their debates beg a question of more general importance to sociology: How do we organize our thinking about phenomena that are at once physical or material and symbolic or ideal? Our intention is not to add another voice in favor of or opposed to theorizing material, physical, or organic characteristics, but to examine the process of thinking about environments and more generally the realist-idealist divide. Environment (like the body) is unlike typical social science concepts in so far as it is both physical and social. If, for example, status and role are purely social concepts, environment is always more than social. I low do sociologists approach what is always more than social in the study of physical environments? Theorizing environments, we propose, is fashioned by the analytic stance of the investigator as legislative, interpretive, or symbolic realist. The strengths and weaknesses of these stances are discussed, and throughout our discussion empirical work representing each ol them is introduced. A final inquiry examines how sociologists can approach these three stances. Two strategies are identified: to assume each stance mirrors the environment as it actually exists or assume the stances are terminologies for exploring various combinations of the physical-symbolic properties ol environments. A brief plea is made for the second strategy.     

Variable Selection for Qualitative Interactions

In this article we discuss variable selection for decision making with focus on decisions regarding when to provide treatment and which treatment to provide. Current variable selection techniques were developed for use in a supervised learning setting where the goal is prediction of the response. These techniques often downplay the importance of interaction variables that have small predictive ability but that are critical when the ultimate goal is decision making rather than prediction. We propose two new techniques designed specifically to find variables that aid in decision making. Simulation results are given along with an application of the methods on data from a randomized controlled trial for the treatment of depression.     

Log-ratios and the logarithmic mean

Logarithmically transformed ratios have an important role to play in some branches of statistics and economics. Focus of this paper is on an unfamiliar interpretation of these logratios, which are in fact absolute differences being divided by the logarithmic mean. It is demonstrated that familiarity with the logarithmic mean and its relation to more common mean values leads to view a problem from a new angle whenever logratios are involved. Examples investigated are Fisher’s z-transformation, the likelihood-ratio test of goodness-of-fit, Theil’s measure of inequality, and the log-ratio itself as one important device for measuring relative change within timeseries.     

Race,SES, and Obesity Among Men

Over the last decade, obesity has increased significantly among men but few national studies have empirically examined racial and socioeconomic differences in obesity among men. In this paper, we utilized logistic regression to evaluate the potential associations that race and socioeconomic status may have with obesity among men in the National Survey of American Life: an in-person household survey of non-institutionalized U.S. blacks and whites who lived in communities where at least 10% of the community residents were black Americans. A greater proportion of black men were likely to be obese than white men, but no interaction among race, SES, and obesity was detected when potential confounding variables were included. There was not a relationship between SES and obesity for white men, but there was an apparent positive relationship between SES and obesity for black men that did not remain significant in adjusted models. No relationship was found between age and obesity among black men, though white men who were 55 and older were more likely than those 18–34 to be obese in confounder adjusted models. Among white men, no relationships were found between obesity and education, household income, or marital status. Black men in the lowest income category were less likely to be obese than those in the highest income category, in bivariate but not adjusted models. These findings suggest that the way racial, economic, stress and behavioral factors combine to affect obesity in black and white men may be different.