About the authors

This article examines the historical development of formally and informally segregated churches within the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, the role segregated churches continue to have, and the attitudes of religious leaders within these churches towards the issue of racial integration. Data were obtained from surveys, interviews, and historical research. Interview and survey data used for this project were gleaned from Parish Council Presidents, Directors of Religious Education, the Diocesan Pastoral Council, and the Advisory Board for the Office of Black Catholic Ministries within the Diocese of Lafayette. One hundred fifty-five surveys were completed and returned. Thirty-four individuals were interviewed. In addition, the Diocese of Lafayette made their archives available to the researchers.     

Queering Ethnicity in the First Gay Films From Ex-Yugoslavia

Between 2002 and 2005 four of the Yugoslav successor states produced major feature films with lesbian or gay protagonists: Maja Weiss's Guardian of the Frontier (Slovenia, 2002), Dalibor Matani?'s Fine Dead Girls (Croatia, 2002), Dragan Marinkovi?'s Take a Deep Breath (Serbia, 2004), and Ahmed Imamovi?'s Go West (Bosnia and Hercegovina, 2005). As with other films from Eastern Europe that portray queer characters, all of these films were shot by straight directors, and the queer characters are not representations of real local queer communities, but instead are used as metaphors to address topics the filmmakers find more important, such as ethnicity and national identity. The ethnic hatreds that fueled the wars of the 1990s were mobilized through the heterosexual matrix. In these films anxieties about ethnicity are worked out through plots involving queer sexuality, though they work differently for male and female couples: female bodies can be conventionally objectified by the heterosexual male gaze, while male couples become the focus for anxieties about male rape.     

Choosing subsets: a size-independent probabilistic model and the quest for a social welfare ordering

“Subset voting” denotes a choice situation where one fixed set of choice alternatives (candidates, products) is offered to a group of decision makers, each of whom is requested to pick a subset containing any number of alternatives. In the context of subset voting we merge three choice paradigms, “approval voting“ from political science, the “weak utility model” from mathematical psychology, and “social welfare orderings” from social choice theory. We use a probabilistic choice model proposed by Falmagne and Regenwetter (1996) built upon the notion that each voter has a personal ranking of the alternatives and chooses a subset at the top of the ranking. Using an extension of Sen's (1966) theorem about value restriction, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for this empirically testable choice model to yield a social welfare ordering. Furthermore, we develop a method to compute Borda scores and Condorcet winners from subset choice probabilities. The technique is illustrated on an election of the Mathematical Association of America (Brams, 1988). Received: 18 August 1995 / Accepted: 13 February 1997     

A method for planning long term strategy in basic industries

Standard market studies may provide a valid estimate of future demand, but they are unable to furnish objective data about future supply and selling prices. Consequently any profitability or feasibility study making use of standard methods involves a large amount of guess-work disguised as scientific data, with the resulting probability of error. This probability is most true and most dangerous in heavy industry.The method described here does not attempt to determine actual future supply, this is impossible. Instead, it strives to define potential supply by conducting a worldwide study of the opportunities for creating new production units able to operate at low cost.The method, makes it possible to select the soundest and most profitable of the possible projects, without concern for those of competitors, since these will already have been analyzed within the framework of the study. The author claims that this method can provide objective estimates of long term return on investment, by taking as an average selling price the cost of sales of the last competitor on the list of those whose output is needed to meet normal demand.     

公共卫生体系的第三条道路——从藏医传统医技医法的调研谈起

调查结果表明,目前在藏区普遍存在看病难和看病贵的问题。实践证明,完全靠政府控制和自由市场规范机制解决这些问题,无法取得令人满意的效果。本文综合藏医学与补充货币的研究,认为使用"德吉券"来控制医疗成本,有一定的可行性。