Acomparison between Northern and Southern blacks residing in the North

Differences between Southern and non-Southern blacks living in the North and West are considered for a wide variety of attributes such as employment, occupation, income, marital stability, and offspring's performance in school. Migrant blacks have generally more favorable rates than their Northern- and Western-born compatriots after standard domographic controls are applied to an unusually detailed set of cross-tabulations based on the One-Percent Sample Tapes for 1960. Perhaps the sharpest gap exists with respect to marital conditions; Southern blacks of both sexes are more likely to marry and, among those ever married, live more frequently with their spouses. Some of the results reported by earlier investigators require considerable modification; For example, the fact that Northern black men are less often at work than migrants has led to speculations about regional differences in work orientation among blacks, but a detailed analysis of labor force activity indicates this pattern does not hold for women. Likewise, the migrant income advantage is found to vary by education such that it is confined to those with low educational attainment. The use of sample tapes permits a novel analysis of differences between Northern-born blacks classified by whether they are second or at least third generation residents of the North (children of Southern- or Northern-born parents, respectively). For the attribute measured, school performance, the gap is essentially nil. Finally, an alternative is suggested to the existing causal interpretations of North-South gaps among black residents of the North. Reconsidered in particular are the higher labor force rates of migrant men and their more frequent employment in blue collar jobs;     

Past Activeness,Solidarity, and Local Development Efforts1

Abstract Actions by local groups and leaders constitute an essential but poorly understood element of many rural development strategies. Previous studies suggest that local development efforts can influence community change, but questions remain about why localities differ in mobilization to achieve development goals. Drawing upon community field theory and human ecology, this study uses data for rural school districts in Pennsylvania to examine the argument that activeness in the past and development of solidarity can contribute to a higher probability of local mobilization than would be predicted by ecological characteristics alone. Hierarchical regressions support this argument for some local actions, while canonical correlations show a generalized pattern strongly associated with past activeness and solidarity.     

‘It's About People and Their Environment’: Student Social Workers' Definitions of Social Work Research

This article considers constructions of social work research from the perspectives of student social workers in New Zealand. There have been many academic discussions of the unique epistemology that can be called social work research but little is known of students and/or practitioner views. Are they interested in social work research? Do they even care about debates on epistemology? Forty-three student social workers considered two questions while attending a social work research methods course: ‘What is social work research?’ and ‘What kind of social work researcher might I be?’. A subset of 18 distance students explored a third question: ‘Should social work research be part of everyday practice or not?’. To answer these questions students provided comments in a short survey, material from their written student assignments and comments from online discussion board activities. The results suggest that student social workers have a preference for social work research that is compatible with their clearly articulated social work value base, and that social work research primarily should benefit the client group with which a social worker is closely linked. Student social workers also recognise the importance of research for their everyday practice, yet at the same time feel there are organisational constraints to this happening.     

Adolescent Substance Use and Marital Status in Adulthood

Researchers have noted that substance use in the adolescent years is associated with a variety of consequences. The majority of studies have focused on relatively short-term consequences of substance use. Using data from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, this study examines how early substance use and current substance use affect individuals’ eventual marital status. Higher levels of substance use in the adult years are shown to be relatively deleterious to both women’s and men’s chances of marriage. However, initial cigarette use in the adolescent years is shown to enhance adults’ likelihood of marriage, whereas adolescent marijuana use substantially reduces the chances of marriage. Interestingly, early alcohol use decreases women’s chances of becoming married yet increases the chances for men. Similarly, early alcohol use was associated with a greater risk of divorce. Overall, the results point to the intricate nature of early substance use and the long-term consequences thereof. The results are discussed within a framework of precocious development theory.     

Composable models for online Bayesian analysis of streaming data

Data is rapidly increasing in volume and velocity and the Internet of Things (IoT) is one important source of this data. The IoT is a collection of connected devices (things) which are constantly recording data from their surroundings using on-board sensors. These devices can record and stream data to the cloud at a very high rate, leading to high storage and analysis costs. In order to ameliorate these costs, the data is modelled as a stream and analysed online to learn about the underlying process, perform interpolation and smoothing and make forecasts and predictions. Conventional state space modelling tools assume the observations occur on a fixed regular time grid. However, many sensors change their sampling frequency, sometimes adaptively, or get interrupted and re-started out of sync with the previous sampling grid, or just generate event data at irregular times. It is therefore desirable to model the system as a partially and irregularly observed Markov process which evolves in continuous time. Both the process and the observation model are potentially non-linear. Particle filters therefore represent the simplest approach to online analysis. A functional Scala library of composable continuous time Markov process models has been developed in order to model the wide variety of data captured in the IoT.     

Stakeholder strategies for the physician executive.

If physician executives are to be effective in confronting the environmental turbulence and uncertainty facing their organizations, they must effectively manage their stakeholders. This article extends the stakeholder approach described in the May-June 1989 issue of Physician Executive as a tool for the physician executive in the development of practical strategies to cope with turbulence and uncertainty. We suggest four generic strategies physician executives can use: involve supportive stakeholders, monitor marginal stakeholders, defend against nonsupportive stakeholders, and collaborate with mixed-blessing stakeholders. As an overarching strategy, a physician executive should try to change the organization's relationships with a stakeholder from a less favorable category to a more favorable one. The stakeholder can then be managed using the generic strategy most appropriate for the category.     

Suicide and rurality in Alabama communities

Empirical research findings suggest that suicide increases with rurality, but research on rural suicide leaves many questions unanswered. This study specifies problems of community organization as a reason for expecting a positive effect of rurality on the suicide rate. A multiple regression analysis of county data shows that rurality has a substantial positive effect and is, in fact, the best predictor of the suicide rate among several variables selected from the previous literature. Additional research is needed to test the interpretation that rurality contributes to an incomplete, fragmented form of community organization which influences the suicide rate by disrupting primary relationships.     

The Student Watershed Research Project (SWRP): collecting watershed data for use by resource management agencies

From 1992 to 1994, Saturday Academy and the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology instituted the pilot phase of a long-term monitoring program called the Student Watershed Research Project (SWRP). The SWRP program was developed to create and maintain collaboration among eighth through twelfth grade teachers and students, scientists, businesses, governmental agencies, and community members which would couple environmental education with the collection of high quality, reproducible watershed health data.The original authors of this paper set out to evaluate the impacts of the SWRP program in terms of changes in educational attitudes of participants and collection of accurate data. Findings demonstrate that assuring accuracy of student collected data was challenging, that teachers and students benefited greatly from a hands-on research approach to science education, and that such an approach would be difficult without the support of a program like SWRP.The SWRP program is entering its seventh year in the Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington metropolitan areas with approximately half of the pilot phase participants still involved. A Quality Assurance Project Plan has been developed to assure data accuracy. Evaluation student science education attitudes documents improved results on a yearly basis.     

Negotiating with interactive scenarios and strategies

Physician executives need to negotiate effectively with a wide range of parties. In those negotiations, they should consider the relative importance of both substantive and relationship outcomes in selecting initial negotiation strategies. Of course, these strategies may or may not be successful, depending on the strategies used by the other party. Hence, the physician executive must consider the other party's strategy and how it and his or her initial strategy are likely to interact both before and during negotiations.