Sources of drug information among adolescent students

A sample of 1023 eighth and tenth grade students in small to medium-sized central Texas school districts was assessed to determine the amount of information they receive from ten sources about six categories of drugs. The amount of information males reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what females reported, and the amount of information that eighth graders reported receiving about each drug category was significantly greater than what tenth graders reported. Television was the primary source of drug information for all categories of drugs except inhalants, for which friends and television were equally important sources. Parents and printed media (magazines or newspapers) were of secondary importance, followed by friends and teachers. Adolescents were less likely to receive drug-related information from experience, siblings, church, doctors, and police. The reliance on the mass media for drug information in smaller school districts is a pattern which has been previously observed in larger urban districts. This consistency suggests that mass media approaches to drug education are likely to be as effective in rural areas and smaller towns as they are among urban adolescents. Implications for television programming are discussed.     

Book Review: Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise. Gaylord Nelson with Susan Campbell and Paul Wozniak. Madison,WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002: 160 pp.

Population and Environment -     

The Sociology of Expertise: The Distribution of Social Fluency

Expert knowledge is an essential component of modern society. It is also a potentially difficult topic for sociology because of the importance sociology attaches to culture and context. The sociology of science has emphasised the continuity between scientific expertise and more traditional forms of knowledge. Whilst this suggests an increasing 'democratisation of expertise' is desirable, it also risks erasing the idea of expertise itself. This might be particularly detrimental for sociology as it restricts the role of sociological inquiry to examining how expert status is attributed rather than understanding what expertise is. This paper describes these developments and contrasts them with other approaches in which expertise appears less important. It concludes by setting out a new approach to expertise that respects the role of culture in generating knowledge but, by stressing the importance of socialisation and experience, argues for a more nuanced conception of expertise as both real and unequally distributed.     

An Experimental Evaluation of the Serial Cost Sharing Rule

This paper proposes an experimental test to evaluate the performance of the serial cost sharing rule, originally proposed by Shenker [Sigmetrics, 241–242 (1990)] and then analyzed by Moulin and Shenker [Econometrica 60, 1009–1037 (1992)]. We report measures of the performance and efficiency of the serial mechanism by comparing the choices and payoffs attained by the subjects to the expected equilibrium allocations. Experimental evidence shows that learning is needed for the subjects to converge to the equilibrium strategy. However, in terms of efficiency, the serial mechanism leads to almost efficient allocations.     

Adaptive Management: A Paradigm for Remediation of Public Facilities Following a Terrorist Attack

Terrorist actions are aimed at maximizing harm (health, psychological, economical, and political) through the combined physical impacts of the act and fear. Immediate and effective response to a terrorist act is critical to limit human and environmental harm, effectively restore facility function, and maintain public confidence. Though there have been terrorist attacks in public facilities that we have learned from, overall our experiences in restoration of public facilities following a terrorist attack are limited. Restoration of public facilities following a release of a hazardous material is inherently far more complex than in industrial settings and has many unique technical, economic, social, and political challenges. For example, there may be a great need to quickly restore the facility to full operation and allow public access even though it was not designed for easy or rapid restoration, and critical information is needed for quantitative risk assessment and effective restoration must be anticipated to be incomplete and uncertain. Whereas present planning documents have substantial linearity in their organization, the “adaptive management” paradigm provides a constructive parallel paradigm for restoration of public facilities that anticipates and plans for uncertainty, inefficiencies, and stakeholder participation. Adaptive management grew out of the need to manage and restore natural resources in highly complex and changing environments with limited knowledge about causal relationships and responses to restoration actions. Similarities between natural resource management and restoration of a public facility after a terrorist attack suggest that integration of adaptive management principles explicitly into restoration processes will result in substantially enhanced and flexible responses necessary to meet the uncertainties of potential terrorist attacks.     

Mission,money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.     

On the Third Law of Demand

The Alchian and Allen theorem predicts that it will be harder to find "good" apples in the State of Washington, a prime apple-growing region, than in, say, New York City, where the addition of shipping charges makes "bad" apples comparatively more expensive. We recast the theorem as a testable proposition by explicitly taking the supply side into account and identifying plausible scenarios in which a fixed cost either has no effect on the relative prices of high and low quality grades of the same good in distant markets or, indeed, causes more of the bad apples to be shipped out.