From Access to Opportunity: The Evolving Social Roles of Community Colleges

This paper looks at the social role played by community colleges, the students they serve, and some of the current challenges they face. Community colleges have always been multi-mission institutions and in recent decades have been leaders in enrolling students from diverse family backgrounds. “Nontraditional” students make up the majority of community college students. This paper looks at the diversity of students in terms of race and ethnicity, first-generation college-goers, and students who are academically underprepared. The paper concludes with a discussion of the strengths of the community college experience for students coming from diverse backgrounds.     

An intelligent workstation controller for integrated planning and scheduling of FMS cell

This paper presents an experimental design developed to determine a combination of robust planning and scheduling rules for an intelligent workstation controller (IWC). The IWC is used as part of the control system for an automated flexible manufacturing system. A three-level hierarchical control structure (shop, workstation and equipment)is adopted in order effectively to control a shop-floor. At the top level is a shop controller which receives orders and their associated manufacturing information, and manages interactions among workstations. The IWC defines and resolves the production control activities necessary to coordinate a group of equipment controllers so as to ensure the completion of orders. Specifically, the IWC is responsible for selecting a specific process routeing for each part, allocating resources, scheduling and coordinating the activities across the equipment, monitoring the progress of activities, detecting and recovering from errors, and preparing reports. These activities are accomplished using planning, scheduling, and execution functions. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the IWC, all the controllable and uncontrollable factors need to be identified and detailed. Controllable factors are those which are set by the controller and cannot be directly affected by the production environment. Uncontrollable factors are those which vary with the production environment and cannot be directly changed by the controller developer. The objective of the paper is to illustrate how a good set of controllable factors that dictate the IWC's effectiveness and robustness over various uncontrollable factors can be determined. Due to the number of possible combinations of all the factors, a complete validation of the effectiveness and robustness of the IWC is extremely time consuming and far beyond the scope of this paper. Therefore, a few planning and scheduling strategies are selected and a formal experiment is conducted. The experiment illustrates how significant performance dependencies for various planning and scheduling strategies can be identified.     

“Fracking democracy”: Issue management and locus of policy decision-making in the Marcellus Shale gas drilling debate

This study examined a two-year period in which natural gas development in the Marcellus Shale region of Pennsylvania expanded rapidly, as did public policy proposals meant to deal with the myriad legal, economic, and environmental issues that accompanied this growth. Focusing on the use of legitimacy strategies during the critical phase of the issue of hydraulic fracturing, the study examined how activists and energy industry advocates argued that different levels of government policy making – local, state, and federal – should be the locus of policy decisions. Both the “fractivists” and the energy industry sought to legitimize state-level legislators and regulators. Activists viewed federal-level intervention as legitimate leverage for their work in the state, while the energy industry saw federal regulators as redundant and restrictive. Finally, while both sides viewed local authorities as legitimate actors, the energy industry sought to limit their ability to act against the development of new wells.     

A comparison of two boxplot methods for detecting univariate outliers which adjust for sample size and asymmetry

It is important to identify outliers since inclusion, especially when using parametric methods, can cause distortion in the analysis and lead to erroneous conclusions. One of the easiest and most useful methods is based on the boxplot. This method is particularly appealing since it does not use any outliers in computing spread. Two methods, one by Carling and another by Schwertman and de Silva, adjust the boxplot method for sample size and skewness. In this paper, the two procedures are compared both theoretically and by Monte Carlo simulations. Simulations using both a symmetric distribution and an asymmetric distribution were performed on data sets with none, one, and several outliers. Based on the simulations, the Carling approach is superior in avoiding masking outliers, that is, the Carling method is less likely to overlook an outlier while the Schwertman and de Silva procedure is much better at reducing swamping, that is, misclassifying an observation as an outlier. Carling’s method is to the Schwertman and de Silva procedure as comparisonwise versus experimentwise error rate is for multiple comparisons. The two methods, rather than being competitors, appear to complement each other. Used in tandem they provide the data analyst a more complete prospective for identifying possible outliers.     

Rural development and the regional state: Denying multifunctional agriculture in the UK

Under the emerging rural development paradigm, we argue that to be multifunctional an activity must add income to agriculture, it must contribute to the construction of a new agricultural sector that corresponds to the needs of the wider society and it must reconfigure rural resources in ways that lead to wider rural development benefits. By evaluating UK rural policies on the basis of whether or not they attempt to meet these conditions, this paper shows that an implicit recognition of agriculture's multifunctional character has occurred recently through the shift from a sectoral to a regional and territorial perspective that reintegrates farming into rural development. However, in practice, and especially in England, the UK government has been unable to turn multifunctional activities into a real rural development option. In fact, by continuing to support agri-industrial/retailer interests on the one hand, and post-productivist— environmental and amenity— interests on the other, the State is governing mostly by setting up competitively organized ‘projects’ and schemes that continue to justify the concentration (and limitation) of resources allocated to agriculture. Based upon a critique of policy developments over the past decade, this paper emphasizes the need for more innovative forms of state innovation that provide opportunities for new, creative and more spatially embedded forms of supply and demand management in agri-food. In the conclusions, the paper also argues that more critical research is needed to uncover the existing and potential role of both governments and producer networks in progressing sustainable rural development through agricultural multifunctionality.     

The hotnot syndrome: Myth‐making in South African school textbooks

Cultural myths are important for the maintenance of political control in a hierarchial multi‐ethnic society. History is often manipulated by the ruling elite at the expense of other segments of the society. South Africa is no exception. The maintenance of these myths is supported by the educational system from a very young age. Disenfranchised people are usually at the bottom of the social ladder and have so little input into the myth‐making process that they reject their aboriginal heritage. The study offered here of South African history textbooks written from the beginning of the First World War to the 1980's shows that they are a reflection of the controlling elite's perception of history which is not consistent with current archaeological and anthropological studies by reputable scholars. The exposure of these myths now permits an acceptance by the descendants of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Cape of their indigenous cultural heritage.     

The cocos-keeling islands: A demographic laboratory

The Cocos Islands, which are situated in the Indian Ocean approximately halfway between Colombo and Fremantle, were first peopled early in the nineteenth century and were gradually developed as a very isolated coconut plantation with a labour force consisting partly of persons of Malay stock descended from the original group of settlers and partly of Bantamese contract labourers from Java. As the Cocos-born population increased in size, the dependence on contract labour decreased and, before the end of the century, all immigration ceased. The 1947 Malay population of the islands was about 1,800.

The islands are fascinating from a demographer's point of view because there was a virtually complete registration of live births, deaths and marriages and a partial registration of stillbirths. With these registration records it was possible to construct the life history of every individual from birth, through infancy and childhood to marriage, and thence through fatherhood or motherhood to death.

The picture revealed by an analysis of these records is that of a population with very high fertility and with mortality at a high level before the first World war and at a medium level after that war. Crude birth rates varied between 50 and 60 per thousand population during the period 1888 to 1947. Crude death rates were between 30 and 40 per thousand population until 1912 but under 2.0 per thousand population after 1918.

Most Cocos girls married before reaching the age of 20 and there were an average of between eight and nine live births per woman living through the childbearing period. There was a steady decline in the average number of live births with advancing age at marriage from age 16 onwards. A significantly high proportion of those dying in the middle of the childbearing period had never married, but the fertility of those marrying at an early age (14, 15 and 16) and dying before reaching the age of 36 was slightly higher than that of those who married at a similar age and survived. Women who survived to the age of 55 were of higher fertility than those who died between the ages of 40 and 55. An analysis of birth intervals revealed significant differences (a) between birth intervals after a stillbirth or after a live birth in which the child died in early infancy, and birth intervals after a live birth in which the offspring survived for longer than 0.4 years, and (b) between the interval from first to second birth and the subsequent birth intervals. There was a difference of almost exactly a year between the average birth interval after a stillbirth or live birth ending in a neo-natal death and the average birth interval after the birth of a child surviving to age 2; there was a similar difference of a year between corresponding median birth intervals.

From 1888 to 1912 infant mortality was well above 300 per thousand. After 1918 infant mortality averaged rather under 100 infant deaths per 1,000 live births. The reduction in infant mortality rates was accompanied by an increase in the mortality of children aged 1 to 4, and the heavy incidence of mortality at these ages after 1918 is the most striking feature of the analysis of mortality by age. Whilst mortality in infancy fell much more heavily on males than on females, early childhood mortality was much higher in Cocos for girls than for boys. The life table computed for the period 1918 to 1947 indicated a life expectancy of about 50 years for males and 47 years for females.     

Leadership Style in Relation to Organizational Change and Organizational Creativity: Perceptions from Nonprofit Organizational Members

As the environment within which organizations act continues to change and becomes increasingly competitive, maintaining an organizational climate that supports change and encourages creativity is a key objective for organizational leaders. This article examines the relationship between leadership style (transformational, transactional, laissez‐faire) and members' perceptions of the psychological climate for organizational change readiness and psychological climate for organizational creativity. Results indicate that transformational leaders have a direct positive relationship with psychological climate for organizational change readiness and organizational creativity, while laissez‐faire leaders have a negative relationship.