A life satisfaction measure: Additional validational data for the Congruity Life Satisfaction measure

Meadowet al. (1992) have developed a measure of life satisfaction based on judgment theory, referred to as Congruity Life Satisfaction (CLS). This paper reports the results of a major study involving six samples from different countries testing the construct validity of the CLS measure. The results of these studies provide additional validational support for the CLS measure.     

The Impact of the Rural Population Component on Homicide Rates in the United States: A County-Level Analysis

Abstract Using 3,130 U.S. counties or county equivalents, this paper provides a test of the impact of rural population on the violent crime of homicide, while controlling for the effects of other correlates. The results indicate that the traditional bond of group cohesion assumed to be associated with the rural environment and its residents continues to have an inhibiting effect on homicide for counties in the United States.     

Lifestyle and home energy conservation in the United States: the poor accept lifestyle cutbacks while the wealthy invest in conservation

The extent to which United States consumers have taken lifestyle cutbacks in eleven expenditure areas as a result of higher energy prices is examined. Data are from a general population sample survey of 8,392 households in ten western states, covering approximately 24 percent of all U.S. households. It was found that an index summarizing the extent to which respondents had taken lifestyle cutbacks was somewhat related in a positive direction to making temporary home adjustments to save energy, but was not related to taking permanent home-related energy conservation actions. The findings bring into question whether a market-oriented conservation policy will increase the taking of conservation actions, but also raise a disturbing question about existing tax credit programs.     

Structural changes in high performing minority and nonminority banks in the deregulated banking environment

This study considers the changes that have occurred in the balance sheets of high-performance minority-owned banks during the period 1981–1988 and compares them to changes in the balance sheets of high-performance nonminority-owned banks. The changes are analyzed using two methodologies: decomposition analysis and a t-test of the mean differences of the balance sheet and of its component parts. The study examines changes in total assets, total liabilities, and the balance sheets as a whole, and then disaggregates the assets and liabilities to determine where the changes occurred in each group of banks. The findings show statistically significant differences in the average proportions of assets and liabilities between the two groups: minority banks held more cash than nonminority banks, fewer loans, more premises, a higher volume of other assets, more common stock and lower undivided profits. Although the wide differences in the structural changes of assets and liabilities began to narrow in 1985–1987, the analysis indicates the differences may again be increasing between the two groups.     

Slash fiction and human mating psychology

The stark contrasts between romance novels and pornography, both multibillion dollar global industries, underscore how different male and female erotic fantasies actually are. These differences reflect the different selection pressures males and females faced over human evolutionary history and highlight the utility of using unobtrusive measures to study aspects of human nature. Salmon & Symons (2001) examined slash (the depiction of a romantic or sexual relationship between typically heterosexual male television protagonists, such as Kirk and Spock from Star Trek) as an erotic genre, placing it in the context of romance and female sexual psychology. The topic is revisited here with attention also being paid to slash between two female television characters and the appeal to people of fiction in general.     

Toward integrated global models: From economic engineering to social science modeling

It is argued that political and military variables are so crucial in decision making that they ought to be included in world models. Three projects, including our own, are described in brief to give a sense of the theories and data that have been employed in some existing global modeling efforts based on this assumption. The project entitled Computer Simulations for Decision Making in International Affairs utilizes an adaptive macromodel of global political, military, and economic processes into which a host of empirically based minimodules are introduced. The Nations in Conflict studies have focused thus far on an econometric model comprised of three primary components: domestic growth and external expansions, competition for foreign resources, market, allies, and strategic advantage, and the dynamics of crisis behavior. The Alker simulation studies have utilized artificial intelligence techniques to study the structuring and restructuring of international systems of social interaction.The theoretical and empirical materials developed in these projects are highly relevant to the enterprise of integrated global modeling. The earliest efforts were begun to build models of the political and military components of international processes. Subsequent world modelers of the Forrester-Meadows inspired genre focused on the economic aspects of the globe, including its demography. It is argued that the convergence of these two traditions be accomplished in a synthetic fashion in ongoing as well as future work.     

The Industrial Transformation of Farm Communities: Implications for Family Structure and Socioeconomic Conditions

Abstract The industrialization of agriculture has resulted in extensive declines in the number of farms and in the number of people employed in agriculture. For many farm communities, this has resulted in rapid population declines. Other farm communities have been able to attract alternative sources of employment. This study analyzes family structure and socioeconomic conditions in 281 Great Plains counties that were economically dependent on agriculture at one time. Surprisingly, it was found that, while communities remaining agriculturally dependent had extensive population declines, they also had higher rates of employment, lower poverty rates, higher proportions of married couple households, and income levels equal to counties now economically dependent on nonfarm industries. Conditions in counties that have become service based were especially troubling.     

Closed-Form Deterministic End-to-End Performance Bounds for the Generalized Processor Sharing Scheduling Discipline

The Generalized Processor Sharing (GPS) schedulingdiscipline is an important scheduling mechanism that can support both class isolation and bandwidth sharing among different service classes, thus making itan appealing choice for networks providing multiple services with Quality-of-Service guarantees. In this paper, we study a broad classof GPS networks known as Consistent Relative Session Treatment}(CRST) GPS networks and establish closed-form end-to-end performance boundsfor CRST GPS networks. This result generalizes the results of Parekhand Gallager (1994) where simple, closed-form end-to-end performancebounds are derived for a special sub-class of CRST GPS networks, theso-called Rate Proportional Processor Sharing (RPPS) GPS networks, but performance bounds for the general CRST GPS networks do not haveclosed-form. Our result is obtained through the notion of CRSTpartition, which in fact yields a broader class of CRST GPS networksthan the one originally defined in (Parekh and Gallager, 1993). Moreover,our approach is quite general. It not only applies to the deterministicanalysis of GPS networks, but can also be employed in the study of GPSnetworks in a stochastic setting.     

Nationalism and the Linguistic Rights of Deaf Communities: Linguistic Imperialism and the Recognition and Development of Sign Languages

This paper examines the impact of nationalism on the linguistic rights of Deaf communities. In exploring the subtle hegemony of nationalism in relation to linguistic minorities, the paper discusses the impact of nationalisms on sign languages from two perspectives and in two contrasting situations. First, the paper examines the impact of nationalism on the recognition and promotion of natural sign languages. Second, it examines a particularly potent form of linguistic imperialism as the dominant linguistic forces seek not only to destroy minority languages but to transform existing minority linguistic processes to conform with the form and content of the national language, through the development and promotion of manually coded versions of national spoken and written languages in formal education. These issues are examined in relation to the nationalisms and indigenous sign languages of Australia and Indonesia.