St. Wolfgang College's Health

St. Wolfgang College recently decided to change its health care plan. The administration took this action after just minimum consultation with the faculty. Consequently, the faculty is disheartened, seeing the action as a reflection of the college's top down decision making process and command culture. Faculty are in a quadary as to what they can do. Further, the administration of the college has largely rebuffed the faculty's efforts to increase its involvement in governance, rejecting a faculty reform effort. The college's president has a background primarily in administration at the secondary school level. Since assuming leadership he has focused on improving physical plant. He avows a mission of enhancing the college's academic reputation and has taken actions that he and the administration believe will achieve this goal, such as dismantling two year degree programs that primarily serve disadvantaged and minority students and providing extra funding to flagship programs.     

Pitfalls in Drawing Policy Conclusions from Retrospective Survey Data: The Case of Advertising and Underage Smoking

Measuring the impact of potentially controllable factors on the willingness of youth to undertake health risks is important to informed public health policy decisions. Typically the only data linking these factors with risk-taking behavior are retrospective. This study demonstrates, by means of a recent example, that there can be serious pitfalls in using even longitudinal retrospective data to draw conclusions about causal relations between potentially controllable factors and risk-taking behavior.     

Beacon Art Center and Institute

The Beacon Art Center and Institute, located in an area of Florida experiencing rapid population growth, has enjoyed increases in membership,revenue and services. The Board of the Corporation and the Director must develop a long range strategic plan for the future of the organization. Ability to function is currently restricted by limited space, limited size of staff, and limited endowment. The center also faces potentially troublesome governance issues. The long run future of the art center must be addressed by the Board and the Director of the organization. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

HIGH SCHOOLS AND CRIME: A REPLICATION

Using Cleveland data, we replicate Roncek and LoBosco's study of the effect of proximity to San Diego's high schools on crime in their surroundings. We also examine a major alternative hypothesis whether having other non-residential land uses in the schools' surroundings accounts for crime in these areas. Our findings closely parallel theirs. Proximity to public high schools only increases crime on city blocks which are immediately adjacent to the schools. Second, the size of a school's enrollment is not important for explaining crime in its surroundings. The analysis of non-residential effects supports Roncek and LoBosco's claim that crime effects are due solely to the presence of public high schools, although other land uses affect crime near private high schools. While there are differences in the exact magnitudes of the effects, the substance of their findings for San Diego generalizes well to a very different city. More generally, we argue that Wirth's early arguments about the effect of urbanism on impeding social control can be extended to the residential areas within the city.     

“I Don't Go By Sean Patrick”: On-Line/Off-Line/Out Identity and SeanPatrickLive.com

Web cams are cameras that are attached to a computer in order to send continuously updated pictures over the Internet. SeanPatrickLive is a Web cam site that documented the life of Sean, a gay man living in the Washington, D.C. area. This essay is the result of ethnographic interviews with Sean Patrick. It discusses Web cams within the context of the cyberqueer, examining how sexuality is presented on-line, using the Internet and the Web cam as a form of gay/queer politics, and performing identity on- and off-line.     

The use of resighting data to estimate the rate of population growth of the snail kite in Florida

The rate of population growth ( u ) is an important demographic parameter used to assess the viability of a population and to develop management and conservation agendas. We examined the use of resighting data to estimate u for the snail kite population in Florida from 1997-2000. The analyses consisted of (1) a robust design approach that derives an estimate of u from estimates of population size and (2) the Pradel (1996) temporal symmetry (TSM) approach that directly estimates u using an open-population capture-recapture model. Besides resighting data, both approaches required information on the number of unmarked individuals that were sighted during the sampling periods. The point estimates of u differed between the robust design and TSM approaches, but the 95% confidence intervals overlapped substantially. We believe the differences may be the result of sparse data and do not indicate the inappropriateness of either modelling technique. We focused on the results of the robust design because this approach provided estimates for all study years. Variation among these estimates was smaller than levels of variation among ad hoc estimates based on previously reported index statistics. We recommend that u of snail kites be estimated using capture-resighting methods rather than ad hoc counts.     

Effects of Risk and Time Preference and Expected Longevity on Demand for Medical Tests

Despite their conceptual importance, the effects of time preference, expected longevity, uncertainty, and risk aversion on behavior have not been analyzed empirically. We use data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to assess the role of risk and time preference, expected longevity, and education on demand for three measures used for early detection of breast and cervical cancer—regular breast self-exams, mammograms, and Pap smears. We find that individuals with a higher life expectancy and lower time preference are more likely to undergo cancer screening. Less risk averse individuals tend to be more likely to undergo testing.     

Parenting capacity

We describe an approach to the assessment of parenting for families in which child abuse has been established to have occurred. Neither the category of abuse nor its physical severity adequately predicts the future wellbeing or safety of an abused child. The critical variable in determining the child's future is the level of disturbance in parenting. We argue against the most common approach to assessments of parenting, which is to generate a non‐hierarchical list of issues with the emphasis on relatively concrete and readily measurable dimensions such as social support, parental knowledge about parenting and the child's developmental status. We enhance the standard approach to assessment by organizing it around parenting capacity. We do not attempt to operationalize parenting capacity, de?ning it as the parents' ability to empathically understand and give priority to their child's needs. Adequate parenting requires that the parents be able to meet the challenges posed by their particular child's temperament and development (which may be shaped by the abusive experience) and also to accept and be prepared to address their own intrinsic characteristics which impede their parenting capacity. Parenting capacity is more dif?cult to assess than the more concrete and commonly measured aspects of parenting, but we argue that its assessment should be central to child protection management decisions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Public Opposition to a Proposed Nuclear Waste Repository in Canada: An Investigation of Cultural and Economic Effects

Residents of four northern communities were surveyed about Atomic Energy of Canada Limited's proposal to site an underground repository for high-level nuclear waste somewhere in the Canadian Shield. Opposition to the repository was relatively strong in all communities, but was strongest among aboriginal respondents. Path analysis revealed that trust in nuclear regulators, faith in science and technology, and anticipated net costs were important mediators of this effect. Aboriginals were less trusting, exhibited less faith in science and technology, and perceived the costs associated with the repository to be higher than their nonaboriginal counterparts. No support was found for the hypothesis that, after controlling for aboriginal status, financially insecure individuals would display greater support for the nuclear waste repository than financially secure individuals. Policy implications for balancing perceived risks and siting needs are discussed.