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.     

Four issues unique to socio-cultural indicators

Four value commitments act as barriers to the development of sociocultural indicators. First, no specialists exist to develop socio-cultural indicators. Second, society is seen only as an order-seeking entity. Third, we fail to see the phenomenon as a living system. Fourth, our commitment to a pseudo-pragmatism dictates that such indicators must be ‘useful’ to those who bankroll their collection. Perhaps systems philosophers should be contracted to guide the task.     

Iterative Converging Algorithms for Computing Bounds on Durations of Activities in Pert and Pert-Like Models

Since its invention in 1958, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) has been widely used during the planning, design, and implementation of projects. Pert models the activities of a project as a single source-single sink directed acyclic graph where nodes represent events (end or beginning of activities) and arcs activities. The maximum amount by which an activity can be delayed without delaying the overall project is called the slack. Critical tasks have zero slack whereas all noncritical tasks have positive slacks. Pert is a valuable tool in the management of large projects since it allows to compute the slack of each activity of the project. Such information may be crucial in avoiding cost overruns that would be caused by delays to critical activities and/or excessive delays to noncritical activities. What Pert fails to provide is how one should go about distributing remaining slack on noncritical activities while taking into consideration properties of the activities as well as precedence relationships among them, so as to have reasonable upper bounds on duration of all activities, critical or noncritical. In this paper we propose several algorithms for the distribution of slack on non-critical activities. We show that if one desires to distribute the remaining slack proportionally to the initially assigned activity durations then the problem is in P, and propose an algorithm of linear time complexity. However if one desires to use distribution functions other than the initial durations of activities, then the problem of slack distribution becomes NP-complete. Finding the maximal bounds corresponding to zero-slack solution at the sink requires iterative application of exponential algorithm. For that case we introduce an approximation algorithm of linear time complexity on each iteration. The algorithm iteratively increases bounds on durations of activities and converges to the zero-slack solution on all paths from the source node to the sink node in the Pert-like graph. The algorithms described in this paper were successfully applied to solving timing bounds problems in VLSI design.     

Children Exposed to Community Violence: Issues for Assessment and Treatment

Community violence is increasingly recognized as a risk factor for serious psychological problems with children particularly vulnerable to its effects. This article summarizes the existing knowledge on the effects of chronic exposure to community violence, highlights essential issues in assessing children for both exposure and resulting trauma from community violence, and provides treatment guidelines for those affected children.     

Where Risks and Protective Factors Operate Differently: Homeless Sexual Minority Youth and Suicide Attempts

Using a sample of 628 homeless youth and young adults from eight US cities, this study examines whether the relationship between having been in custody of social services and suicide attempts, and the relationship between engaging in survival sex and suicide attempts differ based on sexual orientation. Findings suggest that being in custody of social services is associated with a significant increase in likelihood of suicide attempts for heterosexual youth, it does not, however, significantly change the already increased risk of suicide attempts for sexual minority youth. Engaging in survival sex appears to be associated with increased risks of suicide attempts for both heterosexual and sexual minority youth, but the increase in likelihood is much stronger for heterosexual youth than for sexual minority youth. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Household adversity and food security: The case of youth in public housing neighborhoods

This paper sets out to explore factors that may be associated with food hardship among young people who reside in public housing (N?=?124). The study is guided by Family Stress Theory and uses data from a cross-sectional study of African–American adolescents living in a public housing neighborhood located in West Baltimore. Results suggest that food security (defined as availability, accessibility, and adequacy) was negatively related to mother’s incarceration, large households, household experiencing material hardships, and interpersonal conflict as well as violence. It was also linked to community disorganization. Program and policy implications are suggested.     

Partner Violence Victimization Among Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,Transgender, and Queer Youth: Associations Among Risk Factors

Literature shows that youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer (LGBTQ) experience high rates of victimization across various contexts, though there is little research specific to partner violence victimization. Given the deleterious effects of partner violence seen in both youth generally and LGBTQ adults, it is imperative to investigate partner violence among LGBTQ youth. The authors investigated the prevalence of partner violence among a community sample of LGBTQ youth (N = 140) and examined potential correlates of said violence. Approximately half of the participants had ever experienced some form of partner violence. Rates of ever experiencing partner violence were approximately 2.5 times higher for youth who had binge drank in the past month or ever experienced familial abuse and nearly three times higher for youth who had experienced an episode of homelessness in the past year. Implications for professionals who serve LGBTQ youth are discussed.