An Investigation of Measures of Modern and Old-Fashioned Sexism

Working from the Principle of Beneficence we make the case that there is a need for adequate measures of sexism in men and women. Swim, Aikin, Hall and Hunter (1995) suggest that modern sexism represents a constellation of beliefs in which individuals: (a) disavow women's present-day discrimination; (b) reject women's demands for political and economic power; and (c) disapprove of policies designed to promote gender equality. To assess this construct, Swim et al. (1995) developed the Modern Sexism Scale (MSS), and to date, few studies have assessed its reliability and factor structure. Using data from 187 Canadian participants, confirmatory factor analysis was used to assess the unidimensionality of the MSS and Swim and associates' (1995) Old-Fashioned Sexism Scale (OFSS). Results do not support Swim et al.'s conceptualization of modern sexism as a unidimensional construct; however, the OFSS fit a unidimensional model. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Parental marital disruption and intergenerational transfers: An analysis of lone elderly parents and their children

Although one of the most marked demographic trends observed over the twentieth century is the increased rate of divorce, relatively little research has explored the effects of these changing marital patterns in the context of an aging society. Using a sample of lone elderly parents and their adult children, we analyze the direct and indirect effects of marital disruption on four important dimensions of intergenerational transfers: coresidence, financial assistance, adult children's provision of informal care, and parental purchase of paid care. Our findings suggest that divorce has deleterious effects on intergenerational transfers, particularly for elderly fathers. Remarriage further reduces exchange. Our results reveal that parents engage in lower levels of transfers with stepchildren relative to biological children. Moreover, intergenerational transfers are sensitive to characteristics of biological children but not to those of stepchildren. Taken together, these results suggest that exchange at the end of the life course continues to be adversely affected by marital disruption.     

Technocratic Social Work at Home and Abroad: Australia and Iran

Technocratic social work conceived as the neutral application of professional skills has an inbuilt capacity for failing to recognize its social and political effects. Two recent books on social work exemplify this in countries as apparently diverse as Australia and Iran.     

对中国企业知识产权战略的几点思考

分析知识产权在国家中的地位和作用,指出在经济高度全球化、知识化的今天,知识产权的竞争已成为迄今为止人类社会最高级别的竞争,知识产权的创造水平和保护水平正在成为衡量一个国家综合国力和持续发展力的根本尺度和标志性依据。指出中国企业必须树立强烈的知识产权战略意识,并真正建立起自己的知识产权战略,才能在这场关乎国家和民族的未来、企业的生存与发展的战役中立于不败之地。     

IMPLICIT OPTIMAL AND HEURISTIC LABOR STAFFING IN A MULTIOBJECTIVE,MULTILOCATION ENVIRONMENT*

This paper presents a tractable set of integer programming models for the days-off scheduling of a mix of full- and part-time employees working α to β days/week (cycle) in a multiple-objective, multiple-location environment. Previous models were formulated to specifically schedule part-time employees working either two or three days per week. These models were intractable because they required complete employee schedule information. The new models are deemed implicit optimal since they are required to supply only essential information. While the number of variables in previous models is an exponential increasing function of β-α, the size of three of the new models is independent of α and β. The first three models developed here (as in [18]) deal with the trade-offs between idle time, the number of employees required to work at multiple “locations,” and the size of the total labor pool. The inherent flexibility of the implicit modeling approach is illustrated by the presentation of various modifications of the basic models. These modifications permit the use of preference weights on the number of employee work days/week (cycle) or the minimization of payroll costs where differential pay rates exist. These latter models may also be formulated such that idle time is ignored, constrained or minimized. The execution time for the implicit models (on a CDC CYBER 730 computer with commercially available software) averaged well under five seconds on 1200 trial problems for the type of application considered in [18]. A solution was obtained in less than 46 seconds of CPU time for a trial problem which would have required over 1.4 million integer variables with previous models. The availability of optimal solutions was invaluable in the development of two heuristics designed to deal with the trade-offs of [16]. In an experimental analysis a previous heuristic produced results which averaged from 74 to 508 percent above optimum across six experimental conditions. The comparable new heuristic produced results which averaged from 3 to 8 percent above optimum for the same experimental conditions. The paper concludes by developing a framework to integrate the results of this research with the tour scheduling problem and by identifying several other areas for related research.     

历史学家面对战争

第一次世界大战前,对现代社会和文化发展的忧虑便普遍存在———这一点在德国表现得尤为明显。德国、法国、英国及美国的历史学家都在期望战后的世界不要完全不同于战前的秩序。战前的迹象表明,人们同时也在作一些缓和紧张局势的尝试,在历史学家中,这种情况就更为显著。德国学界的国际交往在继续,并且呈扩大的趋势。然而,随着战争的爆发,友谊变成了仇恨,不仅针对敌对国家,也针对它们的历史学家。战争双方都认为,这是一场两种文化间的战争。一战期间,两大阵营的历史学家立场和行为有着很大的相似性,即不论战前他们在政治问题上分歧多么大,一旦战争爆发,他们都几乎无条件地支持战争,尽管这些分歧只是被暂时搁置在一边,这种情形在德国尤为突出。然而,毫无疑问也有一些不同之处。在支持与反对战争的双方之间,分歧与一致同时存在。值得注意的是,在德国,战争对历史编纂学的影响很小,历史学家都不愿接受战争带来的新的现实。一战后,德国的历史学家很少再与其他国家,特别是法国和美国历史研究的新潮流发生联系;由于抵制变迁,德国历史学变得越来越和国际学术界无关。