A Case for Better Graphics: The Unclassed Choropleth Map

In recent years a number of researchers have shown a strong interest in statistical graphics. One widely used graphical method is the “statistical map,” or what is better known in cartography as the choropleth map. A factor in the use of these maps has been the need to group data into classes, raising the obvious question of defining optimum class intervals. Computer technology now makes it possible to produce unclassed choropleth maps, minimizing quantization error. An example of the two methods is given using criminal justice statistics. The unclassed maps are more accurate with regard to quantization error and appear to be of superior visual quality     

Reconstructing a Different South: The American Missionary Association and Jamaica, 1834–65

After British emancipation, a group of American abolitionists initiated a Christian mission to emancipated people in Jamaica, later to be adopted by the American Missionary Association (AMA). Using books and letters written by Americans in Jamaica, this article traces the evolution of evangelical abolitionists' views of emancipation between the 1830s and the 1850s. I argue that the Jamaica Mission taught its parent organisation, the AMA, to value landownership as the best means of ‘civilizing’ freed people, a belief that explains in part the AMA's support for land rights for American ex-slaves during and after the Civil War.     

A Systematic Review of Interventions for Elder Abuse

The purpose of this study was to use rigorous systematic review methods to summarize the effectiveness of interventions for elder abuse. Only eight studies met our inclusion criteria. Evidence regarding the recurrence of abuse following intervention was limited, but the interventions for which this outcome was reported failed to reduce, and may have even increased, the likelihood of recurrence. Elder abuse interventions had no significant effect on case resolution and at-risk caregiver outcomes, and had mixed results regarding professional knowledge and behavior related to elder abuse. The included studies had important methodological limitations that limit our ability to draw conclusions about the effectiveness of these interventions.     

DISPUTE DOMAINS

This article decribes how organizational disputes emerge within, and are shaped by, dispute domains . We analyze dispute domains as the fundamental assumptions, vocabularies, orientations, concerns, and constraints that circumscribe conflictual interaction in particular organizational settings. Organizational disputes are transformed as they move from one dispute domain to another. We examine such dispute transformations in the context of staff-client dispute processing in a welfare-to-work program, and conclude by discussing the implications for analyzing organizations as interrelated dispute domains.     

RATIFICATION AND UTILIZATION: HYPNOTIC TECHNIQUES TO FACILITATE REFRAMING DURING EARLY MARITAL THERAPY

This paper reexamines the Mental Research Institute (MRI) associates' intervention of refraining in marital therapy. The roots of MRI refraining are traced back to Milton Erickson. Ericksonian strategies of ratification and utilization are introduced to enhance the artistry of refraining construction and delivery. Through the use of these strategies, there is a heightened emphasis to four departures from the MRI position: (a) nonverbal language, (b) conjoint refraining,(c) unconscious "wisdom," and (d) recursive therapy. Examples of ratification and utilization techniques illustrate how the marital therapist can have greater therapeutic impact in designing reframes based on the "raw material" of presenting couple behaviors.     

The Environmental Movement and the Left: Antagonists or Allies?

This paper examines the potential impact of the Left on the goals, issues, strategies, and constituencies of the contemporary environmental movement, Contrasting the earlier disparagement of the movement by the Left with increased Leftist attraction to the mature movement, it is argued that the Left could contribute a theoretical context for environmental issues and influence segments of the environmental movement through an emphasis on protest strategies and the differential economic impacts of environmental problems.     

Vehicle routing using fixed delivery areas

In this paper we consider the problem of vehicle routing using fixed delivery areas. This is the problem of splitting the area serviced by a depot into a number of separate subareas—a single delivery vehicle being assigned to each subarea to supply all the customers within the subarea. A heuristic algorithm is developed for the problem based upon an initial allocation of customers to subareas followed by customer interchanges in an attempt to improve the subareas. Computational results are presented for a number of test problems drawn from the literature.     

Co‐production in the epidemiological clinic: A decentred analysis of the tensions in community‐based,client‐facing risk work

Public health policies to prevent disease within populations are giving rise to shifting patterns of healthcare delivery in the late modern era. There is an inherent tension in modern medicine between evidence‐based standardisation, on the one hand, and patient‐centred specificity on the other. This tension manifests in recent policy narratives regarding public health risk (which we have characterised in terms of the epidemiological clinic) and co‐production. Drawing on co‐produced data with health trainers (lay health workers tasked with supporting behavioural change in patients at high risk of cardiovascular disease) in a deprived post‐industrial region of England, our decentred analysis focuses on three extended narratives from this data set. Our analysis builds on and develops emerging theories of risk work, informed by Habermas, and we explore the extent to which elite narratives of public health risk are resisted, absorbed, or bracketed off by client‐facing health workers—emphasising the heterogeneity of responses—and locate these responses within the context of the workers' employment conditions, their embodied experiences, and their wider beliefs and traditions. We argue that co‐production—albeit in a highly constrained form—is possible while delivering public health interventions. However, in the context of a community where health is so adversely affected by wider social problems and where task shifting has drawn lower status healthcare workers into these client‐facing roles, workers must find their own ways to negotiate and attempt to reconcile this context with the risk‐framed practices they are required to carry out.