Teaching about race and social action by ‘digging up the past’: the Mary Turner project

This paper explores how incorporating localized historical acts of racial injustice into Sociology courses can have a variety of pedagogical and social impacts. The use of one such event, the 1918 lynching of 13 people in South Georgia, led to the formation of the Mary Turner Project (MTP). We document the organization’s work as well as its impact on students and the region, as seen through the lens of public sociology. The MTP installed an official road marker to memorialize the lynching, intervened in a campus controversy involving the Confederate flag, hosted numerous commemoration events, and did classroom-based research and hosted community discussions on lynching and slavery in the local area. Drawing from organizational documents, the paper explores how ‘digging up the past’ and the experience of the MTP may serve as a model for critical sociologists who teach courses on social inequalities and want to make those courses more applicable to people’s every day lived experience.     

An Emerging Consensus: Younger and Cohen Revisited

From Aesop to Sun Tzu, the importance of working together has long been acknowledged. Yet as long as cooperation has existed, so have the difficulties associated with it. Pooling two fields might mean twice the power, but this union also brings twice the jargon, twice the competing theories, and twice the head butting. Nonetheless, in this collection, researchers have made a heroic effort to set aside their theoretical differences to produce three computational models for the influential set of empirical data showing that young infants have difficulty detecting correlations among features (Younger & Cohen, 1983, 1986). Specifically, Gureckis and Love (2004/this issue) fit a well‐developed adult‐learning model to the infant work (down to the exact order and number of test trials) in support of a common mechanism underlying categorization. Shultz and Cohen (2004/this issue) vary depth of processing in a cascade correlation network to show how older infants learn more than younger infants from the same amount of exposure. And Westermann and Mareschal (2004/this issue) introduce a model for their representational acuity hypothesis, which explains qualitative shifts as a decrease in the size of neural receptive fields. This commentary takes stock of this attempt at unifying computational modeling and developmental data by identifying common themes, clarifying points of disagreement, and providing a synthesis for this work.     

Demographic Changes and Economic Activityin Greece

This paper investigates the linkages among demographic changes (fertility choice, marriage decision and mortality), real wages and real output in Greece over the period 1960–1998. The results show that in the long run a decrease in infant mortality rates, taking into consideration economic performance and the labor market, causes a reduction in fertility rates. In addition, the results suggest that an increase in real wages decreases nuptiality and fertility. Employing vector error-correction models and impulse response functions, the empirical results support the endogeneity of fertility choice to infant mortality, the labor market and the growth process.     

Feedforward as a supplement to feedback adjustment in allowing for feedstock changes

Many industrial processes must be adjusted from time to time to maintain their mean continuously close to the target value. Compensations for deviations of the process mean from the target may be accomplished by feedback and/or by feedforward adjustment. Feedback adjustments are made in reaction to errors at the output; feedforward adjustments are made to compensate anticipated changes. This article considers the complementary use of feedback and feedforward adjustments to compensate for anticipated step changes in the process mean as may be necessary in a manufacturing process each time a new batch of feedstock material is introduced. We consider and compare five alternative control schemes: (1) feedforward adjustment alone, (2) feedback adjustment alone, (3) feedback- feedforward adjustment, (4) feedback and indirect feedforward to increase the sensitivity of the feedback scheme, and (5) feedback with both direct and indirect feedforward.     

A multivariate regression model for continuous genetic traits

Summary.  In many commonly used models for multivariate traits, the likelihood is specified as a mixture of nested sums of products over the unobserved genotypes of all the family members, in which the familial covariance matrices vary in size and structure for different families, and their sizes can be immense for large family units. These issues pose computational difficulties in many applications. Bonney's compound regressive model for univariate traits simplifies the familial covariance structure and reduces the mixture of nested sums only to the parent–offspring level, thus enhancing computation significantly. This model has been extended to the multivariate case in the absence of unobserved genotypes. Here, we further extend this model to incorporate major genes, covariates and multiple loci. As is typical in practice, this causes new computational difficulties. We study the computational issues and explore the behaviour of this extended model.     

Odious Comparisons: Incommensurability, the Case Study, and "Small N's" in Sociology

Case studies and "small‐N comparisons" have been attacked from two directions, positivist and incommensurabilist. At the same time, some authors have defended small‐N comparisons as allowing qualitative researchers to attain a degree of scientificity, yet they also have rejected the case study as merely "idiographic." Practitioners of the case study sometimes agree with these critics, disavowing all claims to scientificity. A related set of disagreements concerns the role and nature of social theory in sociology, which sometimes is described as useless and parasitic and other times as evolving in splendid isolation from empirical research. These three forms of sociological activity—comparative analysis, studies of individual cases, and social theory—are defended here from the standpoint of critical realism. In this article I first reconstruct, in very broad strokes, the dominant epistemological and ontological framework of postwar U.S. sociology. The next two sections discuss several positivist and incommensurabilist criticisms of comparison and case studies. The last two sections propose an understanding of comparison as operating along two dimensions, events and structures, and offer an illustration of the difference and relationship between the two .     

Élite opinion on retirement pensions

This article discusses some of the findings of a European study of the opinions of influential people in welfare. It is divided into five main sections. The first section discusses the aims and the methodology of the study; the second section looks at the issues in pensions as seen by the respondents in the various countries; the third section examines the proposed solutions; the fourth section tries to establish whether political ideology makes a difference in the way respondents perceive the issues and solutions; and the fifth section is the conclusion.     

Has the Internet Increased Trade? Developed and Developing Country Evidence

Developing countries export more to developed, but not other developing countries, when Internet penetration is higher. Although this could be because Internet penetration stimulates exports, it could also be because trade openness encourages Internet use. To test the direction of causation, we allow Internet use to be determined endogenously using countries' regulation of data services as an instrument. The results suggest that access to the Internet does improve export performance in developing countries, although not in developed countries. In other words, improving Internet access in a developing country will stimulate exports from that country to rich countries. (JEL F15 )