Civil Society Opposition to Nonferrous Metals Mining in Guatemala

Drawing on a range of fieldwork interviews, this paper discusses the opposition of civil society to nonferrous metals mining in Guatemala. Guatemala’s mineral resources, and government efforts to encourage their extraction, are discussed, as is the emergent civil society of that nation. Guatemalan civil society has opposed mining due to the impacts of its environmental effects upon the poor engaged in subsistence agriculture. This opposition has involved protests, community consultations against mining, and networking with the forces of global civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of how this opposition to mining is a manifestation of the opposition to neoliberalism currently underway in Latin America.

Family Trends and Transracial Adoption in the United States

Several demographic trends have changed family formation in the United States resulting in fewer babies being made available for adoption. At the same time the number of transracial adoptions appears to be increasing. We use the 5% Public Use Microdata Sample of the 2000 census and the National Survey of Adoptive Parents to examine the social and demographic characteristics of those who adopt transracially. Transracial adoption of Hispanic and Asian children, but not Black children, is associated with higher income and education levels. It is less likely in the South, but more likely among those who have had military experience.     

The Rise of Middle-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century Spain

Alan Macfarlane et al. (ed.), Records of an English Village. Earls Colne 1400–1750 (1980), Computer Output Microfiche with printed guides (Chadwyck‐Healey, Cambridge, £125).

Felicity Heal, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (1980), xvi+363 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £17.50).

V. G. Kiernan, State and Society in Europe 1550–1650 (1980), x+309 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £12.00).

Martin Scharfe, Die Religion des Volkes. Kleine Kultur‐ und Sozialgeschichte des Pietismus [The Religion of the People. A Brief Cultural and Social History of Pietism.] (1980), 180 (Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, Gütersloh, DM 24).

James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture and Society in Tsarist Russia (1979), xiv+150 (Chicago University Press, Chicago &; London, £8.40).

A. E. Dingle, The Campaign for Prohibition in Victorian England: The United Kingdom Alliance, 1872–1895 (1980), 233 (Croom Helm, £12.50).

G. R. Hawke, Economics for Historians (1980), xii+237 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £10.50, paperback £3.95).     

Problem solving: not good medicine for health care

Explore the challenging paradoxes that run throughout health care and consider ways to accept them into an organization.     

Applying statistical tests to empirically compare tabu search parameters for MAX 3-SATISFIABILITY: A case study

The application of stochastic heuristic, like tabu search or simulated annealing, to address hard discrete optimization problems has been an important advance for efficiently obtaining good solutions in a reasonable amount of computing time. A challenge when applying such heuristics is assessing when a particular set of parameter values yields better performance compared to other such sets of parameter values. For example, it can be difficult to determine the optimal mix of memory types to incorporate into tabu search. This in turn prompts users to undertake a trial and error phase to determine the best combination of parameter settings for the problem under study. Moreover, for a given problem instance, one set of heuristic parameter settings may yield a better solution than another set of parameters, for a given initial solution. However, the performance of this heuristic on this instance for a single heuristic execution is not sufficient to assert that the first set of parameter settings will always produce superior results than the second set of parameters, for all initial solutions.     

Understanding Environmental Risk Perceptions: A Case of Contested Illness in South Florida

Communities facing environmental health threats can experience contention when residents have conflicting interpretations of risks; yet little is known about the social–psychological processes that contribute to divergent risk perceptions in these cases. Drawing on previous work on environmental contamination, contested illness, and literature on risk perceptions, we offer a framework for analyzing how residents assess potential environmental risks. Using the case of The Acreage, Florida, we examine a community where a cancer cluster has been established, but an environmental cause has not been determined. Specifically, we ask how residents individually assess risks concerning possible environmental contamination in cases of contested illness. Data come from 57 in‐depth interviews conducted with current and former residents of The Acreage. We argue that residents utilized particular cognitive heuristics to develop understandings and assessments of the situation. However, when these assessments contradicted those of other residents, community conflict emerged. We conclude by discussing how the framework utilized in our analysis can be applied in future research of contaminated communities.     

Addressing the Dependency Problem in Access Security System Architecture Design

The objective of this research is to present a method for evaluating the performance of access control security systems, such as airport security operations. This requires the examination of security system architectures, which involve security technology devices and the algorithms that coordinate their operations. Dependence between device responses in multiple-device systems is a critical practical issue in assessing the performance of such architectures, though no results on this problem have appeared in the literature. This paper presents a method for evaluating when multipledevice security systems with overlapping capabilities are cost-effective. This is achieved using a dependency structure for security system devices to quantify how various technologies interact and to measure the impact of device dependence on system error probabilities. A measure of device response dependence for a two-device system is defined and its properties are explored, including bounds on the dependency measure. The effect of dependence on the system Type I and Type II error probabilities is examined for the two-device system. System performance is compared for independent vs. dependent device responses and desirable dependence relationships are identified. Results are also presented for a cascading sequence of devices. An example is presented to illustrate the results for the two-device system. Implications of these results are discussed, such as how they can be used to identify the optimal use of security devices and to determine whether new technologies warrant investment.