A REVIEW AND EVALUATION OF MARITAL AND FAMILY THERAPIES FOR AFFECTIVE DISORDERS

Although the efficacy of individual treatments of affective disorders has been well-documented, there are also significant limitations to existing treatments. In the last decade attention has focused increasingley on the interpersonal context of affective illness, and on marital and family relationships in particular. As a result, a number of approaches have been developed which directly involve family members in treatment. In this article we evaluate the current status of marital and family therapies for affective illness. We begin with a discussion of several lines of research bearing on the relationships between family processes and affective illness. The available treatment outcome data evaluating the efficacy of marital and family interventions are then reviewed, with particular attention paid to predictors of treatment success and cost efficacy issues. Finally, we suggest several priorities for future research.     

The Faculty Meeting: Practicing Social Justice-Oriented Group Work

Social group work scholars and practitioners have begun to locate and recognize important sites for thinking about and practicing social group work as increasing evidence demonstrates its diminishing importance. This article identifies faculty meetings as a significant site for integrating social group work more fully into departments and schools of social work and helping to achieve the profession's social justice mission. Challenging the meaning of the faculty meeting and thinking of it as a faculty group is a necessary prerequisite to realize this goal. A set of principles is presented and next steps explored to reclaim and reinsert the value of social group work for the profession today.     

Life politics,nature and the state: Giddens' sociological theory and The Politics of Climate Change

Anthony Giddens' The Politics of Climate Change represents a significant shift in the way in which he addresses ecological politics. In this book, he rejects the relevance of environmentalism and demarcates climate‐change policy from life politics. Giddens addresses climate change in the technocratic mode of simple rather than reflexive modernization. However, Giddens' earlier sociological theory provides the basis for a more reflexive understanding of climate change. Climate change instantiates how, in high modernity, the existential contradiction of the human relationship with nature returns in new form, expressed in life politics and entangled with the structural contradictions of the capitalist state. The interlinking of existential and structural contradiction is manifested in the tension between life politics and the capitalist nation‐state. This tension is key for understanding the failures so far of policy responses to climate change.     

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Alternative Device Configurations for Aviation-Checked Baggage Security Screening

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have resulted in dramatic changes in aviation security. As of early 2003, an estimated 1,100 explosive detection systems (EDS) and 6,000 explosive trace detection machines (ETD) have been deployed to ensure 100% checked baggage screening at all commercial airports throughout the United States. The prohibitive costs associated with deploying and operating such devices is a serious issue for the Transportation Security Administration. This article evaluates the cost effectiveness of the explosive detection technologies currently deployed to screen checked baggage as well as new technologies that could be used in the future. Both single-device and two-device systems are considered. In particular, the expected annual direct cost of using these devices for 100% checked baggage screening under various scenarios is obtained and the tradeoffs between using single- and two-device strategies are studied. The expected number of successful threats under the different checked baggage screening scenarios with 100% checked baggage screening is also obtained. Lastly, a risk-based screening strategy proposed in the literature is analyzed. The results reported suggest that for the existing security setup, with current device costs and probability parameters, single-device systems are less costly and have fewer expected number of successful threats than two-device systems due to the way the second device affects the alarm or clear decision. The risk-based approach is found to have the potential to significantly improve security. The cost model introduced provides an effective tool for the execution of cost-benefit analyses of alternative device configurations for aviation-checked baggage security screening.     

Seed distributions for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament

Bracketology, the art of successfully picking all the winners in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) annual men’s Division I college basketball championship tournament, has become a favorite national activity. In spite of the challenges and uncertainty faced in this endeavor, patterns exist in how the seeds appear in each round, particularly the later rounds. This paper statistically analyzes tournaments from 1985 to 2010, finding that the distribution of seeds that win in the rounds beyond the Sweet Sixteen can be modeled as a truncated geometric random variable. This model allows one to consider any set of seeds in each tournament round and compute the probability that these seeds would win in that round; this methodology can evaluate the likelihood of each seed combination in each tournament round, based on past tournament history. Finally, each tournament from 1985 through 2010 is analyzed using this model to assess its likelihood and measure the probability of its occurrence.     

New Frontiers: Territory,Social Spaces,and the State

Sociological Forum -