A Process for Incorporating Comparative Risk into Environmental Policymaking in Louisiana

The goal of Louisiana's 1990–1991 comparative risk project, also called the Louisiana Environmental Action Plan (LEAP), was to incorporate risk assessment into state environmental planning and policymaking. Scientists, government officials, and citizens were brought together to estimate the relative risk to human health, natural resources, and quality of life posed by 33 selected environmental issues. The issues were then ranked according to their relative estimated risks. It was hoped that this ranking of "comparative risks" would enable state policymakers to target the most important environmental problems and allocate scarce public resources more rationally and efficiently. As a result of the project, the governor issued an Executive Order forming a permanent Public Advisory Committee to continue this type of comparative risk assessment in Louisiana.     

FAMILY THERAPISTS' RESPONSE TO AIDS: AN EXAMINATION OF ATTITUDES,KNOWLEDGE, AND CONTACT*

As the number of individuals and families impacted by AIDS continue to multiply, family therapists will increasingly be asked to become engaged in the challenge of caring for those affected. To date, little has been written in family therpy journals regarding the response of family therapists to this crisis. This paper represents an initial attempt to examine the atitudes of clinical members of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy toward AIDS and persons with AIDS. Included in the study are data regarding the therapists' contact with persons with AIDS, gays, and lesbians, and the impact of such contact on attitudes. Implications for future research, training, and treatment of those affected by AIDS are also provided.     

The Social Context of Police Lying

This is an analysis of the social context of normal police lies. We define lies as speech acts which the speaker knows are misleading or false, are intended to deceive, and where evidence to the contrary is known to the observer. Lies are relative to a moral context, and what an audience will accept. Lies include excuses, which deny full responsibility for an act, but acknowledge its immorality, and justifications, which accept responsibility but deny blame-worthiness. Police learn to lie and to carefully distinguish normal (or acceptable) lies from unacceptable lies, suggesting that lies are a part of a negotiated occupational order. We show how and why some types of lies are rewarded by police using ethnographic data from an 18 month field study of a large urban force. Lies can be of little issue, or become troublesome. We report and analyze two kinds of troublesome lies: case lies, recognized stories an officer utilizes in a courtroom or on paper to facilitate the conviction of a suspect, and cover stories, lies an officer tells in court, to supervisors, and on the job with the aim of providing a verbal shield or mitigation in the event of discipline. Both excuses and justifications are woven together in these vignettes. An example of a refusal to lie is used to illustrate some of the limits on lying as well organizational factors in lying. Some implications for official lying are also noted.     

Employment and filial relations: Is there a conflict?

Since children, particularly daughters, are among the most important sources of help and support for older Americans, it has been suggested that women's increasing employment will affect filial relations. Empirical evidence on this issue is inconsistent, in part due to the use of nonprobability samples. Few studies have measured effects for men. We attempt to broaden the scope of this question beyond help to the frail elderly by asking whether employment affects filial relations in general. We examine effects of hours employed on telephone contact, visiting, feelings of closeness, filial attitudes, and assistance to biological parents, for an area probability sample of men and women over 40. There are no effects of employment for men or women on contact, closeness, or assistance. For the vast majority of this population sample, contact and assistance involve few hours per week, and thus do not seem to conflict with employment.     

ADDITIVE MODELS WITH PREDICTORS SUBJECT TO MEASUREMENT ERROR

This paper develops a likelihood‐based method for fitting additive models in the presence of measurement error. It formulates the additive model using the linear mixed model representation of penalized splines. In the presence of a structural measurement error model, the resulting likelihood involves intractable integrals, and a Monte Carlo expectation maximization strategy is developed for obtaining estimates. The method's performance is illustrated with a simulation study.     

Religious affiliation and the family

The process of religious affiliation is mediated by institutions such as the family, which provide a network of ties to the public sphere. Variations in the likelihood of those with no religious affiliation in high school (N=900) becoming church members by the time they reach 30 are explained in terms of a combination of individual attributes, such as educational and spatial mobility, and changes in structural location, such as the transition to marital and parental status. Panel data from the Career Development Study show that women's chances of affiliation are more affected than are men's by parents' religious homogamy, getting married, and having children.     

Domains of convergence for the EM algorithm: a cautionary tale in a location estimation problem

The EM algorithm is a popular method for maximizing a likelihood in the presence of incomplete data. When the likelihood has multiple local maxima, the parameter space can be partitioned into domains of convergence, one for each local maximum. In this paper we investigate these domains for the location family generated by the t-distribution. We show that, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, these domains need not be connected sets. As an extreme case we give an example of a domain which consists of an infinite union of disjoint open intervals. Thus the convergence behaviour of the EM algorithm can be quite sensitive to the starting point.     

A theory of prudential values and a rule utilitarian theory of morality

Ethics can be divided into a theory of prudential values and a theory of morality in a narrower sense. My paper proposes a utilitarian — a rule-utilitarian — theory of morality. But it deviates from most of the utilitarian tradition by rejecting the hedonistic and subjectivistic accounts of prudential values favored by many utilitarian writers. While economists tend to define people's utility levels in terms of their actual preferences, ethics must define them in terms of their informed preferences. To prefer A over B does not mean to have a stronger desire for A than for B. Rather, it means to regard one's access to A as being more important than one's access to B. Even though different people often have quite different preferences, their basic desires seem to be much the same. We must choose our moral rules, and our society's moral code as a whole, by their social utility. An important factor in determining their social utility are their expectation effects. Unlike the rule — utilitarian more code, the act — utilitarian moral code would be unable to give proper weight to these expectation effects. It would also unduly restrict our individual freedom. Finally, I shall argue against Kant that morality is primarily a servant of many other human values rather than itself the highest value of human life.