Immigration reform and the browning of America: tensions,conflicts and community instability in metropolitan Los Angeles

"Tensions, conflicts, and community instability associated with heightened immigration--especially of nonwhite immigrant groups--threaten to balkanize America. This article highlights the root causes of the growing opposition to both immigrants and U.S. immigration policy--the nativist backlash, presents a typology of the community-level conflicts that have arisen as a consequence of heightened immigration--legal and illegal--to the United States over the last 30 years, and outlines the conditions under which diversity can be brought to the forefront as one of society's strengths.... The 1992 Los Angeles County Social Survey (LACSS)...provides insights into the nature and magnitude of intergroup stereotyping and prejudice in a community in which large numbers of immigrants have settled."     

Managing strategic change--strategy, culture and action

One of the major problems facing senior executives is that of effecting significant strategic change in their organizations. This paper develops a number of explanatory frameworks which address the links between the development of strategy in organizations, dimensions of corporate culture and managerial action. In considering such linkages, and by illustrating them with examples from work undertaken in companies, the paper also seeks to advance our understanding of the problems and means of managing strategic change.     

Bystander behavior and kinesics: The interaction between the helper and victim

One hundred eighty subjects participated in a factorial field experiment designed to study the effects of body orientation, eye contact, and sex upon helping behavior in a situation where a male victim fell. An eye-contact x x body-orientation interaction and a sex x body-orientation interaction were found. Eye contact raised the rate of help; and women helped more often than men, but only when the victim andS were approaching each other. A severe fall produced more help than did a mild fall. The cue value of the front side of a person, eye contact acting as a plea for help, and the salience of responsibility norms were discussed. The study was interpreted as indicating the necessity of accounting for the effects of the interaction between bystanders and victims.The research for this study was supported by a grant from the Central Fund for Research, College of Liberal Arts, The Pennsylvania State University.The authors would like to thank Joseph Primavera, III, for serving as their victim.     

Radon Risk Information and Voluntary Protection: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This study examines the perceived risks and mitigating behavior of Maine households who received new information on their exposures to significant health risks from indoor radon. The observed responses of these households illustrate conceptual issues related to designing an effective risk information program. Despite the involvement of generally well-motivated homeowners and well-intentioned researchers and government officials, we conclude that the risk information approach used in Maine failed to induce appropriate, cost-effective voluntary protection. The results indicate that, after receiving radon test results, information on associated health risks, and suggestions on how to reduce exposures: perceived risks tended to understate objective risks by orders of magnitude, and there was no statistically significant relationship between mitigating behavior and objective risks. These results suggest that the formation of risk perceptions and subsequent behavioral adjustments involve complex interactions among information, contextual, socioeconomic, and psychological variables. Therefore, government programs that seek to reduce health and safety risks with information programs, instead of using more conventional enforced standards, must be crafted very carefully to accommodate this complex process.     

Multi-terminal vehicle-dispatch algorithm

This paper introduces the Multi-Terminal Sweep Algorithm, a heuristic algorithm for obtaining an approximate solution to the multiple terminal vehicle-dispatch problem. The procedure determines a set of routes by which vehicles from two or more terminals can service a collection of demand points so that the total distance traveled is kept near to the minimum. This solution also satisfies constraints on the vehicle load and on the length of each route. Application of the algorithm to eleven multiple terminal vehicle-dispatch problems shows that near-optimal solutions to large-scale problems can be found in a reasonable amount of computer time.     

Managers' Perspectives on Making Major Investment Decisions: the Problem of Linking Strategic and Financial Appraisal

Major investment decisions are an important factor shaping strategic change in complex organisations. Traditionally, they have been primarily regarded as the domain of financial theory, with a few notable exceptions. This paper explores how the apparent gulf between strategic and financial appraisal of major investment decisions can be bridged. The approach taken in this research study was to explore linkages between strategic and financial appraisal from managers' own perspectives. These perspectives were examined through a learning process. This enabled managers to reflect and debate on their experiences and issues - upon both strategic and financial theory(s). Unlike many prior studies, this research took a qualitative approach to data analysis and interpretation. This yielded a range of insights - some of these amplified findings in earlier research studies; others suggested a more radical shift in thinking on strategic/financial appraisal linkages towards a closer fusion of the two disciplines.     

A case study in defining developmental costs for quality assurance in mental health center programs

Issues related to the state-of-the-art of ambulatory mental health care review as well as to the resources necessary for planning and operating a quality assurance program may be hampering development of such programs in community mental health centers nationwide. Faced with the problem of responsible and prudent program management, it has become increasingly difficult for CMHC directors to implement innovative, but unproven, and often unpriced programs which have the potential to draw scarce professional resources away from direct service delivery. Pressure to implement CMHC program requirements that are not ordinarily considered revenue-producing in nature, for example, consultation and education services and quality assurance activities, may further create anxiety for mental health program directors, especially during periods when they are ostensibly confronted with the need to maximize CMHC revenues. Before mental health professionals and administrators of mental health programs can be expected to introduce quality assurance programs, they need to have some idea how much the system costs. The figures reported from three North Carolina mental health centers may offer some indication of what other mental health centers might expect to spend in developing a quality assurance program. Salary expenses for multidisciplinary staff participation in quality assurance activities are presented.     

Multiple imputation of a randomly censored covariate improves logistic regression analysis

Randomly censored covariates arise frequently in epidemiologic studies. The most commonly used methods, including complete case and single imputation or substitution, suffer from inefficiency and bias. They make strong parametric assumptions or they consider limit of detection censoring only. We employ multiple imputation, in conjunction with semi-parametric modeling of the censored covariate, to overcome these shortcomings and to facilitate robust estimation. We develop a multiple imputation approach for randomly censored covariates within the framework of a logistic regression model. We use the non-parametric estimate of the covariate distribution or the semi-parametric Cox model estimate in the presence of additional covariates in the model. We evaluate this procedure in simulations, and compare its operating characteristics to those from the complete case analysis and a survival regression approach. We apply the procedures to an Alzheimer's study of the association between amyloid positivity and maternal age of onset of dementia. Multiple imputation achieves lower standard errors and higher power than the complete case approach under heavy and moderate censoring and is comparable under light censoring. The survival regression approach achieves the highest power among all procedures, but does not produce interpretable estimates of association. Multiple imputation offers a favorable alternative to complete case analysis and ad hoc substitution methods in the presence of randomly censored covariates within the framework of logistic regression.