The relationship between sex guilt and sexual desire in a community sample of Chinese and Euro-Canadian women

Many studies have documented significant differences in sexual desire between individuals of European and Chinese descent, but few have examined the mechanisms that underlie these differences. A recent study of university students found that sex guilt is one mechanism by which culture influences sexual desire among Chinese and Euro-Canadian women. The goal of this study was to examine whether sex guilt also mediates the relationship between ethnicity and sexual desire in a sample that is more representative of women in the general population. Euro-Canadian (n = 78; mean age = 42.1 years) and Chinese (n = 87; mean age = 42.8 years) women were recruited from the community. Euro-Canadian women reported greater sexual desire and less sex guilt. In the entire sample, sex guilt mediated the relationship between ethnicity and sexual desire such that the Chinese women reported greater sex guilt, which, in turn, was associated with lower sexual desire. Among the Chinese women, sex guilt mediated the relationship between mainstream acculturation (degree of Westernization) and sexual desire such that more Westernized Chinese women reported less sex guilt, which, in turn, was associated with greater sexual desire. These results support recent findings and further suggest that sex guilt may be one mechanism by which ethnicity affects sexual desire.     

News coverage of child sexual abuse and prevention, 2007-2009

News media coverage of child sexual abuse can help policymakers and the public understand what must be done to prevent future abuse, but coverage tends to focus on extreme cases. This article presents an analysis of newspaper coverage from 2007 to 2009 to describe how the daily news presents and frames day-to-day stories about child sexual abuse. When child sexual abuse receives news attention, the stories focus primarily on the criminal justice details of a specific incident rather than contextual information about causes of and solutions to child sexual abuse, and prevention is rarely addressed. We offer suggestions for strategies that advocates can use to help reporters improve news coverage so that it better contextualizes child sexual abuse and links it to prevention policies.     

Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession

Although subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance debt, house prices, and 19-year-old population size. We find similar evidence of college-related foreclosure risk using longitudinal household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings uncover a previously overlooked dimension of the foreclosure crisis, and highlight mortgage insecurity as an inadvertent consequence of parental investment in higher education.     

Integrating Analysis and Communication Skills into the Decision Science Curriculum*

The teaching of decision sciences presupposes that careful attention is directed toward improving students' critical thinking and analytical skills. This paper presents an approach to teaching quantitative methods classes that focuses on developing student skills in the areas of analytical and critical thinking through written and oral communication. The approach requires very little additional instructor preparation time and does not require the instructor to make major changes in either the content or organization of the course. While the instructor's investment is minimal, the benefits to the students appear to be substantial.     

Data Driven Modeling: An Application in Scheduling

This paper presents a data driven modeling (DDM) approach to certain types of optimization problems. DDM relinquishes control of the completed model to the user department rather than the operations research (OR) staff. The approach emphasizes development of models that are dependent on data maintained and understood by the users. The data base consists of coded user rules which describe when changes will occur in the problem structure and data which captures the generalization of the problem. Both the rules and data can be updated by user department personnel. These data drive a matrix generator controlled by the rules which uses the data base as input to generate the specific model formulation. This DDM system is designed by OR consultants or staff to allow independence of use along with low-cost and minimal-effort maintenance. The DDM approach is illustrated with an application to a real-world medical scheduling problem.     

Environmental Hazards,Migration, and Race

This study contributes to our understanding of the association between internal migration patterns and environmentally hazardous facilities, with a focus upon race-specific outmigration at the county-level, nationwide. Among research suggesting inequalities with regard to the social distribution of environmental risk, selective migration is often implied to be a key dynamic leading to differential exposure to proximate environmental hazards. Nonetheless, the models presented here provide no evidence of differential migratory response by race to environmentally hazardous facilities, net of a wide array of socioeconomic controls for labor force opportunity, climate, and demographic structure. Future research should consider these associations at more precise geographies and/or at the individual level.     

A review of hedge funds and their investor activism: do they help or hurt other equity investors?

Hedge funds tend to be highly activist investors who exercise their ??principal power?? over their portfolio firms. We observe that, compared to other investor types, hedge funds appear to be even more activist than is predicted by a comprehensive Investor Activism Model, due to the unexpectedly large role of several antecedent variables. This conclusion suggests that the relatively lightly regulated environment of hedge funds affects the weighting of conventional activism-antecedent variables. We explore how their access to several investing and trading strategies is allowing hedge funds to redefine investor activism. In the process, we find that, while hedge funds and their activism tend to benefit fellow investors, the potential exists for some specific hedge fund types to expropriate value from minority shareholders, creating ??principal?Cprincipal?? conflict. The potentially detrimental impact of hedge fund activism on other equity investors is demonstrated, illuminating several current policy concerns.     

Pharmaceutically-Made Men: Masculinities in Chad’s Emergent Oil Economy

This article explores masculinities and changes in men’s lives in the rural oil fields of Chad during the period of an oil and pipeline project described by the World Bank as a “model” for oil-as-development. In many parts of Africa, private sector investment is concentrated in the extractive industries, especially oil and gas projects. Africa’s emerging oil economies entail new institutional configurations, or what Michael Watts called an “oil complex,” that challenge antecedent norms and forms of identity. In this article, I describe the expectations, desires, and experiences of three distinct groups of men—those who found temporary employment on the project, those who continued to make a living from farming while contending with land expropriation, and those who migrated to oil field towns in search of work—to make three general points about the oil complex and masculinities in Chad. The structure of the global oil industry meant that local men who found jobs on the project could act as breadwinners and patriarchs, but only temporarily; local workers struggled post-employment with their exclusion from the possibilities associated with the project. Men who never found jobs continued to eke out a living from the land, but state-of-the-art policies governing land expropriation led simultaneously to conflict in families and greater economic interdependence among family members. Finally, in the low-media environment of the oil field region, ideas and images about sex, sexuality, and love emanating from the transient and hyper-masculine global oil industry workforce served as models for landless young men who migrated to oil field towns and who, in the absence of work, sought to transform themselves into objects of desire through the mediation of pharmaceuticals.