Adaptive Management: A Paradigm for Remediation of Public Facilities Following a Terrorist Attack

Terrorist actions are aimed at maximizing harm (health, psychological, economical, and political) through the combined physical impacts of the act and fear. Immediate and effective response to a terrorist act is critical to limit human and environmental harm, effectively restore facility function, and maintain public confidence. Though there have been terrorist attacks in public facilities that we have learned from, overall our experiences in restoration of public facilities following a terrorist attack are limited. Restoration of public facilities following a release of a hazardous material is inherently far more complex than in industrial settings and has many unique technical, economic, social, and political challenges. For example, there may be a great need to quickly restore the facility to full operation and allow public access even though it was not designed for easy or rapid restoration, and critical information is needed for quantitative risk assessment and effective restoration must be anticipated to be incomplete and uncertain. Whereas present planning documents have substantial linearity in their organization, the “adaptive management” paradigm provides a constructive parallel paradigm for restoration of public facilities that anticipates and plans for uncertainty, inefficiencies, and stakeholder participation. Adaptive management grew out of the need to manage and restore natural resources in highly complex and changing environments with limited knowledge about causal relationships and responses to restoration actions. Similarities between natural resource management and restoration of a public facility after a terrorist attack suggest that integration of adaptive management principles explicitly into restoration processes will result in substantially enhanced and flexible responses necessary to meet the uncertainties of potential terrorist attacks.     

Mission,money, and merit: Strategic decision making by nonprofit managers

Public and nonprofit organizations need to make strategic choices about where to invest their resources. They also need to expose hidden managerial assumptions and lack of adequate knowledge that prevent the attainment of consensus in strategic decision making. The approach we developed and tested in the field used a dynamic, three‐dimensional model that tracks individual programs in an organization's portfolio on their contribution to mission, money, and merit. The first dimension measures whether the organization is doing the right things; the second, whether it is doing things right financially; and the third, whether it doing things right in terms of quality. Senior managers provide their own evaluations of the organization's programs. Both the consensus view and the variation in individual assessments contribute to an improved managerial understanding of the organization's current situation and to richer discussions in strategic decision making. In field tests, this visual model proved to be a useful and powerful tool for illuminating underlying assumptions and variations in knowledge among managers facing the complex, multidimensional tradeoffs needed in strategic decision making.     

English Language Proficiency of Immigrants and Refugees in the Twin Cities Metropolitan Area

Studies of the determinants of English language ability have generally focused on the largest immigrant groups in the United States. Much less is known about smaller, but significant regional concentrations of immigrants and refugees. This article presents data on four very distinct and understudied groups: Russians, Somalis, Hmong, and Mexicans in the Midwest. We found large differences in English language proficiency across the different national origin groups, even after controlling for background variables. These differences were not attributable to refugee status or to linguistic distance from English. Being Somali, migrating to the United States at a young age and having a college diploma were the best predictors of both spoken and written proficiency. The returns to higher education were particularly noteworthy — respondents with college diplomas were more than 29 times more likely than non‐high school graduates to speak English well, and more than 20 times as likely to read well. Women appear to have benefited more than men from completing college in terms of spoken English proficiency since the male‐female gap narrows among the highly educated. Length of time in the United States was a good predictor of whether an individual speaks English at home, regardless of age of entry to the country.     

The Development of Affect Specificity in Infants' Use of Emotion Cues

This study examined the emergence of affect specificity in infancy. In this study, infants received verbal and facial signals of 2 different, negatively valenced emotions (fear and sadness) as well as neutral affect via a television monitor to determine if they could make qualitative distinctions among emotions of the same valence. Twenty 12‐ to 14‐month‐olds and 20 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds were examined. Results suggested that younger infants showed no evidence of referential specificity, as they responded similarly to both the target and distracter toys, and showed no evidence of affect specificity, showing no difference in play between affect conditions. Older infants, in contrast, showed evidence both of referential and affect specificity. With respect to affect specificity, 16‐ to 18‐month‐olds touched the target toy less in the fear condition than in the sad condition and showed a larger proportion of negative facial expressions in the sad condition versus the fear condition. These findings suggest a developmental emergence after 15 months of age for affect specificity in relating emotional messages to objects.     

The availability of personal and external coping resources: Thier impact on job stress and employee attitudes during organizational restructuring

This study examines the relationships among personal coping resources, social support, external coping resources, job stressors and job strains in a sample of 110 American Telephone and Telegraph employees undergoing a major organizational restructuring. The study expanded on a model suggested by Ashford (1988) by defining another category of coping resources that employees may draw upon to deal with the stressors and strains which occur during major organizational changes. External coping resources were defined as those which provided employees with a sense of 'vicarious control' in stressful situations. Results indicated that personal coping resources, social support and external coping resources had a direct effect upon job stressor and strain levels. No 'buffering' effect of these coplng resources was found. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that external coping resources added to the prediction of job stressors and strains even when pertonal coping resources and social support were entered first into the prediction questions.     

Making ends meet: perceptions of poverty in Sweden

During the era after the Second World War, Sweden has built a welfare system based on labor market participation and income maintenance. Low unemployment and decent wages are supposed to guarantee people a labor market income or income maintenance, which in turn should provide a proper standard for everyone. However, a rapid increase in unemployment and economic problems have made the future of the Swedish welfare state more uncertain than ever. These circumstances have, among other things, led to the suggestion that Sweden should abandon the income maintenance policy and create a social policy system with the more limited ambition of guaranteeing everyone a minimum income. In that case, one central question must be answered: what constitutes a decent minimum income in today's Sweden? Where should we draw the poverty line under which people will not be forced to live? These questions are central in the current debate. The consensual poverty line method is used in this article to derive a poverty line relevant for today's Sweden. The results shows that more than every fifth household has an income below the consensual poverty line. That is, they have an income that most Swedes would argue is too low to make ends meet. The level of the consensual poverty line was compared with the National Board of Health and Welfare's guidelines for social assistance. The consensual poverty line was shown to be more generous to small households and the norm for social assistance was more generous to larger households. Finally, the expenditure for guaranteeing all Swedish household a minimum income equal to the consensual poverty line was estimated: more than SEK 25 billion per year. The results in the article casts serious doubt on the ability of the Swedish welfare state to secure a decent income to all citizens.