“If I Killed You,I'd Get the Kids”: Women's Survival and Protection Work with Child Custody and Access in the Context of Woman Abuse

Public interest in child custody and access has intensified under the guise of gender neutrality and without adequate attention to gender based violence. A study of formal systems' responses to abuse by intimate partners identified child custody and access as a central issue. Interviews with women revealed that upon leaving abusive partners, women's work involved the contradictory requirements of preserving the children's relationships with, yet protecting them from, their fathers. Interviews with service providers and document analysis illustrated how certain practices, policies and ideologies create and sustain these requirements. Findings illustrate that gender analysis and accounting for violence in custody and access practice are necessary to the safety of women and children.     

Time- and Loading-Dependence in the McKone Model for Dermal Uptake of Organic Chemicals from a Soil Matrix

McKone has recently proposed an innovative two-layer model for dermal uptake of organic chemicals from a soil matrix that explicitly includes variables for properties of the chemical, the soil, the skin, and the exposure. In this note, we investigate the joint time- and loading-dependencies implicit in the model by using MATHEMATICA to find and plot a closed-form function for the uptake fraction for six aromatic hydrocarbons.     

The prevalence of physical activity maintenance in a sample of university students: a longitudinal study

The health and financial costs of physical inactivity are staggering. Few researchers have assessed the prevalence of physical activity at the level needed to gain health benefits. OBJECTIVE: The author's purpose in this longitudinal study was to assess the prevalence of university students who maintained physical activity at the level necessary for health gains for at least 1 month. PARTICIPANTS: University students (N = 392) from 2 campuses participated in this 1-month study. METHODS: The author administered a survey to the same group of students at baseline and 1 month later to assess the prevalence of students who met and maintained the physical activity guideline for health (PAGH). RESULTS: Thirty-five percent of students maintained the PAGH for 1 month. CONCLUSION: The majority of students in this study were insufficiently physically active. Given that insufficient physical activity may lead to serious health concerns, interventions are needed to improve activity maintenance in this population.     

Preference reversals and the measurement of environmental values

Numerous studies have demonstrated that theoretically equivalent measures of preference, such as choices and prices, can lead to systematically different preference orderings, known as preference reversals. Two major causes of preference reversals are the compatibility effect and the prominence effect. The present studies demonstrate that the combined effects of prominence and compatibility lead to predictable preference reversals in settings where improvements in air quality are compared with improvements in consumer commodities by two methods-willingness to pay for each improvement and choice (For which of the two improvements would you pay more? Which improvement is more valuable to you?). Willingness to pay leads to relatively greater preference for improved commodities; choice leads to relatively greater preference for improved air quality. These results extend the domain of preference reversals and pose a challenge to traditional theories of preference. At the applied level, these findings indicate the need to develop new methods for valuing environmental resources.