Tell the Teacher or Tell the Bully off: Children's Strategy Production for Bystanders to Bullying

Although children's reticence to intervene as bystanders to bullying is well established, the reasons for their inaction remain unclear. One possibility is that they are incapable of generating appropriate response strategies in these situations. This study examined the number and type of strategies children (N = 104, 6–11 years) could generate for bystanders to a variety of bullying situations. Across bullying situations, older children generated more strategies than did younger children. Children most often suggested that the bystander confront the bully directly, followed by the suggestion that the bystander find a teacher for help or comfort the victim. An exclusion incident prompted more frequent proposals that the bystander help by comforting the victim while a pushing incident prompted more frequent appeals to a teacher. A priming story about a peer bystander intervening successfully in a bullying incident boosted strategy production in girls but did not affect boys.     

Race differentials in employment effects of psychological distress: A study of non-Hispanic Whites and African-Americans in the United States

This study used two sub-samples of African-Americans and non-Hispanic Whites from the 2002–2003 U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health to examine differential effects of psychological distress (PD) on employment. Failing to reject exogeneity of PD in the employment specifications, we estimated standard probit of employment. We found that PD significantly reduced employment probability regardless of race; but the reduction was 7.4% for African-Americans, compared to 5.3% for Whites. Using individuals with PD only, we estimated the Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition and found endowments explained 61% of employment differences between Whites with PDs and African-Americans with PDs while 39% of these differences were due to unexplained factors. These findings suggest that targeted policies for prevention and effective treatment of PD might yield higher employment benefits for minorities.     

Setting Risk‐Informed Environmental Standards for Bacillus Anthracis Spores

In many cases, human health risk from biological agents is associated with aerosol exposures. Because air concentrations decline rapidly after a release, it may be necessary to use concentrations found in other environmental media to infer future or past aerosol exposures. This article presents an approach for linking environmental concentrations of Bacillus. anthracis (B. anthracis) spores on walls, floors, ventilation system filters, and in human nasal passages with human health risk from exposure to B. anthracis spores. This approach is then used to calculate example values of risk‐informed concentration standards for both retrospective risk mitigation (e.g., prophylactic antibiotics) and prospective risk mitigation (e.g., environmental clean up and reoccupancy). A large number of assumptions are required to calculate these values, and the resulting values have large uncertainties associated with them. The values calculated here suggest that documenting compliance with risks in the range of 10^?4 to 10^?6 would be challenging for small diameter (respirable) spore particles. For less stringent risk targets and for releases of larger diameter particles (which are less respirable and hence less hazardous), environmental sampling would be more promising.     

Violence against nurses in outpatient mental health settings.

Nurses in outpatient mental health settings who have been assaulted may have an increased sense of vulnerability. Assault and verbal threats influence how nurses view client behavior. Mechanisms need to be developed to protect staff in outpatient settings and to support colleagues when assaults or threats occur.     

A different life?: Barthes,Foucault and everyday life

How might the injunction to ‘think differently’ in the work of French theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault have informed a re-thinking of everyday life? In Barthes’ work, a critical analysis of myth and ideology in the contemporary everyday life of the late 1950s gives way to counter-ideological strategies that might seem to move away from the everyday and towards the utopian. However, the utopian imagination at work in Barthes’ thought is effective precisely in its insistence on the everyday detail. This is reflected in the later work in the attention given to the incident and the haiku. In his later work, Foucault turns towards antiquity in response to his own assessment of the ubiquitous diffusion of relations of power and the need to ‘think differently’. It is, however, in the interviews and specifically in a series of comments on homosexuality that Foucault is most attentive to the ‘possibilities for new life’ in his own time. It is through the undoing of already established relations and the experimentation with different modes of relation that a locus of difference can be found in everyday life. This is characterized by Foucault as a heterotopia. Foucault’s tentative suggestions of different possibilities are oriented towards an intensification of pleasures, counter to the psychoanalytic attention to desire. However, Foucault’s account of pleasure is associated with mortality, suggesting the question: is this different life one destined only to posterity and its own transcendence? Deleuze’s reading of Foucauldian subjectivation suggests a different strategy of resistance, more attuned to the immanence of a life.     

An extended Gini approach to inequality measurement

It is well-known that, when the Lorenz curves do not cross, the ranking of distributions provided by the Gini index is identical to the one implied by the Lorenz criterion. This does not preclude inequality as measured by the Gini index to increase while the Lorenz curves cross. A suitable modification of the Gini coefficient allows the Lorenz quasi-ordering to coincide with the ranking generated by the application of unanimity over the class of extended Gini indices. Recently the Lorenz quasi-ordering and the underlying principle of transfers have come under attack, while new criteria – the differentials, deprivation and satisfaction quasi-orderings – have been proposed for providing unambiguous rankings of distributions. We suggest to weaken the principle of transfers by imposing additional restrictions on the progressive transfers, which take into account the positions on the income scale of the donors and beneficiaries. We identify the subclasses of extended Gini indices that satisfy these weaker versions of the principle of transfers and we show that the application of unanimity among these classes generate rankings of distributions that coincide with those implied by the differentials, deprivation and satisfaction quasi-orderings.