Commensurate Security: An Alternative Defense Paradigm

Commensurate security is proposed as a national defense paradigm that will compete increasingly with those of nuclear deterrence and arms control for the attention of the peoples and governments of Europe. The paradigm includes the concepts of threat assessment, unprovocative armaments, territorial defense, civilian resistance, and restructuring of military forces to provide better utilization of a nation's defense resources. It addresses the common weakness of deterrence and arms control, their reliance on nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Nations' adoption of commensurate security will stimulate the emergence of a composite paradigm integrating aspects of current models but increasingly focused on defense of homeland and avoidance of offensive threat.     

Policy, planning and the state in rural localities

The study of planning and policy-making in rural areas has tended to follow conventional lines of approach until quite recently. Although not atheoretical in nature, there has been a lack of regard to the political processes involved in policy-making and decision-making and a crucial lack of interest in the context within which such processes occur. Rather, research has taken an inherently positivist and largely pragmatic road towards the study of rural policy. It is argued in this paper that concepts and theories of the state generated largely in urban and regional contexts, provide a very necessary backcloth for the study of policy in rural areas. Unless the form, function and mechanisms of the state are fully appreciated, research into policy-making and planning will be dogged by inherent but largely untested assumptions concerning why policies are made, and on whose behalf they are implemented.     

EXCHANGE RATE RISK and THE BID-ASK SPREAD: A SEVEN COUNTRY COMPARISON

This paper studies the determination of exchange market transaction costs. Using a large data set including seven currencies, it provides empirical support for the theoretical prediction of a positive relationship between the level of uncertainty regarding future prices and current transaction costs. In contrast to most previous work, it considers explicitly the problem of omitted transactions volume, showing that while estimators are less efficient and potentially inconsistent in the absence of the unavailable variable, the direction of potential coefficient bias is such that hypothesis tests regarding the importance of uncertainty are rendered more conservative.     

Lying and nonverbal behavior: Theoretical issues and new findings

Conceptual issues about deceit, in specific why lies fail and when and how behavior may betray a lie, provides the basis for considering the type of experimental situations which may be fruitful for the study of deceit. New evidence, integrating past reports with new unpublished findings, compare the relative efficacy of facial, bodily, vocal, paralinguistic and textual measures in discriminating deceptive from honest behavior. The findings show also that most people do not rely upon the most useful sources of information in judging whether someone is lying.The information reported here also appears inCredibility Assessment—A Unified Theoretical and Research Perspective, J. Yuille (Ed.), in press, Kluwer. The work described was supported by a Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (MH 06092) and a previous grant from NIMH (MH11976).     

The nature of the connection between life course and satisfaction with community services

Research on satisfaction with community services has used both age and life cycle stage as predictors of satisfaction. As both age and life cycle stage are indicators of life course, their relative advantages in service satisfaction research need to be assessed. The authors correlated both age and life cycle stage with twenty service satisfaction items and with item non-response (a measure of the salience of a service). Results were: (1) associations with service satisfaction were linear, (2) some associations with salience were markedly curvilinear, and (3) as predictors of service satisfaction, age and life cycle performed similarly. The choice between age and life cycle as predictors of service satisfaction appears to involve conceptual as well as empirical issues.     

The compensation of national union presidents: Moderating effects of union size

Over the last forty years numerous reseachers from the fields of economics, finance, and human resources management have proposed and empirically evaluated a number of models in efforts to identify determinants of executive compensation. Recently, similar research efforts have been undertaken to identify compensation determinants for union officers, both at the local and national levels. As an extension of these works, this study found measures of union financial strength, job complexity, performance and tenure in office to be directly related to national union presidents’ compensation. Although union income and relative union member earnings were the strongest determinants of officer compensation for the sample of unions as a whole, analyses of three subgroups of unions based on size revealed very different findings for large as opposed to small and medium-sized unions.     

Use of Contpasts in a Design of Experiments-Anova Course

A priori contrasts can be devised to match most experimental predictions. When the experimental data also matches the predictions, inference on such contrasts will have far greater power than any series of conventional omnibus F tests. An illustrative exercise gives the student practice in creating the weights needed to match various predictions. Inference on contrasts is illustrated, and related to the inference of omnibus tests. Factorial designs with equal or proportional n's define special orthogonal families of contrasts so that the corresponding sums of squares have additive properties. Orthogonality is less important than matching the statistical inference done with the experimental interest. Mastery of contrasts frees the users from blindly striving for completely crossed designs in all situations.