Essential Enactments: Commentary on Paper by Taras Babiak

Enactments are ubiquitous and are fruitful ways of examining minipsychodramas that possess our patients' lives. Addressed improvisationally, they set the stage for a different story to be written. Impasses, by contrast, do not readily yield to such examination. They often come in the form of “crunches,” “double binds,” and “relational (k)nots,” wherein the needed and repeated dimensions of the transference disqualify one another, leading to such circumstances as “To feel sane, I must forgo love; and to feel loved, I must forgo my sanity.” A discussion of Babiak's treatment of Bart illustrates how he narrowly escapes having powerfully urgent enactments devolve into impenetrable impasses.     

Religion and subjective well-being among the elderly in China

Evidence from developed and developing countries alike demonstrates a strongly positive relationship between religiosity and happiness, particularly for women and particularly among the elderly. Using survey data from the oldest old in China, we find a strong negative relationship between religious participation and subjective well-being in a rich multivariate logistic framework that controls for demographics, health and disabilities, living arrangements, wealth and income, lifestyle and social networks, and location. In contrast to other studies, we also find that religion has a larger effect on subjective well-being on men than women.     

Projection designs for mixture experiments in orthogonal blocks

Mixture experiments are often carried out in the presence of process variables, such as days of the week or different machines in a manufacturing process, or different ovens in bread and cake making. In such experiments it is particularly useful to be able to arrange the design in orthogonal blocks, so that the model in tue mixture vanauies may ue iitteu inucpenuentiy or tne UIOCK enects mtrouuceu to take account of the changes in the process variables. It is possible in some situations that some of the ingredients in the mixture, such as additives or flavourings, are present in soian quantities, pernaps as iuw a.s 5% ur even !%, resulting in the design space being restricted to only part of the mixture simplex. Hau and Box (1990) discussed the construction of experimental designs for situations where constraints are placed on the design variables. They considered projecting standard response surface designs, including factorial designs and central composite designs, into the restricted design space, and showed that the desirable property of block orthogonality is preserved by the projections considered. Here we present a number of examples of projection designs and illustrate their use when some of the ingredients are restricted to small values, such that the design space is restricted to a sub-region within the usual simplex in the mixture variables.     

Careers and productivity in an internal labor market

This paper contributes to the existing literature by evaluating the effects of age and tenure on careers and productivity within an internal labor market. We use the administrative personnel records of a long balanced panel of blue-collar workers from a manufacturing firm in Germany with a distinct classification of wage groups and unique information on workers’ productivity in form of suggestions for productivity improvement. Using robust locally weighted regression, our main findings suggest that the probability of promotion is highest for younger workers and early in the career. Older workers are less likely to be promoted. The likelihood of making a rewarded suggestion is inversely u-shaped with respect to tenure and age. Furthermore, workers’ ability and firm-specific human capital determine the workers’ careers and productivity.     

The Benefits of Reducing Gun Violence: Evidence from Contingent-Valuation Survey Data

This article presents an estimate of the benefits of reducing crime using the contingent-valuation (CV) method. We focus on gun violence, a crime of growing policy concern in America. Our data come from a national survey in which we ask respondents referendum-type questions that elicit their willingness-to-pay (WTP) to reduce gun violence by 30%. We estimate that the public's WTP to reduce gun assaults by 30% equals $24.5 billion, or around $1.2 million per injury. Our estimate implies a statistical value of life that is quite consistent with those derived from other methods.     

Hearing the voices of disabled students in higher education

Since the return of the Labour government to power in the UK in 1997 issues of social inclusion have risen up the political and statutory agenda within higher education (HE). This study reports the findings of disabled students lived experiences and views of transition from induction through to employability within one HE institution. The study examined the perspectives of disabled students via a questionnaire and face‐to‐face interviews. It found that there was still much work to be done in levelling HE experiences for disabled students and identified five key issues that should be addressed in order to enable access and entitlement to HE. These are pre‐course induction support, commitment by HE institutions to facilitating barrier free curricula, consultation with disabled students, institutional commitment to develop support services and embedding of personal development planning.     

Managing the Dynamic Science and Engineering Labor Market in the United States

The five million workers employed in science and engineering (S&E) occupations, and the 20 million with S&E degrees, are considered keys to U.S. competitiveness in the 21st century. Most of those earning PhDs in engineering at U.S. universities are foreigners, as are many of those earning PhDs in science. Many U.S. employers assert that the U.S. Government impairs economic competitiveness with policies that force some foreigners who earn advanced degrees from U.S. Universities to leave and restrict admissions of H‐1B temporary foreign workers and that employers want to hire.