Dead Poets' Society: Teaching,Publish‐or‐Perish,and Professors' Experiences of Authenticity

Within social psychology, the concept of authenticity of the self has traditionally suffered from lack of definitional clarity. In this article, after conceptualizing authenticity as the phenomenological emotional experience of feeling true to one's self, the author empirically examines the diversity of emotions associated with various degrees of authenticity and inauthenticity. Data for this study are from semi‐structured in‐depth interviews with forty‐six faculty members employed at a public research university in the United States. Professors' experiences of and dispositions toward teaching, and their experiences of authenticity and inauthenticity, are examined against the background of structural and cultural forces and changes in American higher education. Data interpretation shows that teaching is mostly a source of authenticity for professors in the humanities, and less for those professors who identify themselves primarily as researchers.     

Independence and sphericity tests for the residuals of space-time arma models

The mechanics of the procedure for building space-time autoregressive moving average (STARMA) models is dependent upon the form of G, the variance-covariance matrix of the underlying errors.This paper presents large sample tests of the hypotheses that G is diagonal and that G equals o² I. Tables of the critical values for these tests are constructed     

ANASE: measuring aircraft noise annoyance very unreliably

Does anyone who lives under a flight-path like aircraft noise? It is a political hot potato as well as a peace-destroyer. Tens of thousands of people will hear the noise from any third runway at Heathrow. So, when a study commissioned by the government claimed that people are becoming less tolerant of aircraft noise, it made highly unpleasant reading for supporters of a third runway. But the Department for Transport rejected the report as unreliable. Peter Brooker senses the vibrations.     

MAINTAINING THE HALLMARKS… THE SOCIAL SECURITY APPEALS TRIBUNAL COMES OF AGE

This paper examines the practices of the Social Security Appeals Tribunal (‘SSAT’) as the first tier externa! review mechanism in respect of primary decision-making by the Department of Social Security. In particular the characteristics of the SSAT which set it apart as essentially inquisitorial and non-adversarial, and the appropriateness of the use of features more usually associated with the formal court process, will be considered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the legislative objectives of the SSAT and the extent of their achievement to date, and suggest that the features which set the SSAT apart from its more formal judicial counterparts need to be maintained as the SSAT becomes more institutionalized within administrative review processes.     

Agency as vulnerability: accounting for children's movement to the streets of Accra

This paper considers the agency of children moving to the streets of Accra, Ghana's capital city. A much used but largely unexamined concept, agency is nevertheless commonly deployed in childhood studies as a means to stress the capacity of children to choose to do things. In the literature on street and working children, and a cognate area of study concerned with children's independent migration, this has involved accounts of children's agency made meaningful by reference to theories of rational choice or to the normative force of childhood. It is our argument that both approaches leave unanswered important questions and to counter these omissions we draw upon the arguments of social realists and, in particular, the stress they place on vulnerability as the basis for human agency. We develop this argument further by reference to our research with street children. By drawing upon the children's accounts of leaving their households and heading for Accra's streets, it is our contention that these children do frame their departures as matters of individual choice and self‐determination, and that in doing so they speak of a considerable capacity for action. Nevertheless, a deeper reading of their testimonies also points to the children's understandings of their own vulnerability. By examining what we see as their inability to be dependent upon family and kin, we stress the importance of the children's perceptions of their vulnerability, frailty and need as the basis for a fuller understanding of their agency in leaving their households.     

Social Capital is Associated with Earnings among Foreign‐born Mexican Men but not Women in Los Angeles County

The mechanisms through which social capital is accumulated may influence its relationship with hourly earnings. Because Mexican men and women accumulate social capital differently, for instance, gender may be an important factor for understanding social capital’s association with Mexican migrant earnings. Unlike past research that often fails to differentiate between various social capital metrics (e.g., social network member reciprocity, participation in civic group organizations, neighbourhood trust), this article estimates two of these associations with wages while controlling for individual‐, household‐ and neighbourhood‐level characteristics. Results suggest that foreign‐born Mexican men receive a wage premium from civic participation (bridging social capital) and a wage penalty from reciprocal social network exchange (bonding social capital). We also find that unauthorized legal status (among Mexican men and all migrants) and having children (among women) were negatively associated with hourly wages. We conclude with a discussion of the relative association of human and social capital with Mexican migrant wages.     

An empirical analysis of the welfare magnet debate using the NLSY

This paper examines the extent to which differences in welfare generosity across states leads to interstate migration. Using microdata from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) between 1979 and 1992, we employ a quasi-experimental design that utilizes the categorical eligibility of the welfare system. The pattern of cross-state moves among poor single women with children, who are likely to be eligible for benefits is compared to the pattern among other poor households. We find little evidence indicating that welfare-induced migration is a widespread phenomenon. Received: 3 April 1997/Accepted: 4 September 1998     

Some unique properties of eigenvector centrality

Eigenvectors, and the related centrality measure Bonacich's c(β), have advantages over graph-theoretic measures like degree, betweenness, and closeness centrality: they can be used in signed and valued graphs and the beta parameter in c(β) permits the calculation of power measures for a wider variety of types of exchange. Degree, betweenness, and closeness centralities are defined only for classically simple graphs—those with strictly binary relations between vertices. Looking only at these classical graphs, where eigenvectors and graph–theoretic measures are competitors, eigenvector centrality is designed to be distinctively different from mere degree centrality when there are some high degree positions connected to many low degree others or some low degree positions are connected to a few high degree others. Therefore, it will not be distinctively different from degree when positions are all equal in degree (regular graphs) or in core-periphery structures in which high degree positions tend to be connected to each other.     

A COMMENT ON COMPETITION AND BIDDING BEHAVIOR: SOME EVIDENCE FROM THE RICE MARKET

In testing agents' responses to increased competition in sealed-bid first price-rice auctions, Meyer [1988] makes two erroneous assumptions: (1) that agents know ex ante the number of bidders in the auction, and (2) that firms forecast resale prices with information unavailable at the time of the auction. These two misspecifications are identified and corrected. A probit model provides a forecast of market competition, and agents' bids are modeled as a function of expected competition and factors affecting the value of each rice lot. The bias toward zero in Meyer's estimated coefficient on market competition is reduced.