Managing Portfolio Lives: Flexibility and Privilege Amongst Upscale Restaurant Workers in Los Angeles

The unstable, even precarious labor conditions of many frontline service jobs in the United States should render them undesirable to upwardly mobile young workers. Yet for many, these types of jobs complement, rather than infringe upon, their broader lifestyles. Drawing on six years of ethnographic research in upscale Los Angeles restaurants, I show how front-of-the-house service workers navigate portfolio lives—sustained though shifting arrangements of labor and leisure that blur the boundaries between the two. I describe how these workers, who are mostly young, white, and college educated, leverage both personal resources and workplace structures to weave their restaurant jobs into their larger webs of activities. I close by discussing how the concept of portfolio lives extends theories of boundaryless work careers to the urban service economy, though these dynamic assemblages remain subject to class and race inequalities.

     

Heterogeneity in treatment effects across diverse populations

Differences in patient characteristics, including age, sex, and race influence the safety and effectiveness of drugs, biologic products, and medical devices. Here we provide a summary of the topics discussed during the opening panel at the 2018 Johns Hopkins Center for Excellence in Regulatory Science and Innovation symposium on Assessing and Communicating Heterogeneity of Treatment Effects for Patient Subpopulations: Challenges and Opportunities. The goal of this session was to provide a brief overview of FDA-regulated therapeutics, including drugs, biologics and medical devices, and some of the major sources of heterogeneity of treatment effects (HTE) related to patient demographics, such as age, sex and race. The panel discussed the US Food and Drug Administration's role in reviewing and regulating drugs, devices, and biologic products and the challenges associated with ensuring that diverse patient populations benefit from these therapeutics. Ultimately, ensuring diverse demographic inclusion in clinical trials, and designing basic and clinical research studies to account for the intended patient population's age, sex, race, and genetic factors among other characteristics, will lead to better, safer therapies for diverse patient populations.     

Opportunities and Challenges for Public Libraries to Enhance Community Resilience

This study bridges a gap between public library and emergency management policy versus practice by examining the role of public libraries in the community resource network for disaster recovery. Specifically, this study identifies the opportunities and challenges for public libraries to fulfill their role as a FEMA‐designated essential community organization and enhance community resilience. The results indicate there are several opportunities for libraries to enhance community resilience by offering technology resources and assistance; providing office, meeting, and community living room space; serving as the last redundant communication channel and a repository for community information and disaster narratives; and adapting or expanding services already offered to meet the changing needs of the community. However, libraries also face challenges in enhancing community resilience, including the temptation to overcommit library capacity and staff capability beyond the library mission and a lack of long‐term disaster plans and collaboration with emergency managers and government officials. Implications for library and emergency management practice and crisis research are discussed.     

Popularity Contagion Among Adolescents

This study aimed to support the theory of popularity contagion, which posits that popularity spreads among friends spontaneously and regardless of behavioral changes. Peer nominations of status and behavior were collected annually between 6th and 12th grades from a total of 1062 adolescents. Longitudinal hypotheses were mostly supported using path analyses, showing (1) that individual popularity could be predicted by friends’ popularity levels over time, even when controlling for stability of individual popularity; (2) that this prediction was not accounted for by behavioral contagion of aggressive or prosocial behaviors; and (3) that individual social preference generally could not be predicted by friends’ preference levels over time. Implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.     

“Make Sure You’re Not Getting Yourself in Trouble:” Building Sexual Relationships and Preventing Sexual Violence at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point

Sexual violence continues to present a problem on college campuses nationwide and among members of the U.S. military. This study attended to patterns of response in how students (cadets) at the U.S. Military Academy (West Point) discussed sexual and romantic relationships, both potential and actual, in order to examine how, if at all, they enact their sexuality-related values. Constructivist grounded theory was used to analyze semistructured interviews with three male and three female cadets from each of the 4 years of the undergraduate program, in which they are intended to become “leaders of character” who will serve as Army officers. Findings indicated limitations in cadets’ access to developing and implementing sexuality-related skills within this context. Cadets’ fear and distrust erected barriers to their pursuing their desires; the ways in which cadets avoided getting in trouble for sexual harassment or sexual assault shifted responsibility from a potential perpetrator onto a potential victim; and cadets were caught in dilemmas regarding romantic relationships as sources of both emotional support and social stigma. These findings have implications for promoting gender equity and for preventing sexual violence at this institution and at others like it, including both university campuses and other military settings.     

On the Nearness of Records to Population Quantiles with Respect to Order Statistics in the Sense of Pitman Closeness

In this paper, Pitman closeness criterion is used to compare the nearness of record values and order statistics from two independent samples to a specific population quantile of the parent distribution while the underlying distributions are the same. General expressions for the associated Pitman closeness probability are obtained when the support of the parent distribution is bounded and also unbounded. Some distribution-free results are achieved for symmetric distributions. The exponential and uniform distributions are considered for illustrative proposes and exact expressions are obtained in each case.     

Interactive Hazards Education Program for Youth in a Low SES Community: A Quasi‐Experimental Pilot Study

A pilot study of an interactive hazards education program was carried out in Canberra (Australia), with direct input from youth participants. Effects were evaluated in relation to youths’ interest in disasters, motivation to prepare, risk awareness, knowledge indicators, perceived preparedness levels, planning and practice for emergencies, and fear and anxiety indicators. Parents also provided ratings, including of actual home‐based preparedness activities. Using a single group pretest‐posttest with benchmarking design, a sample of 20 youths and their parents from a low SES community participated. Findings indicated beneficial changes on a number of indicators. Preparedness indicators increased significantly from pre‐ to posttest on both youth (p < 0.01) and parent ratings (p < 0.01). Parent ratings reflected an increase of just under six home‐based preparedness activities. Youth knowledge about disaster mitigation also was seen to increase significantly (p < 0.001), increasing 39% from pretest levels. While personalized risk perceptions significantly increased (p < 0.01), anxiety and worry levels were seen either not to change (generalized anxiety, p > 0.05) or to reduce between pre‐ and posttest (hazards‐specific fears, worry, and distress, ps ranged from p < 0.05 to < 0.001). In terms of predictors of preparedness, a number of variables were found to predict posttest preparedness levels, including information searching done by participants between education sessions. These pilot findings are the first to reflect quasi‐experimental outcomes for a youth hazards education program carried out in a setting other than a school that focused on a sample of youth from a low SES community.     

Effect of cigarette smoking on sexual functions,psychological factors,and disease activity in male patients with ankylosing spondylitis

Objective: This study aims to investigate the effect of smoking on sexual functions in AS patients.

Patients and methods: A total of 67 male AS patients with a median age of 34 years (range: 18–57) reporting sexual activity at least for the past 4 weeks period were included. Patients were divided into smokers (Group 1, n?=?47) and non-smokers (Group 2, n?=?20). Fagerström test for nicotine dependence, smoking history, exhaled carbon monoxide test were recorded for smoking AS patients. Visual analogue scale (VAS), Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Disease Activity Index (BASDAI), Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Metrology Index (BASMI), Bath Ankylosing Spondylitis Functional Index (BASFI), Ankylosing Spondylitis Quality of Life (ASQoL), International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) were filled for both groups.

Results: There was no significant difference between smokers and non-smokers in all evaluation parameters. BASMI scores were significantly lower in the mild dependency subgroup as compared to those with moderate or severe dependency (p?=?.005 and p?=?.007, respectively). Total IIEF score and IIEF categories correlated significantly with BASDAI, BASFI, BASMI, ASQoL, pain, fatigue, and cumulative smoking. BDI showed an inverse correlation with the IIEF score and IIEF category (p?r?=?–0.520, p?r?=?–0.508, respectively).

Conclusions: Sexual function in AS patients is associated with the pain, fatigue, disease activity, functional status, quality of life, depression as well as the cumulative exposure to smoking, and that sexual functions tend to decline with increasing degree of cigarette dependency.     

A new algorithm for clustering based on kernel density estimation

In this paper, we present an algorithm for clustering based on univariate kernel density estimation, named ClusterKDE. It consists of an iterative procedure that in each step a new cluster is obtained by minimizing a smooth kernel function. Although in our applications we have used the univariate Gaussian kernel, any smooth kernel function can be used. The proposed algorithm has the advantage of not requiring a priori the number of cluster. Furthermore, the ClusterKDE algorithm is very simple, easy to implement, well-defined and stops in a finite number of steps, namely, it always converges independently of the initial point. We also illustrate our findings by numerical experiments which are obtained when our algorithm is implemented in the software Matlab and applied to practical applications. The results indicate that the ClusterKDE algorithm is competitive and fast when compared with the well-known Clusterdata and K-means algorithms, used by Matlab to clustering data.