We qualitatively explored reasons why transgendered women may engage in sexual risk that could lead to HIV infection. Specifically, we conducted this investigation with transgendered women identifying as Black/African American. Interviews from 17 participants were audio taped and analyzed. Four themes emerged. Women commonly reported they had a strong need/desire to be loved by men. Many stated they had and would engage in unprotected sex to obtain and preserve such a relationship. Nearly all were currently using female hormones. Nine obtained their hormones through non-medical means including the Internet, transgendered friends, and street vendors. For these women hormone injections often involved sharing needles/syringes. Selling sex was a common practice and many women did so without the benefit of condom use. Finally, women experienced multiple forms of societal discrimination. By being caught between worlds (straight, gay, male, and female) transgendered women may be placed into situations where avoiding HIV risk is extremely difficult. 相似文献
Every state requires a home study before the placement of foster children for adoption. This article examines the history of home studies, presents results from expert interviews on the changing processes and purposes of home studies, and explores current challenges for the field. The article also introduces the Structured Analysis Family Evaluation (SAFE), a uniform home study format that encourages consistent family evaluations across workers, agencies, and jurisdictions. The article clarifies how SAFE may address challenges facing foster care and adoption practice. 相似文献
Internet gambling is growing rapidly, as is concern about its possible effect on the public’s health. This paper reports the
results of the first prospective longitudinal study of actual Internet sports gambling behavior during eight study months.
Data include recorded fixed-odds bets on the outcome of sporting contests and live-action bets on the outcome of events within
contests for 40,499 Internet sports gambling service subscribers who enrolled during February 2005. We tracked the following
primary gambling behaviors: daily totals of the number of bets made, money bet, and money won. We transformed these variables
into measures of gambling involvement. We analyzed behavior for both fixed-odds and live-action bets. The median betting behavior
of the 39,719 fixed-odds bettors was to place 2.5 bets of €4 (approximately $5.3 US) every fourth day during the median 4 months
from first to last bet. This typical pattern incurred a loss of 29% of the amount wagered. The median betting behavior of
the 24,794 live-action bettors was to place 2.8 wagers of €4 every fourth day during the median duration of 6 weeks at a loss
of 18% of the amount wagered. We also examined the behavior of empirically determined groups of heavily involved bettors whose
activity exceeded that of 99% of the sample. 相似文献
A new version of the age-old controversy between religion and science has been launched by today’s intelligent design movement.
Although ostensibly concerned simply with combating Darwinism, this new creationism seeks to drive a “wedge” into the materialist
view of the world, originating with the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus and manifested in modern times by Darwin, Marx,
and Freud. Intelligent design proponents thus can be seen as challenging not only natural and physical science but social
science as well. In this article, we attempt to explain the long history of this controversy, stretching over millennia, and
to defend science (especially social science) against the criticisms of intelligent design proponents – by defending science’s
materialist roots.
Brett Clark (Corresponding author)Email:
John Bellamy FosterEmail:
Richard YorkEmail:
Brett Clark
received his Ph.D. from the University of Oregon and is the Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press. His research interests
are ecology, political economy, and science. He has published articles and review essays in Theory and Society, The Sociological Quarterly, Organization & Environment, and Critical Sociology. He received the 2007 Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological
Association for a series of articles (one of which was the article “Carbon Metabolism: Global Capitalism, Climate Change,
and the Biospheric Rift,” published in Theory and Society in 2005) with Richard York.
John Bellamy Foster
is Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review (New York). He is the author of The Theory of Monopoly Capitalism (1986); The Vulnerable Planet (1994); “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift,” American Journal of Sociology (1999); Marx’s Ecology (2000); Ecology Against Capitalism (2002); Naked Imperialism (2006); and (with Paul Burkett) “Metabolism, Energy, and Entropy in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy,” Theory and Society (2006).
Richard York
is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon and co-editor of the Sage journal Organization & Environment. His research focuses on human interaction with the natural environment and the philosophy, history, and sociology of science.
He has published articles in American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Rural Sociology, Social Problems, Social Science Research, Sociological Forum, The Sociological Quarterly, Theory and Society, and other scholarly journals. He has twice (2004 and 2007) received the Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment
and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. 相似文献
The Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) is a computer administered, open-ended (as opposed to multiple-choice) test of analytic reasoning, critical thinking, problem solving, and written communication skills. Because the CLA has been endorsed by several national higher education commissions, it has come under intense scrutiny by faculty members, college administrators, testing experts, legislators, and others. This article describes the CLA's measures and what they do and do not assess, how dependably they measure what they claim to measure, and how CLA scores differ from those on other direct and indirect measures of college student learning. For instance, analyses are conducted at the school rather than the student level and results are adjusted for input to assess whether the progress students are making at their school is better or worse than what would be expected given the progress of "similarly situated" students (in terms of incoming ability) at other colleges. 相似文献
This paper attempts to isolate and analyze the principal ideas of multiobjective optimization. We do this without casting aspersions on single-objective optimization or championing any one multiobjective technique. We examine each fundamental idea for strengths and weaknesses and subject two—efficiency and utility—to extended consideration. Some general recommendations are made in light of this analysis. Besides the simple advice to retain single-objective optimization as a possible approach, we suggest that three broad classes of multiobjective techniques are very promising in terms of reliably, and believably, achieving a most preferred solution. These are: (1) partial generation of the efficient set, a rubric we use to unify a wide spectrum of both interactive and analytic methods; (2) explicit utility maximization, a much-overlooked approach combining multiattribute decision theory and mathematical programming; and (3) interactive implicit utility maximization, the popular class of methods introduced by Geoffrion, Dyer, and Feinberg [24] and extended significantly by others. 相似文献
Environmental scanning activities of over 400 top management subunits in 108 European manufacturing firms provided the data base for this research. Four traits (constructs) of scanning using three methods (interest, frequency, and time) were examined. A confirmatory factor analysis approach to multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) data was employed. Verification of the reliability as well as convergent and discriminant validity of the scanning scales are reported and discussed. The viability of confirmatory factor analysis in providing a precise analysis of partitioning variance according to trait, method, and error is demonstrated. 相似文献
Scheduling university examinations is often done with the objective of spreading a student's required examinations over an examination week. That is the equivalent of the problem of minimizing the number of examinations a student must take on any one day. An approach to scheduling exams which relates the problem to the classical assignment problem is discussed. The model developed is a symmetry-constrained assignment model, and the solution method requires use of a branch-and-bound algorithm. Results from application of the algorithm to six semesters of actual data are presented. 相似文献
This paper considers the estimation of Cobb-Douglas production functions using panel data covering a large sample of companies observed for a small number of time periods. GMM estimatorshave been found to produce large finite-sample biases when using the standard first-differenced estimator. These biases can be dramatically reduced by exploiting reasonable stationarity restrictions on the initial conditions process. Using data for a panel of R&Dperforming US manufacturing companies we find that the additional instruments used in our extended GMM estimator yield much more reasonable parameter estimates. 相似文献
There have been few studies investigating the relationship between the built environment and the status of bird distributions in small island tropical urban areas. We present a study investigating the relationship between bird species richness, abundance and assemblage to the built environment in Suva, Fiji. Field surveys were taken at 54 randomly selected sites throughout the city, stratified by three building density classes and the central business district (CBD). At each site bird counts were recorded, along with environmental data such as average building height, within a 150 m radius. Land-use information was obtained from screen digitized high-resolution satellite imagery within the same radius. Distance to undeveloped patches of land within the urban area was calculated using a GIS. Analysis of the effects of the built environment was carried out for all species, and for exotic and native species separately. Abundance of exotics was significantly higher in the central business district (CBD) than all other urban density classes, and significantly higher than natives in all other density classes. We found a negative relationship between native species richness and distance to undeveloped patches, but no relationship for exotics. Species assemblage was not related to urban density class. We conclude that the status of native and exotic bird species in Suva is similar to what has been found in urban areas in temperate climates, and conservation efforts should focus on minimizing the amount of heavily urbanized “core areas” and protecting undeveloped areas of forested vegetation to improve bird biodiversity in small tropical islands cities.