The Couch Project

Carl Couch had a distinctive project. He was a man of distinctive character. In this commentary, I first describe the Couch project and then discuss how the project was interwoven with the character of its author. I then discuss “Oh, What Webs Those Phantoms Spin” in the context of Carl's larger project and close with a brief discussion of New Iowa School research after Carl Couch.     

Modeling Social Processes: Some Lessons from Sports

Sports events can provide helpful models for thinking about social processes. DiMaggio's hitting streak in baseball, for example, raises serious questions about how the causes of relatively uncommon social events are typically studied. The hitting streak also directs our attention to considering models that generate a distribution of outcomes in a population of social units. The series of games leading to a football championship is relevant for approaching the role of complex chains of events in leading to a given outcome (where each individual sequence itself has a low probability of occurring). A model of changing templates suggests a more realistic way of thinking about the linkages over time from an initial starting point to a given outcome. Another sports example, based on the application of a binomial model to the outcome of a series of games, suggests that we should think of chance as a dependent variable that is influenced by—among other factors—the nature of the social structure. Also examined are the special problems in explaining any specific outcome.     

Integrating professional socialization and training for sociology graduate students

It is a curious contradiction that sociology, a discipline that includes in its subject matter socialization, norms, occupations, formal organization, the institution of education and the concept of the career does not necessarily prepare its products in a systematic and coherent manner to become trained professionals. Newly minted Ph.D.s must often learn by trial and error because we have left them adrift concerning how to conduct themselves as professional sociologists. Moreover, while these new Ph.D.s are usually trained well as scholarly researchers, many are not prepared for the non-research careers they will take as sociologists. When this happens, we sociologists, supposedly enlightened about such matters, have failed our students. This article is divided into two parts. The first is a critique of traditional graduate education in sociology. The second part plays off these criticisms by offering a coherent plan, consonant with the current and future possibilities for sociologists.     

The influence of anthropogenic resources on multi-scale habitat selection by raccoons

With the continuing spread of urban areas, gaining a greater understanding of the effect of human presence on wildlife species is essential for wildlife managers. We determined the influence of anthropogenic resources on home range size and habitat selection of raccoons (Procyon lotor) during summer (June–August) 1996–2000 for 120 raccoons at three sites exposed to varying levels of urbanization and anthropogenic resources, specifically food. Home range estimates were larger (P < 0.05) at the rural site than the suburban and urban sites for both genders. We used compositional analysis to examine raccoon habitat selection at the second-order home range, second-order core area, and third-order home range scales. Woodland was consistently a highly-selected habitat type for both sexes at every spatial scale. Relative to other habitat types, habitat associated with human-related food (human use areas) was selected most often at the urban site, intermediately at the suburban site, and not selected at the rural site. Spatial scale also affected habitat selection. Human use areas were preferentially selected at the second- and third-order level at the urban site, third-order level only at the suburban site, and at neither level at the rural site. Additionally, intersexual differences in habitat selection were reduced at the urban site, with both sexes preferentially selecting for human use areas as well as woodland habitat. Smaller home ranges in urbanized environments are often attributed to the abundant and concentrated anthropogenic resources associated with human activity, but with little empirical support. Our habitat selection analyses followed our predictions that raccoon foraging is strongly influenced by the artificial distribution and abundance of human-related food. Male and female raccoons in urban areas reduce their foraging patterns and focus their foraging activity on anthropogenic foods.     

Some New Regression Methods for Predictive and Construct Validation

Social Indicators Research -     

Online interval scheduling: randomized and multiprocessor cases

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of equal-length intervals arriving online, where each interval is associated with a weight and the objective is to maximize the total weight of completed intervals. An optimal 4-competitive algorithm has long been known in the deterministic case, but the randomized case remains open. We give the first randomized algorithm for this problem, achieving a competitive ratio of 3.5822. We also prove a randomized lower bound of 4/3, which is an improvement over the previous 5/4 result. Then we show that the techniques can be carried to the deterministic multiprocessor case, giving a 3.5822-competitive 2-processor algorithm, and a 4/3 lower bound for any number of processors. We also give a lower bound of 2 for the case of two processors. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of COCOON 2007, LNCS, vol. 4598, pp. 176–186. The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong (SRG 7001969), and NSFC Grant No. 70525004 and 70702030.     

An Integrated Approach for Assessing the Impact of Large-Scale Future Floods on a Highway Transport System

The negative impact of climate change continues to escalate flood risk. Floods directly and indirectly damage highway systems and disturb the socioeconomic order. In this study, we propose an integrated approach to quantitatively assess how floods impact the functioning of a highway system. The approach has three parts: (1) a multi-agent simulation model to represent traffic, heterogeneous user demand, and route choice in a highway network; (2) a flood simulator using future runoff scenarios generated from five global climate models, three representative concentration pathways (RCPs), and the CaMa-Flood model; and (3) an impact analyzer, which superimposes the simulated floods on the highway traffic simulation system, and quantifies the flood impact on a highway system based on car following model. This approach is illustrated with a case study of the Chinese highway network. The results show that (i) for different global climate models, the associated flood damage to a highway system is not linearly correlated with the forcing levels of RCPs, or with future years; (ii) floods in different years have variable impacts on regional connectivity; and (iii) extreme flood impacts can cause huge damages in highway networks; that is, in 2030, the estimated 84.5% of routes between provinces cannot be completed when the highway system is disturbed by a future major flood. These results have critical implications for transport sector policies and can be used to guide highway design and infrastructure protection. The approach can be extended to analyze other networks with spatial vulnerability, and it is an effective quantitative tool for reducing systemic disaster risk.     

Fast searching games on graphs

Given a graph, suppose that intruders hide on vertices or along edges of the graph. The fast searching problem is to find the minimum number of searchers required to capture all the intruders satisfying the constraint that every edge is traversed exactly once and searchers are not allowed to jump. In this paper, we prove lower bounds on the fast search number. We present a linear time algorithm to compute the fast search number of Halin graphs and their extensions. We present a quadratic time algorithm to compute the fast search number of cubic graphs.     

Historic Preservation in Czechoslovakia: The Chȃteau at Staré Hrady

The paper discusses the gendering of the Lithuanian national movement during its formative stage, 1883–1914. It concentrates on the intelligentsia’s debate on the women’s question, which served as one of the most significant cultural battlegrounds for the national elite, helping to define its own identity and new directions for Lithuanian nationalism. Through the discussion of different marital strategies and women’s roles in national politics as seen by the male intelligentsia, the paper argues that, despite the harsh critique of traditional peasant gender relations, the debate amounted to women’s virtual domestication. For male patriots, the emancipation of Lithuanian women meant, first of all, accepting the role of patriotic wives, i.e., responsibility for the education of children, or the role of nation mothers, which entailed nurturing new members of the community. A few secular and independent women writers were welcomed into nation-building politics but only as junior partners.