Getting Away from It All: The Construction and Management of Temporary Identities on Vacation

When individuals go on vacation they take on a temporary “vacation identity.” Vacationers use props, behaviors, and interactions with traveling companions to define and bound the experience as separate and different from everyday life. Data are drawn from twenty in‐depth interviews and participant observation with sixty international tourists in China during the summer of 2008. Vacationers' participation in rites and routines and impression management techniques helped them construct a personally meaningful, yet short‐lived identity. The results underscore the influence of others in identity construction and point to the importance of a nonpresent other in creating and presenting identities.     

Relations between environmental problems,psychology and health among shift-workers in the Norwegian process industry

Abstract

A group of 89 male shift-workers, mean age 38 years, was examined for health complaints, subjective experience of their work environment, psychological defence strategies, and immunological factors. They worked in a process industry, controlling a complex chemical process partly by instruments and partly by direct checking of mechanical devices such as valves. Shifts were eight hours long and changed every second week.

The main problem areas identified were problems with the management, colleagues and superiors, feelings of being under-valued, time pressure, fear of making mistakes, and lack of influence and communication. The main health complaints were sleep disturbance and gastro-intestinal problems. Shift workers also complained about allergies, breathing difficulties, tension, anxiety and depression. There were no pathological levels of plasma immunoglobulins (Ig) or Ig complements. However, levels did correlate with experience of work-related problems and with measures of defence mechanisms. Up to 25% of the variance in die immunological indicators was explained by a combination of defence mechanism scores and those of perceived health and work problems. This suggests that immunoglobulins may be an indicator of work-related health risks (‘stress’), even if the level of explained variance is too low to use immunoglobulins alone as a ‘marker’. The same variables, and immunoglobulins, also related significantly to perceived health. This may be a particularly important indicator, and when combined with immunology and psychological variables, also as a risk factor for organic disease.     

Statistical comparisons of methods for interpolating the output of a numerical air quality model

This paper compares Models-3/Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) outputs at multiple resolutions by interpolating from coarse resolution to fine resolution and analyzing the interpolation difference. Spatial variograms provide a convenient way to investigate the spatial character of interpolation differences and, importantly, to distinguish between naive (nearest neighbor) interpolation and bilinear interpolation, which takes a weighted average of four neighboring cells. For example, when the higher resolution is three times the lower, the variogram of the difference between naive interpolation of the lower resolution output and the higher resolution output shows a depression at every third lag. This phenomenon is related to the blocky nature of naive interpolation and demonstrates the inferiority of naive interpolation to bilinear interpolation in a way that pixelwise comparisons cannot. Theoretical investigations show when one can expect to observe this periodic depression in the variogram of interpolation differences. Naive interpolation is in fact used widely in a number of settings; our results suggest that it should be routinely replaced by bilinear interpolation.     

The effect of long-term outcome studies on the therapy of schizophrenia: a critique

The reader of this commentary on Haley's paper by Stein will note that Stein refers to Haley as "the author of the critiqued paper" or "ACP," rather than by name. This unusual style was occasioned by the Editor's decision that Stein should comment on the paper without any knowledge of its authorship, in order that the focus of Stein's comments be on the substance of that paper and that his comments not be influenced by who had written it. The admittedly somewhat awkward references to "ACP" have been retained in Stein's comments in order to make that point clear.-Ed.     

Durable solutions for developing country refugees

"Refugee problems demand durable solutions" is the opening statement of the Principles for Action in Developing Countries adopted by the 1984 Executive Committee of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In fact, in most refugee situations no such demand is made. Those same Principles weakened the demand for durable solutions by labelling 3rd country resettlement as the least desirable and most costly solution and by indicating that when voluntary repatriation is not immediately feasible, it is sufficient to provide only temporary settlement for the refugees. This article seeks to provide some background to recent changes in refugee problems that have impeded the attainment of durable solutions and to explore some of the difficulties and possibilities for durable solutions in developing countries in the 1980s (author's).     

Refugee research bibliography

This is an unannotated, interdisciplinary bibliography on refugees, presented in alphabetical order by author and covering the period from the 1950s to the present.     

Three-year follow-up of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.)

The long-term effectiveness of D.A.R.E. was assessed by contrasting 9th-grade students who received the program in the 6th grade with others who did not receive the program. Of 38 elementary schools eligible for D.A.R.E. programs, 21 received the program and 17 did not. A follow-up survey assessed central D.A.R.E. concepts such as self-esteem, resistance to peer pressure, delay of experimentation with drugs, and drug use. Employing latent variables to represent the concepts, no significant differences were found between D.A.R.E. participants and controls. The authors discuss attenuation of effects and the generally antidrug context of schools.     

Improved Bounds on Relaxations of a Parallel Machine Scheduling Problem

We consider the problem of scheduling n jobs withrelease dates on m identical parallel machines to minimize the average completion time of the jobs. We prove that the ratio of the average completion time of the optimal nonpreemptive schedule to that of the optimal preemptive schedule is at most 7/3, improving a bound of Shmoys and Wein.