Playing With Time: Gay Intergenerational Performance Work and the Productive Possibilities of Queer Temporalities

This article examines the tendencies of LGBT intergenerational theater projects. By engaging with ideas of queer time, temporal drag, and the pervasive heteronormative imagery of heritability and inheritance, this article explores the possibility that LGBT intergenerational projects may generate some of the problems they aim to challenge. Through the lens of queer time, the article describes the normativity generated in LGBT intergenerational theater projects as a form of restrictive interpellation. The article explores the temporal complexities at play in such theater productions as The Front Room, a specific LGBT intergenerational theater project performed in the United Kingdom in 2011. The article concludes by noting some ways in which intergenerational theater projects might seek to work through the embodiment of the historical quotidian as a mode of resistance to normativity’s recirculation.     

IMPLICIT OPTIMAL AND HEURISTIC LABOR STAFFING IN A MULTIOBJECTIVE,MULTILOCATION ENVIRONMENT*

This paper presents a tractable set of integer programming models for the days-off scheduling of a mix of full- and part-time employees working α to β days/week (cycle) in a multiple-objective, multiple-location environment. Previous models were formulated to specifically schedule part-time employees working either two or three days per week. These models were intractable because they required complete employee schedule information. The new models are deemed implicit optimal since they are required to supply only essential information. While the number of variables in previous models is an exponential increasing function of β-α, the size of three of the new models is independent of α and β. The first three models developed here (as in [18]) deal with the trade-offs between idle time, the number of employees required to work at multiple “locations,” and the size of the total labor pool. The inherent flexibility of the implicit modeling approach is illustrated by the presentation of various modifications of the basic models. These modifications permit the use of preference weights on the number of employee work days/week (cycle) or the minimization of payroll costs where differential pay rates exist. These latter models may also be formulated such that idle time is ignored, constrained or minimized. The execution time for the implicit models (on a CDC CYBER 730 computer with commercially available software) averaged well under five seconds on 1200 trial problems for the type of application considered in [18]. A solution was obtained in less than 46 seconds of CPU time for a trial problem which would have required over 1.4 million integer variables with previous models. The availability of optimal solutions was invaluable in the development of two heuristics designed to deal with the trade-offs of [16]. In an experimental analysis a previous heuristic produced results which averaged from 74 to 508 percent above optimum across six experimental conditions. The comparable new heuristic produced results which averaged from 3 to 8 percent above optimum for the same experimental conditions. The paper concludes by developing a framework to integrate the results of this research with the tour scheduling problem and by identifying several other areas for related research.     

DETERMINING THE APPROPRIATE DISCOUNT RATES IN PURE CAPITAL RATIONING

This paper proposes an interpretation of the pure capital rationing problem as it is faced by many managers in decentralized firms in which budgets serve as the principal means of control. It is argued that the appropriate objective for situations such as these is the maximization of either undiscounted earnings over the planning horizon or total value of the investments at the horizon. When either objective function is used in conjunction with the frequently encountered linear programming models for the capital rationing problem, shadow prices result which give rise to discount rates that will reproduce the optimal solution using discounted cash flow as a criterion. These results are then used as a means for clarifying several confusing and misleading statements that have appeared in the literature.     

Ethnicity-of-Interviewer Effects Among Mexican-Americans and Anglos

A general interpersonal deference explanation for ethnicity-of-interviewereffects is tested with a random survey of Anglos and Mexican-Americansusing Anglo and Hispanic interviewers and questions relatedto Mexican-American culture. The theory was most clearly supportedamong Anglo respondents. The mixed support found among Mexican-Americanssuggests that deference is strongest when questions deal withthe culture represented by the interviewer, not the respondent.     

Disability, Eugenics and the Current Ideology of Segregation: a modern moral tale

Recently, an amalgamation of articles have appeared in a wide range of publications linking together community and school inclusion, and facilitated communication research as an unholy trinity of anti-empiricism eroding the disability fields. The authors of these critiques suggest that there exists a scientific basis for state institutions, segregated learning and a non-critical acceptance of traditional interpretations of expressive ability on the part of people with disabilities. In this article we expose not science, but an ideology of segregated control behind these claims. This ideology permeates the disabilityrelated professions and is cloaked in the language of the natural sciences. We trace this use of the natural sciences to the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century and explore the legacy of the ideology of control as it impacts current understanding of disability.     

The environment as a determinant of child mortality among migrants in frontier areas of Pará and RondÔnia, Brazil, 1980

This article examines child mortality as an indicator of the quality of life among migrants living in Brazilian Amazonia in 1980. I focus on migrants in the frontier states of Pará and RondÔnia, which experienced rapid settlement during the 1970s. The key question here is the effect of settlement location on child mortality rates. While RondÔnia had lower ratios of population per public health establishments and personnel than Pará, RondÔnia nonetheless exhibited a higher malaria prevalence in 1980. I therefore attribute locational differences in child mortality to environmental factors important to malaria transmission rather than to health care infrastructure. The findings from multivariate regression analysis show that net of the effects of human capital, migration history and migrant living standards, settling in Pará rather than RondÔnia resulted in significantly lower rates of child mortality. These findings suggest that environmental factors coinciding with location of frontier settlement had important consequences for the living standards of migrants in the Brazilian Amazon.     

The Significance of Shils

Edward Shils was a widely recognized but misunderstood thinker. The original contexts of his thought are not well understood and greatly distorted by associating him with the concerns of Parsons. Shils provides a fully comparable alternative to the thought of Habermas and Foucault, with essentially similar roots: practice theory, the dissolution of Marxism in the twenties, and Carl Schmitt. Though Shils was indebted to the American sociological tradition, with respect to these issues his sources were outside it: in Hendrik de Man, T. S. Eliot, and Michael Polanyi. It is shown how Shils responded to Schmitt's argument about the inherent conflict between democracy and liberalism in terms of an account of civility and tradition, and how this argument results in a critique of Foucault, Habermas, and collectivistic liberalism.