Nonritual alcohol drinking practices among high school students from the Kibbutz movement in Israel: implications for prevention

This article describes the Kibbutzim part of a survey conducted in the north of Israel during spring 1990, in order to investigate alcohol drinking habits of Jewish students from Kibbutzim and urban areas, as well as those of Moslem and Druze students, and to draw conclusions for designing alcohol abuse prevention activities. Of the general sample of 2763 students, 572 subjects were drawn from eleven schools which belong to sixty-two Kibbutzim. Exactly 435 students were Kibbutzim-born and 137 were outsiders living and being educated in the Kibbutzim. Kibbutzim-born youth showed the highest rate of involvement with alcohol in Israel, and a striking difference concerning the rates of alcohol consumption was revealed between the above mentioned two groups. This article explains this gap, as well as the high prevalence of alcohol use among Kibbutzim-born youth, and discusses implications for prevention.     

Loss and Recovery

Relationships whose loss triggers grief are termed "relationships of attachment." These relationships are pair-bond relationships, parental attachments to children, transference relationships to helpers, and persisting childlike attachments to parents. Because these relationships share significant characteristics, it is proposed that they are developments of a single socio-emotional system—the attachment system of children. This point of view permits a unified treatment of a number of topics, including the threats that elicit attachment emotions and behaviors, the impact of loss, the nature and course of recovery from loss, impediments to recovery, and the forms taken by failures to recover.     

Mechanisms Underlying Language Acquisition: Benefits From a Comparative Approach

One of the longstanding issues in language research has been the extent to which the mechanisms underlying language acquisition are uniquely human. The primary goal of this article is to introduce the reader to some of the recent developments in comparative language research that have shed new light on this issue. To appreciate the significance of the new developments, we begin with a brief historical overview of language studies that have adopted a comparative approach, and then discuss a subset of the relevant theoretical accounts that seek to explain why humans are the only species capable of acquiring language. We next focus on findings from behavioral studies comparing the performance of human infants and adults with nonhuman primates on tests that tap the perceptual and learning mechanisms that are fundamental to language acquisition. We argue that in cases where the behavioral data appear similar across populations, there is a need to investigate the underlying computational abilities and units of analysis to correctly specify the degree to which the mechanisms are truly shared or are uniquely specified.     

Report on the Workshop on Practical Protection in Humanitarian Crises

With a global crisis of approximately 15 million refugees and an estimated 20 to 25 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in need of protection, the current protection regime is under increased scrutiny. "Practical Protection" is a fairly new concept. Those pursuing it aim to expand understanding and responsibilities for protection beyond those institutions with a specific protection mandate. "The Workshop on Practical Protection in Humanitarian Crises" was organized to bring the practical protection concept to representatives from a wide range of international agencies, governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who discussed its implications for their work in humanitarian crises.
Organizations with specific protection mandates, primarily the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), work to protect uprooted groups through legal tools and recognized principles, often in the context of assistance programmes that provide shelter, food, water, medical care, education and other forms of humanitarian assistance. They work in collaboration with NGOs and other international organizations that focus primarily on assisting forced migrants. These latter agencies have traditionally avoided overt involvement in protection activities. When UNHCR and ICRC are not present or are over-extended, gaps in the protection regime emerge. The gap is particularly evident with regard to internally displaced and other war-affected populations, but it is present in most refugee situations as well.     

CREDITS AND CRAFT PRODUCTION: FREELANCE SOCIAL ORGANIZATION IN THE HOLLYWOOD FILM INDUSTRY, 1964–1978*

This paper describes a system of work and patterns of productivity in the Hollywood film industry. Describing the social organization of the film industry entails two primary tasks. One is to describe the administration of work activities among technical specialists. The second is to investigate empirically the organization of those work activities. We argue that because of the particular needs of filmmaking, efficiency is achieved utilizing craft methods of work administration. An analysis of longitudinal data on film specialist's productivity provides some preliminary answers to Becker's theoretical idea of the recurrent nature of work activities in the production of art works. Finally, accounting for the disproportionate work contributions among specialists, some explanations are offered based upon an analysis of the process by which coalitions of specialists are joined.     

Development and validation of a tool to improve physician identification of elder abuse: the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index (EASI)

This study aimed to develop and validate a brief tool for physician use to improve suspicion about the presence or absence of elder abuse. A literature review on elder abuse, obstacles to its identification, limitations of detection tools, and characteristics of screeners employed by physicians were used to generate elder abuse detection questions for critique by 31 doctors, nurses, and social workers in focus groups. Six resulting questions became the Elder Abuse Suspicion Index (EASI) administered by 104 family doctors to 953 cognitively intact seniors in ambulatory-care settings. Findings were compared to a recognized, detailed elder abuse Social Work Evaluation (SWE) later administered to participants by social workers blinded to the results of the EASI. The EASI had an estimated sensitivity and specificity of 0.47 and 0.75, usually took less than 2 minutes to ask, and 97.2% of doctors felt it would have some or big practice impact. This research is a first phase in the development and validation of a user-friendly tool that might sensitize physicians to elder abuse and promote referrals of possible victims for in-depth assessment by specialized professionals.     

Ownership concentration beyond good and evil: is there an effect on corporate performance?

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between ownership concentration and firm performance, while accounting for the endogeneity of the ownership structure, a potential curvilinearity of the performance effect, differences in corporate governance systems, and alternative performance measures. Using a sample of 1,079 firms from 8 countries we find evidence for a curvilinear effect of ownership concentration on firm performance, which becomes insignificant after controlling for endogeneity. Hence, our results support the findings by Demsetz and Villalonga (J Corp Fin 7(3):209?C233, 2001). More research is needed to disentangle the contradictory findings in prior works.