Going to Pieces: Paul Monette and the Fragments of the Tribe

Author of the highly acclaimed Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and winner of the 1992 National Book Award for his autobiography Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, Paul Monette died of complications from AIDS in Los Angeles on February 12, 1995. His most recent work, Last Watch of the Night: Essays Too Personal and Otherwise (1994), is his third volume in a trilogy of autobiographical writing on growing up gay, coming-out, and living with AIDS. A graduate of Phillips Academy and Yale University, Monette received a number of awards for his writing and his work as an outspoken voice in the battle against AIDS, including the National Book Award, three Lambda Literary awards, the PEN Center West Freedom to Write Award, and three honorary doctorate degrees, from Wesleyan University, the City University of New York, and the State University of New York at Oswego. A memorial service was held for Monette on Sunday, February 19, 1995, at the Directors Guild of America on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Paul Monette was 49.     

The aftereffects of stress: An attentional interpretation

Two studies were conducted in order to test the hypothesis that the aftereffects of stress on both performance and social behavior are attributable to a depletion of attentional capacity. This depletion, or cognitive fatigue, was predicted to increase with both the attentional load and duration of an activity. A laboratory study demonstrated that aftereffects can be induced (without a stressor such as noise, crowding, or shock) by the performance of an attention-demanding task. Deficits on an aftereffects task increased as principal task demand and task duration increased. A second study, conducted in a field setting, found that after performing a high-load task, subjects were less likely to help a woman search for a contact lens than were their counterparts who performed a low-load task. Similarly, subjects who had been crowded were less likely to help than were those who had not been crowded. The data are interpreted as providing support for the cognitive-fatigue explanation of the aftereffects of stress.The research reported in this article was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SOC 75-09224). Study II was part of the second author's Master's thesis.The authors are indebted to Art Ellsworth, manager of Valley River Center; to Ann Lezak and George Hochstetler for serving as experimenters; to Caroline Gredvig and Valerie Kimble for serving as confederates; to Lita Furby for statistical counsel; to Mike Kemp, Al Murphy, and Nick Garshnek for technical assistance; and to David Krantz, Myron Rothbart, and David Mandel for comments on an earlier draft.     

Approximations of rational criteria under complete ignorance and the independence axiom

Rational decision making under complete ignorance, a limit case of uncertainty, is defined. Through a concept of approximation, a meaning is given to a criterion almost possessing a property. Rational criteria depend almost on the sole bounds of the outcome range of each decision, they are almost continuous, they can almost possess a transitive indifference relation; however, under Savage's Independence Axiom, this last property restricts possible criteria to those which can be approximated, at least partly, by either the Maximin or the Maximax criterion.     

Sensitivity of the Optimum to Perturbations of the Profit or Weight of an Item in the Binary Knapsack Problem

In the binary single constraint Knapsack Problem, denoted KP, we are given a knapsack of fixed capacity c and a set of n items. Each item j, j = 1,...,n, has an associated size or weight w_j and a profit p_j. The goal is to determine whether or not item j, j = 1,...,n, should be included in the knapsack. The objective is to maximize the total profit without exceeding the capacity c of the knapsack. In this paper, we study the sensitivity of the optimum of the KP to perturbations of either the profit or the weight of an item. We give approximate and exact interval limits for both cases (profit and weight) and propose several polynomial time algorithms able to reach these interval limits. The performance of the proposed algorithms are evaluated on a large number of problem instances.     

Buchbesprechungen

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Dual Career Couples als eine Variante von Work-Life-Integration

Dual Career Couples as a form of work-life-integrationThe author discusses the situation of dual career couples, when both are university graduates following an own career. Basing on a respective publication she delineates the current, mostly American research and reports on several German research projects, which endeavour to analyse the relation between gender and inequality in dual career couples.     

Von der Supervision zur Mediation und zurück

From supervision to mediation and vice versaMediation in organizations becomes more and more important because of increasing conflicts. The question is, which competencies of the counsellor are necessary, and above all, whether mediation is a particular method. The author explains the method of mediation and illustrates his concept of “patchwork-mediation”. This procedure allows to build a bridge between supervision and mediation.     

Ebert. Wolfgang (2001): Systemtheorien in der Supervision — Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven

Ohne Zusammenfassung