Raising Girlyboys: A Parent's Perspective

An increasing number of children are expressing themselves in gender-expansive or gender-variant ways. A subgroup of those children are girlyboys: boys who accept themselves as boys but cross culturally defined gender lines in their attitudes, behaviors, and desires. Using clinical material, written accounts, and personal observations, this paper investigates the experience of parents raising these boys. Facilitative parenting is differentiated from obstructive parenting within the rubric that gender-fluid outcome is healthy and parents can have influence in this arena. The experience of parents with their girlyboys is also offered as a window through which to view a young boy's protogay development. Analysis is made of the ways in which the psychoanalytic lens has traditionally blurred or distorted our thinking about parents' roles in gender-variant children's development. An alternative view of parenting, informed by the work of post-modern psychoanalytic gender theorists, is proffered, with an end to reinforcing healthy gender-fluid development.     

Methodology for the Calculation of Annualized Incremental Risks in Systems of Dams

In the past few years, the field of dam safety has approached risk informed methodologies throughout the world and several methodologies and programs are appearing to aid in the systematization of the calculations. The most common way of implementing these calculations is through the use of event trees, computing event probabilities, and incremental consequences. This methodology is flexible enough for several situations, but its generalization to the case of systems of several dams is complex and its implementation in a completely general calculation methodology presents some problems. Retaining the event tree framework, a new methodology is proposed to calculate incremental risks. The main advantage of this proposed methodology is the ease with which it can be applied to systems of several dams: with a single risk model that describes the complete system and with a single calculation the incremental risks of the system can be obtained, being able to allocate the risk of each dam and of each failure mode. The article shows how both methodologies are equivalent and also applies them to a case study.     

SHORT REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this article: Gay Becker, The Elusive Embryo: How Women and Men Approach New Reproductive Technologies Theodore Caplow, Louis Hicks, and Ben J. Wattenberg, The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Guide to Trends in America, 1900–2000 Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon, It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years Elisabeth Croll, Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Eds.), Re‐Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China David T. Graham and Nana K. Poku (Eds.), Migration, Globalisation and Human Security Paul Harrison and Fred Pearce, AAAS Atlas of Population and Environment Russell King, Paolo De Mas, and Jan Mansvelt Beck (Eds.), Geography, Environment and Development in the Mediterranean Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs and United Nations Population Fund, Low Fertility and Policy Responses to Issues of Ageing and Welfare National Assessment Synthesis Team, Climate Change Impacts on the United States: The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. Report for the US Global Change Research Program Jacques Vaixin and Thérèse Locoh (Eds.), Population et développement en Tunisie: La métamorphose     

Emergency Planning for Hazardous Industrial Areas: A Brazilian Case Study

One of the characteristics of modern industrial development is the emergence of a new typology of accidents whose effects can be spread, in space as well as in time, well beyond the borders of the installations where they occur, sometimes impacting the local population and the environment in a catastrophic fashion. This is the result of a number of factors that have changed the risk profile of modern industrial activities. For a number of reasons, the developing countries have proved to be more vulnerable to industrial disasters. Three of the most catastrophic industrial accidents—Bhopal, San Juan de Ixhuatepec, and Cubatão—occurred in developing countries, claiming thousands of lives. During the 1970s and 1980s the higher degree of public visibility of industrial hazards as a result of serious accidents, led to the creation, especially in the more industrialized countries, of regulations for greater control over industrial activities, either by means of new laws or by updating existing legislation. Some of these regulations were designed to improve the response to accidents with potential impacts outside the industrial sites. This article attempts to describe the current status and identify the shortcomings of off‐site emergency planning for hazardous industrial areas in Brazil. The most important problems are the lack of specific legislation and the absence of awareness and active participation of public authorities. The experience of an off‐site emergency planning process for a Brazilian industrial area is presented. This experience illustrates how difficult it is to prepare and implement emergency planning processes in an industrializing country.     

La psicología de la paz en los Estados Unidos

Resumen

Dentro del estudio de los procesos sociocognitivos implicados en la conducta de salud, el objetivo de este estudio es obtener la percepción de rol de las personas implicadas en la relación del profesional de la salud con el paciente. Así como su asociación con el cumplimiento terapéutico del paciente. Cien pacientes de hipertensión arterial esencial y cien profesionales de la salud (médicos y de enfermería) respondieron a los cuestionarios especialmente elaborados para este trabajo.

El cumplimiento terapéutico lo valoramos mediante una medida combinada de autoinforme y consecución de los objetivos terapéuticos. Los resultados mostraron que el rol del paciente podría evaluarse por los profesionales sanitarios en función de tres dimensiones fundamentales (obediencia/resistencia hacia la asistencia sanitaria; confianza/desconfianza hacia los profesionales sanitarios y cumplimiento/incumplimiento hacia los tratamientos terapéuticos). El rol de médico percibido por los pacientes se definió de forma más amplia y exigente que el rol de la enfermera. Y por último, observamos diferencias entre los pacientes cumplidores y los incumplidores respecto a algunas características atribuidas al rol del médico.     

VIOLENCE,MORALITY, AND TELEVISION COMMERCIALS

It is popularly believed that television violence and declining morality are important causes of crime. Nearly all of the research in this area, however, has centered attention on programs, both news and entertainment. Commercials have generally been neglected. The present study sought to remedy this oversight . Findings from a content analysis of 1,699 commercials show that only a very small percentage of commercials contain violence. The findings also indicate that a low number of commercials exhibit behavior or attitudes that run contrary to conventional moral standards. It is theorized that although advertisers sponsor programs that feature violence or morally controversial themes, they do not wish to closely associate such content with the products or services they seek to sell.     

Women Empowering Women

As women in this female-centered profession of social work, we have not effectively advocated for ourselves in terms of leadership in our educational systems. We reexamine the 2008 special section of the Journal of Social Work Education on women in the academy and build on information that suggests social work has lost its momentum to advocate for a more unified feminist voice and standpoint epistemology in our scholarly literature, teaching materials, and leadership models. We reflect on pioneers who helped pave the way, and we question our own involvement as women in surrendering to the dominant voice. We conclude with suggestions for eliminating status-based disparities, unifying our stance as women, and strengthening the feminist voice in leadership, mentorship, and education through the lens of relational-cultural theory.     

Influence diagnostics in a multivariate normal regression model with general parameterization

Patriota and Lemonte [24] introduced a quite general multivariate normal regression model. This model considers that the mean vector and the covariance matrix share the same vector of parameters. In this paper we present some influence assessment for this model, such as the local influence, total local influence of an individual and generalized leverage which are discussed. Additionally, the normal curvatures for local influence studies are derived under some perturbation schemes.     

CONSUMING IRELAND: LUCKY CHARMS CEREAL,IRISH SPRING SOAP AND 1-800-SHAMROCK

This article analyses some of the most prominent and long-lasting US advertising campaigns that have engaged themes of Irishness. The trend toward using Irishness to sanitize the commodified nature of goods and services in a variety of US television commercials has accelerated dramatically at the end of the 1990s. Expanding upon the formative campaigns discussed here, corporate brands as varied as General Foods International Coffees, AT & T Long Distance Service, the cholesterol medication Zocor, Folger's Coffee, Dr Pepper soda, Platinum Mastercard and Mobil Oil have all deployed advertising that references Irishness as a mode of transformative identity, a form of ideological camouflage, an accessory discourse to ‘family values’, or a catalyst for the pleasures of white ethnic heritage. Limited in its scope, but attentive to the strategies of some of the most formative campaigns that inspired these trends, this piece seeks to indicate some of the most prominent coordinates on the expanding map of Irishness in contemporary US popular culture.