The role of The Boffin as abject Other in gendered performances of school achievement

The gendered subjectivities of high achieving school pupils are examined, demonstrating the uneasy relationship between high educational achievement and peer popularity. Drawing on data from a study involving classroom observation and interviews with 71 high-achieving pupils across nine secondary schools in England, the article focuses on the gendered construction of The Boffin. Judith Butler's work, and Hannah Arendt's conception of pariahs and parvenus, are applied to analyse The Boffin as pariah, and as 'queer' in the classroom. The article explores the ways in which this construction is gendered, and the consequences of its application for girls and boys. It is argued that application of this stigmatised term functioned as a powerful deterrent to 'excessive' performances of achievement, for all pupils. But the risks are particularly acute for boys, to whom the 'naming' of Boffin appeared more readily applied, and for whom marginalization as Boffin appears especially perilous (risking particularly pernicious forms of punishment at the hands of other boys).     

AN ALTERNATING LEAST-SQUARES PROCEDURE FOR ESTIMATING MISSING PREFERENCE DATA IN PRODUCT-CONCEPT TESTING*

Product-concept testing is a popular activity in marketing research. Often the number of new product/service concepts under study far exceeds the time available for any single respondent. Respondents therefore may receive only a subset of the concepts comprising the total design. Researchers are interested in making plausible imputations for the missing evaluations of any given respondent. This paper proposes a model and an iterative estimation procedure to impute missing entries for each evaluator. The model and the procedure incorporate (1) the internal structure of the response matrix and (2) an ancillary matrix of (nonmissing) respondent background data; they also (3) allow for individual differences in respondents' uses of the numerical rating scale. The model is applied to both real and synthetic data. Suggestions also are given on how the data imputations may be used in market segmentation and product-line decisions.     

Men's psychological functioning in the context of women's breast cancer

Previous research indicates that men are affected when their female partners have breast cancer. However, little is known about what predicts men's psychological well-being in this context. The current investigation involved couples in which the woman had early stage breast cancer and explored the degree to which men's positive and negative well-being was related to women's well-being, women's physical symptoms, relationship functioning, and relationship duration. The findings indicate that all of these factors play a role and interact in predicting men's well-being. In particular, when women have a high level of physical symptoms, the typical associations between men's well-being with women's well-being and relationship adjustment no longer persist. Implications for working with couples addressing health problems are provided.     

The struggle for hegemony: the emergence of a counter-public sphere in post-1997 Hong Kong

The present study examines the struggle for hegemony in the public sphere by two different systems, following Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. It has been postulated that the new media, particularly social media, has become an important public sphere for the citizens of Hong Kong to engage in an anti-hegemonic struggle against China’s discursive encroachment into Hong Kong since 1997. Given that the public platform provided by legacy media has been bought out or coopted by China, new media has begun to serve as a subaltern public sphere to enable resisting the hegemony imposed by China. This was analyzed through a survey conducted as part of this study, which showed that people who are young, read the Apple Daily, have high expectations of local autonomy, and a high regard for press freedom are prone to using social media to obtain their social and political information. This article analyzes the implications of the emergence of a counter-China hegemonic public sphere.     

Nonparametric estimation of regression models with mixed discrete and continuous covariates by the K-nn method

In this article we consider the problem of estimating a nonparametric conditional mean function with mixed discrete and continuous covariates by the nonparametric k-nearest-neighbor (k-nn) method. We derive the asymptotic normality result of the proposed estimator and use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate its finite sample performance. We also provide an illustrative empirical example of our method.     

Heart disease risk perception in college men and women

The authors sought to assess the perception of risks for coronary heart disease (CHD) in college men and women. They surveyed 470 undergraduates from 2 major 4-year institutions who completed a questionnaire that measured perceived risks for heart disease. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents rated their risks as lower or much lower than those of their peers, indicating a clear optimistic bias. The research also revealed that the students who exercised regularly rated their risk of coronary disease lower than those who did not do so. In addition, women perceived a number of risk markers to be more potent or causative factors than men did. A significant number of participants did not comprehend commonly understood causal relationships associated with heart disease risk. The findings in this preliminary investigation suggest that college men and women do not accurately perceive their risks for developing heart disease.     

Smoking reduction & cessation: a hospital based survey of outpatients' attitudes

1. Most people with mental illnesses have made at least one attempt to quit smoking on their own. 2. Psychiatric diagnosis and degree of nicotine dependence do not appear to be predictive of ability to quit. 3. People with mental illnesses are aware of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), but do not combine it with a behavioral program, possibly contributing to the higher rates of recidivism in this population. 4. The lack of participation of mental health care providers in promoting smoking cessation is a complex issue.