Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India

The apparently inexorable rise in the proportion of “missing girls” in much of East and South Asia has attracted much attention among researchers and policymakers. An encouraging trend was suggested by the case of South Korea, where child sex ratios (males to females under age 5) were the highest in Asia but peaked in the mid‐1990s and normalized thereafter. Using census data, we examine whether similar trends have begun to manifest themselves in the two most populous countries of this region, China and India. The data indicate that child sex ratios are peaking in these countries, and in many subnational regions are beginning to trend toward lower, more normal values. This suggests that, with continuing economic and social development and vigorous public policy efforts to reduce son preference, the “missing girls” phenomenon could eventually disappear in Asia.     

Opportunistic data structures for range queries

In this paper, we study the problem of supporting range sum queries on a compressed sequence of values. For a sequence of n k-bit integers, k ≤ O(log n), our data structures require asymptotically the same amount of storage as the compressed sequence if compressed using the Lempel-Ziv algorithm. The basic structure supports range sum queries in O(log n) time. With an increase by a constant factor in the storage complexity, the query time can be improved to O(log log n + k). The work described in this paper is fully supported by a grant from the Research Grant Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (CityU 1071/02E). A preliminary version has appeared in 11th International Conference in Computing and Combinatorics (COCOON'05).     

Economic Incentive,Embeddedness, and Social Support: A Study of Korean‐Owned Nail Salon Workers’ Rotating Credit Associations1

Much of the past research on rotating credit associations (RCAs) in the U.S. Korean community has been conducted in the context of Korean entrepreneurs’ success in small businesses. By contrast, little has been known about the significance of RCAs in the lives of Korean immigrant workers. Based on a sample of Korean female workers at Korean‐owned nail salons in the New York–New Jersey area, the first aim of this study is to address whether Korean immigrant workers, like Korean immigrant merchants, take into account RCAs as a way to save money or raise capital. Second, this study also speculates about the importance of embeddedness (Granovetter) and social capital (Portes and Sensenbrenner) views for both economic behavior and a likelihood of malfeasance by RCA participants. Lastly, this study regards RCA membership as a mechanism of social support for its participating members. Overall, the analyses provide evidence that RCA membership at nail salons leads to both economic benefit and social support for some of its participants, and that embedded networks and an accompanying sense of trust have some connection to the suppression of its members’ latent malfeasance.     

Blog power: Examining the effects of practitioner blog use on power in public relations

While blogs are not yet a standard public relations tool, practitioners use blogs to enhance their power within their organizations. Using an online survey of public relations practitioners, this pilot test examined the relationship between power and blog use. Three factored categorizations of blog use among practitioners emerged: routine information and research, interactive blog communication, and issues identification. Results showed differences based on power, between blog users and non-users, owner-practitioners and non-owners, among others.     

Career Counseling With Lesbian,Gay, Bisexual,and Transgendered Persons: The Next Decade

The author, on the basis of an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature as well as the relevant opportunities and threats, proposes future directions for career counseling with lesbian, gay male, bisexual male and female, and transgendered persons. Suggestions include efforts for theory development, empirical research, career assessment, counseling practice, and counselor education.     

Online bottleneck matching

We consider the online bottleneck matching problem, where $k$ server-vertices lie in a metric space and $k$ request-vertices that arrive over time each must immediately be permanently assigned to a server-vertex. The goal is to minimize the maximum distance between any request and its server. Because no algorithm can have a competitive ratio better than $O(k)$ for this problem, we use resource augmentation analysis to examine the performance of three algorithms: the naive Greedy algorithm, Permutation, and Balance. We show that while the competitive ratio of Greedy improves from exponential (when each server-vertex has one server) to linear (when each server-vertex has two servers), the competitive ratio of Permutation remains linear when an extra server is introduced at each server-vertex. The competitive ratio of Balance is also linear with an extra server at each server-vertex, even though it has been shown that an extra server makes it constant-competitive for the min-weight matching problem.     

Voluntary Midlife Career Change: Integrating the Transtheoretical Model and the Life‐Span,Life‐Space Approach

Frequent career change is the predicted experience of workers in the global economy. Self‐initiating career changers are a substantial subset of the total population of career changers. There is currently a dearth of theory and research to help career counselors conceptualize the career change process for the application of appropriate interventions. The authors present an integration of a well‐researched behavior change theory, the transtheoretical model of change, with Super's (1990) life‐span, life‐space approach. The corresponding stages of the 2 models are discussed along with theoretically appropriate interventions. The integrated model provides the basis for future research on the change process for voluntary midlife career changers.     

Quantity Flexibility Contract in the Presence of Discount Incentive

We design a new contract, which we refer to as the QFi contract, that combines the quantity flexibility (QF) mechanism and the price‐only discount incentive. Under the QF contract, the buyer does not assume full responsibility for the forecast, yet the supplier guarantees the availability of the forecasted quantity and extra buffer inventory. In contrast, the price‐only discount contract places full inventory burden on the buyer. We show that the proposed QFi contract effectively balances the inventory risk for both the buyer and the supplier considering both the QF and discount mechanisms. We also show that the QFi contract is able to achieve supply chain coordination. More importantly, the QFi contract's coordinating price scheme does not require knowledge of demand distribution. We identify areas where the buyer and supplier may both benefit from implementing the QFi contract as opposed to the extant QF or price‐only (wholesale) discount contractual decisions in a decentralized supply chain. We also specify the conditions under which supply chain coordination can be achieved in a win‐win manner. We conclude with managerial implications and provide directions for future research.     

The Decline of Son Preference in South Korea: The Roles of Development and Public Policy

For years, sex ratios at birth kept rising in South Korea despite rapid development. We show that this was not an anomaly: underlying son preference fell with development, but the effect of son preference on sex ratios at birth rose until the mid‐1990s as a result of improved sex‐selection technology. Now South Korea leads Asia with a declining sex ratio at birth. We explore how son preference was affected by development and by public policy. Decomposition analysis indicates that development reduced son preference primarily through triggering normative changes across society—rather than just in individuals whose socioeconomic circumstances had changed. The cultural underpinnings of son preference in preindustrial Korea were unraveled by industrialization and urbanization even as public policies sought to uphold the patriarchal family system. Our results suggest that child sex ratios in China and India may decline before those countries reach South Korean levels of development, since the governments of both countries vigorously promote normative change to reduce son preference.