Building the S&T Digital Library at the Naval Research Laboratory

Abstract

The Ruth H. Hooker Research Library has been delivering digital information to researchers' desktops at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) sites across the country for over ten years. This article describes the current and planned efforts at unifying the various journals, databases, reference tools, and linking schemes into a comprehensive and integrated Web-based scientific and technical digital library for the benefit of the NRL and the broader naval research community. Serials Review 2003; 29:76–82.     

The warlord as arbitrageur

This article seeks to generate a more precise understanding of the emergence and perpetuation of warlords. First, it offers a simple, intuitive, and empirically grounded conceptual definition of warlordism. Second, it argues that the primary factor contributing to the success of warlords is the ability to take advantage of price differentials for political, economic, and cultural goods across terrains—in a word, to arbitrage. Third, it illustrates this model with a case study of Khun Sa (1934–2007), the self-proclaimed Shan freedom-fighter and “king” of Burma’s heroin trade. Finally, it suggests that the international community rethink its commitment to the norm of sovereignty in order to combat the proliferation of such non-state violence-wielders.     

Why Have Children in the 21st Century? Biological Predisposition, Social Coercion, Rational Choice

This review examines arguments and evidence pertaining to the question: why have children in settings where the net economic costs of children are clearly substantial? Thereview is organized around three themes: biologicalpredispositions, environment (social coercion) and rationalchoice. Specifically, we explore the argument that evolution hasproduced sets of genes that predispose persons to childbearing bymaking sex and parenthood pleasurable. We review sociologicalarguments regarding the pronatalism/antinatalism of societalinstitutions. Finally, we discuss arguments that stress therationality of childbearing decisions by appealing to biologicalpredispositions and the economic and non-economic values ofchildren. The authors speculate that while a modern socialstructure and rationale supportive of childbearing could beconstructed, such changes are not inevitable and may be difficultin the face of competing interests. Moreover, future social andtechnological change could alter the context of childbearingsubstantially. This uncertainty complicates policyrecommendations.     

Edward Thompson's contribution to eighteenth‐century studies. The patrician‐plebeian model re‐examined

Mark Colvin, Penitentiaries, Reformatories, and Chain Gangs: Social Theory and the History of Punishment in Nineteenth‐Century America (1997), x + 294 (St Martin's Press, New York, £35.00/$45.00).

Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor:The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (1996), xix + 264 (Verso, London and New York, £39–95/$65–00, paperback £13.95/$19–00).

Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society and the State in Imperial Russia (1996), xiv + 335 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, £35.00/$49.50).

Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (1997), 328 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, £30.00/$55.00).

Philippe Minard, La fortune du colbertisme: Etat et industrie dans la France des Lumières (1998), 505 (Fayard, Paris, 160 FF). [Colbert's Legacy: State and Industry in Enlightenment France.]

William Doyle, Venality: The Sale of Offices in Eighteenth‐Century France (1996), xvii + 343 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £45.00/$85.00).

Alan Forrest, The Revolution in Provincial France: Aquitaine 1789–1799 (1996), vi + 377 (Clarendon Press, Oxford and New York, £45.00/$85.00).

Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin‐de‐Siècle Paris (1998), xiii + 230 (University of California Press, Berkeley, $35.00).     

Unity is strength: staff college and the British officer corps

Utilizing Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, Keith Macdonald has recently examined the elite social origins of the British officer corps. His analysis is valid as far at it goes but it ignores the professional practices of British officers. This article examines Britain's Joint Services Command and Staff College to assess the unification of the three services around common forms of military practice. It argues that while the new staff college has been effective in disseminating new forms of professional expertise among British officers, various practices have been institutionalized which actively undermine the unity of the officer corps.     

It's frustrating! Managing emotional dissonance in aged care work

Performing paid care work requires workers to simultaneously negotiate care and waged relationships. Mediating contradictions between the two often causes workers to experience frustration, a form of emotional dissonance. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 100 workers in Australian aged care organisations, this research identifies aspects of the work environment that enable care workers to successfully juggle or synthesise the emotional demands of their work. The research demonstrates that employers have an important role in alleviating frustration, and can do this by creating work environments which: give care workers relative autonomy; allow care workers to construct themselves as professional carers providing quality care; provide workers with support to manage their emotions and develop emotional resilience; and promote client recognition of workers' roles. Providing such work environments has the potential to not only alleviate workers' frustration, but also to increase job satisfaction and retain workers in aged care.     

The sociologist and the community developer: Autonomy and role conflict in qualitative research

Sociologists are being called upon to evaluate community development efforts in the United States at an increasing rate. These sociologists, as independent researchers, are working side by side with professional community development consultants. Based on an ongoing community development research project, which rests largely upon qualitative techniques, the roles of consultant and researcher are delineated. Methodological advantages and disadvantages of separating these roles are discussed. It is hypothesized that the presence of an independent research agent will likely produce four response phases on the part of the professional consultant during the course of the research project: (1) approval and support, (2) professional challenge, (3) apprehension, and (4) guarded acceptance. Suggestions are made regarding qualitative techniques that can minimize negative responses on the part of practitioners.     

Higher order generalisation of first order autoregressive tests

Higher order analogues of currently favoured tests for autocorrelated dicturbances are presented. Comparisons of power, against autoregressive disturbances of a range of orders considered likely in practice, favour a version of a test originally proposed by King (1985). This superiority is particularly marked with regressors for which Ordinary Least Squares is least efficient and thus testing most crucial. Selected significance bounds are tabulated for the twelfth order analogue of this test statistic for use with monthly data.     

Model Selection When a Key Parameter is Constrained to be in an Interval

This article considers model selection procedures based on choosing the model with the largest maximized log-likelihood minus a penalty, when key parameters are restricted to be in a closed interval. Its main emphasis is how these penalties might be chosen in small samples to give good properties of the resultant procedure. We illustrate two model selection problems in the context of Box–Cox transformations and their application to the linear regression model. Simulation results for both problems indicate that the new procedure clearly dominates existing procedures in terms of having higher probabilities of correctly selecting the true model.     

Kurtosis of the logistic-exponential survival distribution

ABSTRACT

In this article, the kurtosis of the logistic-exponential distribution is analyzed. All the moments of this survival distribution are finite, but do not possess closed-form expressions. The standardized fourth central moment, known as Pearson’s coefficient of kurtosis and often used to describe the kurtosis of a distribution, can thus also not be expressed in closed form for the logistic-exponential distribution. Alternative kurtosis measures are therefore considered, specifically quantile-based measures and the L-kurtosis ratio. It is shown that these kurtosis measures of the logistic-exponential distribution are invariant to the values of the distribution’s single shape parameter and hence skewness invariant.