Federal statistics in a complex environment: the case of the 1980 census

A discussion of the 1980 U.S. census is presented. The authors suggest that the taking of a national census is not just a statistical exercise, but an exercise involving ethics, epistemology, law, and politics. They contend that conducting a national census can be defined as an ill-structured problem in which the various complexities imposed by multidisciplinarity cannot be separated. "The 1980 census is discussed as an ill-structured problem, and a method for treating such problems is presented, within which statistical information is only one component."     

Waste paper and the market mechanism

Increasing attention is being given to the possible consequences which might follow from the exhaustion of the world's natural resources. Countering the pessimistic conclusions of such institutions as the Club of Rome, economists such as Wilfred Beckerman have emphasized the importance of substitution, pointing to many examples where a shortage of one raw material has led to the discovery or development of alternative materials, e.g. artificial for natural rubber, aluminium for copper.Substitution usually occurs through normal market mechanisms, i.e. changes in relative prices. However in some circumstances the market mechanism may be inhibited by a variety of factors, so that its operation requires to be supplemented by an outside agency. This article explores this possibility in relation to the paper making industry, which provides a particularly interesting example owing to the existence of a well established market in waste paper, the main substitute for the major natural resource, woodpulp.A brief indication is given of the relative importance of waste paper and an outline of the structure of the U.K. market; the conditions under which greater utilization of waste paper might occur are then considered taking a sideways look at the influence of the individual. In the final section the various implications for the role of the state are summarized.     

Internalized Other Interviewing in Relational Therapy: Three Discursive Approaches to Understanding its Use and Outcomes

For over 20 years, family therapist Karl Tomm has been engaging families and couples with a therapeutic intervention he calls Internalized Other Interviewing (IOI). The IOI (cf. Emmerson‐Whyte, 2010; Hurley, 2006) entails interviewing clients, from the personal experiences of partners and family members as an internalized other. The IOI is based on the idea that through dialogues over time, one can internalize a sense of one's conversational partner responsiveness in reliably anticipated ways. Anyone who has thought in a conversation with a family member or partner, “Oh there s/he goes again,” or anticipates next words before they leave the other's mouth, has a sense of what we are calling an internalized other. For Tomm, the internalized anticipations partners and family members may have offers entry points into new dialogues with therapeutic potential—particularly, when their actual dialogues get stuck in dispreferred patterns.     

The State of Research in Latino Academic Attainment

In this essay, I present an interdisciplinary examination of the state of research in Latino education, addressing not only the cultural forces influencing Latinos’ educational attainment, but also the structural conditions faced by them—as a racialized minority group—throughout their schooling and that have a cumulative effect on their academic attainment. Overall, I suggest that by engaging in a critical review of the literature on Latinos’ educational attainment, the reader will acknowledge that the racially driven hierarchical structural arrangements are highly responsible for the patterns observed.     

Change and Continuity in Australian International Migration Policy

Almost half Australia's population are an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. This paper traces changes in Australia's immigration policy over the postwar period and relates them to changing global and national developments. While Australian postwar immigration policy changes are similar in many ways to those in other “traditional” migration countries there are a number of distinctive elements. The effectiveness of those policies in achieving government goals is assessed and it is concluded that most objectives of policy have been successfully achieved. Nevertheless there are a number of challenges which Australian policy makers face over the next decade.     

Comparison as a Universal Learning Action

This article explores ‘comparison’ as a universal metasubject learning action, a key curricular element envisaged by the Russian Federal State Educational Standards. Representing the modern learner’s fundamental pragmatic skill embedding such core capacities as information processing, critical thinking, robust decision-making, and effective problem solving, the universal learning action of ‘comparison’ has become a new professional challenge for educators, in terms of both understanding the underlying theoretical framework and ensuring that appropriate instructional models are deployed. The author seeks to clarify either of these aspects by providing a plain discussion of how the basic mechanisms of comparison as a cognitive device can be incorporated into clear and simple classroom aids and algorithms supporting goal-directed learning.     

Transient detailed balance and product form for reaction networks

This paper explores the boundary of the set of reaction networks that have an exact transient (truncated) multidimensional Poisson or product-form distribution for the number of particles of different types. Motivated by the birth–death process, we introduce the notions of transient detailed balance and delay functions, and use these notions to obtain the novel transient product-form distribution in a coagulation-fragmentation process for polymers with a tree-like structure from that of the pure coagulation process.