Setbacks for pro-choice

In June, 1977, the U.S. House of Representatives voted against all abortion funding with Medicaid money, the Supreme Court issued 3 decisions stating that states are not required to finance abortions for low-income women, and the Senate limited Medicaid funding for abortion to pregnancies resulting from rape or incest or abortions deemed "medically necessary." These decisions will certainly result in increased antiabortion pressure on state legislatures to cut off state abortion funding and to restrict the provision of abortions in public hospitals. Private hospitals and clinics will have to reconsider their ability to subsidize abortion services for low-income women. These developments make it necessary for the procchoice lobby around the nation to reassess its political priorities.     

Receptivity toward Immigrants in Rural Pennsylvania: Perceptions of Adult English as Second Language Providers*

This article uses interview and questionnaire data to examine how adult English as a second language (ESL) providers in rural Pennsylvania perceive community receptivity toward immigrants and the factors they believe foster or hinder receptivity and immigrants' integration. ESL providers' depictions of local responses to immigrants ranged from welcoming to hostile. They identified four constellations of factors that influenced receptivity: national and local politics, the labor market and immigrant occupations, immigrants' ability to look or act like native-born residents, and community institutions. This study reveals how differing contexts of reception are believed to influence immigrants' incorporation into rural communities. It also highlights the role of educators and educational institutions in creating a welcoming atmosphere that supports immigrants' socioeconomic well-being.     

Backing seen of population policy in AID

Congress is almost certain to agree to use of U.S. funds to motivate reduced population growth in developing countries but funding for sterilization abroad emerged as a political issue in the House. In the proposed U.S. AID budget, which in the past has been about 10% funded for direct population programs, a total concern with literacy for women, higher educational levels, and other developmental programs which increase motivation for family planning has been proposed. Zero Population Growth has sent telegrams to Congress supporting this basic development policy. The controversy over sterilization is the result of India's compulsory sterilization legislation. An amendment refusing to allow any U.S. funds to be used for sterilization programs was rejected, but in rejecting it, the members of the House of Representatives expressed their concern that any and all sterilization programs be completely voluntary. In a letter, AID Deputy Administrator Robert Nooter assured Congress that AID has no goals to sterilize any certain number of women around the world and it is not the main purpose of the AID program to to emphasize sterilization as a method of family planning.     

‘The Realm of Maiden Beauty’: Spectres of Slavery,Rebellion, and Creolisation in the Landscape of Cable’s Louisiana

Using a creative interdisciplinary method of enquiry, this article seeks to exorcise the spectres of revolutionary creolisation embedded in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novel The Grandissimes. It probes, in particular, the secreted traces of the Creole diaspora triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and attempts to peel back the manifold layers of ideological occlusion embedded in the (ostensibly white, Anglo-American) narrative frame of Cable’s omniscient narrator and his protagonist Joseph Frowenfeld, which suppress the connections between inter-American identities across diverse, revolutionary, creolistic worlds in Louisiana and the Gulf South. Unlike other studies examining traces of the Haitian Revolution in The Grandissimes, which tend to focus on the parallels between fictional and historical figures in Cable’s southern romance, this article dissects the subtle allusions to the revolution and the attendant diaspora found in the plantation infrastructures and the urban landscape of Cable’s Louisiana. In so doing, it demonstrates how Saint-Domingan migrants affirmed and reinvigorated the cultural landscape of the ‘Creole’ South and ‘circumvented’ the ideological spread of ‘Americanness’ at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and during successive moments thereafter.     

A simple greedy approximation algorithm for the minimum connected $$$$-Center problem

In this paper, we consider the connected \(k\)-Center (\(CkC\)) problem, which can be seen as the classic \(k\)-Center problem with the constraint of internal connectedness, i.e., two nodes in a cluster are required to be connected by an internal path in the same cluster. \(CkC\) was first introduced by Ge et al. (ACM Trans Knowl Discov Data 2:7, 2008), in which they showed the \(NP\)-completeness for this problem and claimed a polynomial time approximation algorithm for it. However, the running time of their algorithm might not be polynomial, as one key step of their algorithm involves the computation of an \(NP\)-hard problem. We first present a simple polynomial time greedy-based \(2\)-approximation algorithm for the relaxation of \(CkC\)—the \(CkC^*\). Further, we give a \(6\)-approximation algorithm for \(CkC\).     

Money-egalitarian-equivalent and gain-maximin allocations of indivisible items with monetary compensation

Suppose that a certain quantity M of money and a finite number of indivisible items are to be distributed among n people, all of whom have equal claims on the whole. Different allocations are presented using various criteria of fairness in the special case where each player's utility function is additively separable. An allocation is “money-egalitarian-equivalent” (MEE) if each player's monetary valuation of his or her bundle is a fixed constant. We show that there is an essentially unique allocation that is MEE and Pareto-optimal; it is also envy-free. Alternatively, the “gain” of a player may be defined as the difference between how the player evaluates his bundle and an exact nth part of the whole according to his numerical evaluation of the whole. A “gain-maximin” criterion would maximize the minimum gain obtained by any player. We show that Knaster's procedure finds an allocation which is optimal under the gain-maximin criterion. That allocation is not necessarily envy-free, so we also find the envy-free allocation that is optimal under the gain-maximin criterion among all envy-free allocations. It turns out that, even though there exist allocations that are simultaneously envy-free and Pareto-optimal, this optimal allocation may fail to be Pareto-optimal, and it may also violate monotonicity criteria. Received: 30 September 1996/Accepted: 6 March 2002 The author would like to thank Professor William Thomson for a discussion on this subject; and he would like to thank the anonymous referees, who made many substantive suggestions for improving this paper – shortening it, streamlining the arguments, improving the terminology, making further ties with the literature, and improving the exposition.     

Ambivalence in the Relationship of Adult Children to Aging Parents and In‐Laws

The concept of ambivalence emphasizes the complexity of family relations and the potential for individuals to evaluate relationships as both positive and negative. Using multilevel models, we investigate ambivalence in adult children's relationships with their aging parents and in‐laws (N= 1,599). We focus on factors predicting adult children's ambivalence toward parents and in‐laws within a gendered kinship structure that shapes these relations. We conclude that ambivalence is a useful concept for representing the complexity of parent‐child relationships and is produced within the context of social relations structured by gender and kinship. Results show greater ambivalence among dyads of women, toward in‐laws, among those in poor health, for daughters providing assistance, and for adult children with poor parental relations in early life.     

Time and the external validity of experiments

Time is a major consideration in the external validity of both randomized and naturalistic experiments. Major threats to external validity are: (1) time unit of analysis; (2) seasonal and cyclical variation in subjects; (3) dynamic covariation; (4) cross-time intervention effects; (5) subject-time sampling problems (6) time-personological interactions; and (7) effect size changes over time. Problems associated with sampling and randomization efficacy over time are discussed.