Jobs,Gender, and Foetal Protection Policies: From Muller v. Oregon to Johnson Controls

The issue of work place hazards that may threaten the health of an unborn child has long been problematic for women, business decision-makers, and lawmakers. The desire to protect the developing foetus must be balanced against a woman's legal right to get and keep the job of her choice. The issue has never been easy to resolve, as this historical analysis shows. An overview of the potential effects of work place hazards on reproductive health is presented. Relevant fair employment laws are summarized, and a brief history of court cases and employer practices is provided. It is argued that ultimately, foetal protection policies had little or nothing to do with protection of foetuses. They may have had more to do with protecting the employer from potential liability and with perceptions of women's status in the work place than with protecting the next generation. Finally, suggestions for future research are presented.     

Urinary Excretion of Chromium Following Ingestion of Chromite-Ore Processing Residues in Humans: Implications for Biomonitoring

Biomonitoring programs for urinary chromium (Cr) typically attempt to evaluate occupational exposure via the inhalation route. This study investigated whether Cr can be detected in the urine of people following the ingestion of soils that contain relatively high concentrations of chromium in chromite ore processing residue (COPR). To evaluate the reasonableness of using urinary monitoring to assess environmental exposure, six volunteers ingested 400 mg of soil/day (low-dose group), two others ingested 2.0 g of soil/day (high-dose group) for 3 consecutive days, and one person ingested a placebo on each of 3 days. The soil and COPR mixture contained concentrations of total chromium (Cr) and hexavalent chromium [Cr(VI)] of 103 ± 20 and 9.3 ± 3.8 mg/kg, respectively. Therefore, the low-dose group ingested 41 μg Cr/day [including 3.7 μg Cr(VI)] and the high-dose group ingested 206 μg Cr/day [including 18.6 μg Cr(VI)] on each of 3 consecutive days. All urine samples were collected and analyzed individually for total Cr on the day prior to dosing, during the 3 days of dosing, and up to the first void 48 h after the last dose. No significant increases in urinary Cr excretion were found when background excretion data were compared with data following each of the 3 days of dosing or in daily mean urine concentrations of the high- vs the low-dose groups. It appears that Cr present in a soil and COPR mixture at Cr doses up to 200 μg/day is not sufficiently bioavailable for biomonitoring of urine to be informative. These results are consistent with previously published findings suggesting that incidental exposure to dusts and soils containing comparable levels of Cr will not result in increased concentrations of Cr in urine.     

Computer‐Mediated Communication in Intimate Relationships: Associations of Boundary Crossing,Intrusion, Relationship Satisfaction,and Partner Responsiveness

This study examined the impact of technology on couples in committed relationships through the lens of the couple and technology framework. Specifically, we used data from 6,756 European couples to examine associations between online boundary crossing, online intrusion, relationship satisfaction, and partner responsiveness. The results suggest that participants’ reports of online boundary crossing were linked with lower relationship satisfaction and partner responsiveness. Also, lower relationship satisfaction and partner responsiveness were associated with increased online boundary crossing. The results suggest that men, but not women, who reported greater acceptability for online boundary crossing were more likely to have partners who reported lower relationship satisfaction in their relationships. Implications for clinicians, relationship educators, and researchers are discussed.     

Who Benefits from Religion?

Many studies have documented the benefits of religious involvement. Indeed, highly religious people tend to be healthier, live longer, and have higher levels of subjective well-being. While religious involvement offers clear benefits to many, in this paper we explore whether it may also be detrimental to some. Specifically, we examine in detail the relation between religious involvement and subjective well-being. We first replicate prior findings showing a positive relation between religiosity and subjective well-being. However, our results also suggest that this relation may be more complex than previously thought. While fervent believers benefit from their involvement, those with weaker beliefs are actually less happy than those who do not ascribe to any religion—atheists and agnostics. These results may help explain why—in spite of the well-documented benefits of religion—an increasing number of people are abandoning their faith. As commitment wanes, religious involvement may become detrimental to well-being, and individuals may be better off seeking new affiliations.     

A structural hermeneutics of The O’Reilly Factor

There has been a significant rise in opinion and talk-based programming on American cable news channels since the mid-1990s. These news analysis programs are often politically partisan in their interpretive approach. This article examines one of the most prominent and popular of these shows, The O’Reilly Factor using the theoretical tools of structural hermeneutics. The program produces a radically simple and partisan schema for interpreting the news, but to do so it relies on the constructed persona of the host, a complex underlying meaning structure formulated around binary oppositions, and a number of rhetorical techniques. The show simplifies, but is not itself simple. To simplify the news in a way that suggests partisan conclusions that still seem relevant rather than cartoonish, individual episodes and segments of the show frame issues in terms of a meaning structure that leads strongly to partisan conclusions, but affords an appearance of the reasonable consideration of diverse views. It is suggested that this kind of deep analysis of meaning structures is important for making sense of how news analysis programs and mediated partisanship function as a cultural system.     

Sampling hyperparameters in hierarchical models: Improving on Gibbs for high-dimensional latent fields and large datasets

ABSTRACT

A common Bayesian hierarchical model is where high-dimensional observed data depend on high-dimensional latent variables that, in turn, depend on relatively few hyperparameters. When the full conditional distribution over latent variables has a known form, general MCMC sampling need only be performed on the low-dimensional marginal posterior distribution over hyperparameters. This improves on popular Gibbs sampling that computes over the full space. Sampling the marginal posterior over hyperparameters exhibits good scaling of compute cost with data size, particularly when that distribution depends on a low-dimensional sufficient statistic.     

Alcohol Use and Popularity: Social Payoffs From Conforming to Peers' Behavior

Although many economic analyses of adolescents have examined the costs of risky behaviors, few have investigated the gains that young people derive from such actions, particularly in terms of social payoffs for complying with peer behavior. This paper studies the relationship between adolescents' use of alcohol (relative to that of their peers) and popularity at school. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a rich and nationally representative survey with detailed information on social networks. Our findings suggest that adolescents are socially rewarded for conforming to their peers' alcohol use and penalized (to a lesser degree) for increasing their consumption above that of their peers. Male adolescents are rewarded for keeping up with their peers' drinking and for getting drunk. Female adolescents are rewarded for drinking per se, but not necessarily for keeping up with their peers. The results offer new information on peer influence and have implications for substance abuse interventions at school and in the community.     

Sample size requirements for rare or abundant attribute sampling

Two approximation procedures to determine required sample size for a Fixed width binomial confidence interval are given and compared to exact calculations as well as the normal and Poisson approximations. The approximation procedures are found to be quite simple but very accurate for estimating sample sizes for either rare or abundant attributes.     

A nursing-centered treatment team in inpatient medical psychiatry

1. Nurses have the most extensive direct contact with their patients, yet in the traditional physician-centered model, they are often excluded from decision making. We have developed a new model of patient care with the nurse as the primary therapist and contact person, as well as the individual who cares for each patient's physical needs. 2. Out team approach improves efficiency, integration of care, and staff unity, which can be especially helpful for patients with personality disorders. 3. Patients appreciate the approach and are better able to increase focus on treatment when the physicians are not present in the ward.