Social Change and the Family

This paper explores the social change of the past 40 years through reporting the results of a restudy. It argues that social change can be understood, culturally, as involving a process of de-institutionalisation and, structurally, as involving differentiation within elementary family groups as well as within extended family networks. Family change is set in the context of changes in the housing and labour markets and the demographic, industrial and occupational changes of the past 40 years. These changes are associated with increases in women\'s economic activity rates and a decrease in their \'degree of domesticity\'. They are also associated with increasing differentiation within families such that occupational heterogeneity is now found at the heart of the elementary family as well as within kinship groupings as was the case 40 years ago. Thus the trend towards increased differentiation identified in the original study (Rosser and Harris: The Family and Social Change) has continued into the 21st century. This is associated with a de-institutionalisation of family life and an increasing need for partners to negotiate participation in both productive and reproductive work.De-Institutionalisation, Social Change, Restudy, Occupational Differentiation, Extended Family

Transforming Masculinist Political Cultures? Doing Politics in New Political Institutions

In the devolved legislative assemblies of Scotland and Wales the proportion of women representatives is approaching parity. This is in marked contrast to Westminster where one in five MPs are women. In this paper we explore the extent to which the masculinist political cultures characterising established political institutions are being reproduced in the National Assembly for Wales or whether its different gendering, both in the numbers of women representatives and in terms of its institutional framework, is associated with a more feminised political and organisational culture. Drawing on interviews with half the Assembly Members, women and men, we show that the political style of the Assembly differs from that of Westminster and that Assembly Members perceive it as being more consensual and as embodying a less aggressive and macho way of doing politics. AMs relate this difference to the gender parity amongst Assembly Members, to the institutional arrangements which have an \'absolute duty\' to promote equality embedded in them, and to the desire to develop a different way of doing politics. We suggest that the ability to do politics in a more feminised and consensual way relates not only to the presence of a significant proportion of women representatives, but also to the nature of the institution and the way in which differently gendered processes and practices are embedded within it. Differently gendered political institutions can develop a more feminised political culture which provides an alternative to the masculinist political culture characterising the political domain.Gender, Political Culture, New Political Institutions, Consensus Politics, Political Style, National Assembly for Wales

Solution Sampling with Random Table Constraints

International audienceConstraint programming provides generic techniques to efficiently solve combinatorial problems. In this paper, we tackle the natural question of using constraint solvers to sample combinatorial problems in a generic way. We propose an algorithm, inspired from Meel's ApproxMC algorithm on SAT, to add hashing constraints to a CP model in order to split the search space into small cells. By uniformly sampling the solutions in one cell, we can generate random solutions without revamping the model of the problem. We ensure the randomness by introducing a new family of hashing constraints: randomly generated tables, which keeps the cost of the hashing process tractable. We implemented this solving method using the constraint solver Choco-solver. The quality of the randomness and the running time of our approach are experimentally compared to a random branching strategy. We show that our approach improves the randomness while being in the same order of magnitude in terms of running time. We also use our algorithm with an other, more powerful, set of hashing constraints: linear modular equalities. We experimentally show that the resulting sampling is uniform, at the cost of a longer running time

Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth. (How we shall bring about the Revolution.)

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Manipulating Sales Revenue To Achieve Cognitive Reference Points: An Examination Of Large U.S. Public Companies

Significant research (e.g., Carslaw, 1988; Thomas, 1989) provides evidence that managers manipulate earnings to reach cognitive reference points in income.  More specifically, when the second-from-the-left earnings digit falls just below zero, management finds ways to round earnings up to just above this breakpoint so that the first earnings digit increases by one.  The current study demonstrates that for a sample of large publicly-traded U.S. companies this same type of manipulative behavior appears to be occurring with respect to reported sales revenue

Campus Climate Assessment Final Report, 2016

The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, in collaboration with Office of the Vice President for Student Affairs, recently completed a comprehensive campus climate assessment of Illinois State University. This included inviting all campus stakeholders to participate in a climate survey, which was collaboratively designed to assess broad issues of diversity and inclusion; the University\u27s competency in addressing matters of harassment and discrimination; the ways in which faculty and staff respond to changing institution demographics; the extent to which the University is committed and responsive to matters of diversity and inclusion; and perceptions regarding the current campus climate as one supportive of equality and equitable outcomes for all stakeholders. A total of 1,952 respondents (faculty, staff, and students) initiated the survey, yielding 1,301 completed surveys and an overall 66% completion rate In addition, and consistent with our work at other colleges and universities across the nation, we spent three days on-campus at Illinois State University facilitating dozens of focus groups with students, faculty, and staff. These groups were identified and by the institution as communities whom could provide both a broad and deep sense of the campus climate for purposes of the assessment

Capillary origami: spontaneous wrapping of a droplet with an elastic sheet

The interaction between elasticity and capillarity is used to produce three dimensional structures, through the wrapping of a liquid droplet by a planar sheet. The final encapsulated 3D shape is controlled by tayloring the initial geometry of the flat membrane. A 2D model shows the evolution of open sheets to closed structures and predicts a critical length scale below which encapsulation cannot occur, which is verified experimentally. This {\it elastocapillary length} is found to depend on the thickness as $h^{3/2}$, a scaling favorable to miniaturization which suggests a new way of mass production of 3D micro- or nano-scale objects.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

The Impact Of Audit Quality On Earnings Management To Achieve User Reference Points In EPS

Prior research (Thomas, 1989; Das and Zhang, 2003; Jordan et al., 2008a) presents evidence that managers manipulate income to round up earnings per share (EPS) to key user reference points when unrounded EPS fall only slightly below these breakpoints.  In the U.S., studies on audit quality suggest that, relative to small audit firms, large CPA firms provide higher quality audits and, as such, more aggressively constrain their clients’ attempts to manage earnings in general (e.g., see Francis and Krishnan, 1999; Krishnan, 2003).  However, research outside the U.S. finds no consistent audit quality differential based on auditor size (e.g., see Piot and Janin, 2007; Maijoor and Vanstraelen, 2006).  The current study examines whether audit quality, as proxied by auditor size, in the U.S. constrains earnings management to effect user reference points in EPS.  Using the Big 4 versus non-Big 4 dichotomy as the measure of auditor size and audit quality, results suggest that audit quality significantly restricts management’s attempts at rounding up EPS as clients of Big 4 firms show no major signs of this manipulative behavior while non-Big 4 auditees appear to round up the first digital position right of the decimal point in EPS across zero to increase the digit immediately left of the decimal point by one

Letter from Charlotte C. Leonard to Charles Scribner\u27s Sons Copyright Department

Leonard writes from Chicago, Illinois, to the Copyright Department at Charles Scribner\u27s Sons in New York City to discuss copyright issues related to Hubert Creekmore\u27s anthology. She mentions problems with the usage and permissions for Sappho\u27s Forever Dead, Catullus\u27s To Himself, and two of Aesop\u27s Fables. Leonard explains that future editions should credit The Century Company and Open Court Company. She mentions poems that appear in John W. Cunliffe and Grant Showerman\u27s Century Readings in Ancient Classical and Modern European Literature.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/creekmore/1108/thumbnail.jp