South Africa's common society

African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented February 1991I circulated a draft paper in February 1989 with the title "South Africa's Civil War: Revolution and Counter-Revolution". It had two parts, one called "Resistance and Repression", the other "South Africa's Common Society". Together they made out a case for identifying the struggle as a civil war arising out of a revolutionary situation. The terms are complementary, not contradictory. A civil war by definition is an armed conflict between combatants who are citizens of the same state, belong to the same society, and take up arms in a struggle for political power. The most bitter and ruinous war of the last century was the civil war fought in the United States in 1861/2 between the slave-owning Confederacy and the Union of free labour states. (2) A South African example of an imperial war was Britain's war of 1899-1902 against the Boer republics, fought by an aggressive power to establish control over the whole of Southern Africa in keeping with the ambition of Cecil John Rhodes (1852-1902) to paint the map red from Cape to Cairo

Examining School Counselor Advocacy for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Students: An Assessment of Factors Toward Action

Lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) students have been historically marginalized and at-risk for school dropout (Pope, Bunch, Szymanski, & Rankins, 2004), and school counselors advocate for them (ASCA, 2013a). For this survey study, empirical and conceptual literature pertaining to factors that were hypothesized to relate to school counselor advocacy for LGB students were reviewed. In particular, there has been limited empirical data that have addressed this issue. The underlying theoretical framework applied was the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) (Ajzen, 1985). The TPB has been used to predict a variety of behaviors such as teaching students with special needs (Casebolt & Hodge, 2010), participation in physical activity (Tsorbatzoudis, 2005), and knowledge sharing (Kuo & Young, 2008; Shipp, 2010). Data from a non-random sample of 398 middle and high school counselors located throughout the United States were analyzed. The school counselors completed the survey comprised of a demographic form and five subscales, three of which were either modified or developed for this study. Middle and high school counselors completed items from the Sexual Orientation Counselor Competency Scale (SOCCS), the School Counselor Self-Efficacy Scale (SCSE), the Subjective Norm Scale (SNS), the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Advocacy Intentions Scale (LGBAIS), and the Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Advocacy Activity Scale (LGBAAS). School counselors’ attitudes toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons; advocacy self-efficacy; and LGB advocacy intention were found to significantly predict LGB advocacy activity. LGB advocacy intention significantly mediated the effects of attitudes and advocacy self-efficacy on LGB advocacy activity. Significant differences with regard to each of the TPB factors except subjective norm were found. Implications for the assessment and training of pre-service and practicing school counselors were identified

Information Design with Equilibrium Selection

This paper extends the solution concept in information design problems, in which a designer aims to implement a particular game outcome by controlling the structure of signals that the players receive. Specifically, we consider settings in which an equilibrium is implementable only if it satisfies an exogenous selection criterion. We focus on optimal information design in a common-interest two-player game with binary actions, requiring the selected equilibrium to satisfy risk dominance. We provide a method for the designer to maximize the probability of making the best equilibrium risk dominant, and show how to extend our approach to other settings

Information Design in Coordination Games with Risk Dominant Equilibrium Selection

We study the design of public information structures that maximize the probability of selecting a Pareto dominant equilibrium in symmetric (2 x 2) coordination games. Because the need to coordinate exposes players to strategic risk, we treat the designer as able to implement an equilibrium only if the players believe it is also risk dominant. The designer's task is therefore to pool the set of states in which the desired equilibrium is risk dominant with the largest possible set in which it is not, while keeping the desired equilibrium risk dominant in expectation. We provide a simple characterization of the optimal signal structure which holds under general conditions. We extend the analysis to related problems, and show that our intuition is robust, suggesting that our approach provides a promising way forward for a large class of problems in constrained information design

Supporting Intersex People: Effective Academic and Career Counseling

This phenomenological study explored the academic and career experiences of 10 intersex people. Researchers conducted the study to share knowledge with counselors and other helping professionals about the importance of validating intersex personhood during the school-age years and in work settings. Five findings were uncovered: (a) coping as intersex, (b) range of feelings, (c) gender identity development, (d) bullying at school and work, and (e) body problems. This article reports on specific needs and recommendations of this self-identified sample and includes implications for education and counseling practice, along with limitations and recommendations for future research

Disclosure and Rollover Risk

This paper studies whether and to what extent transparent disclosure prevents inefficient liquidation arising from rollover risk. We model an illiquid but solvent borrower who can design a public signal about what creditors can recover from forcing liquidation, and what their claims would be worth if the firm survives. We find that the signal structure that minimizes rollover risk never identifies liquidation or continuation values, and that borrowers can commit to this structure. Moreover, if creditors can impose disclosure requirements, they may increase inefficient liquidation, in order to pool states to increase the amount they expect to recover from defaults

On the ground electronic states of copper silicide and its ions

The low-lying electronic states of SiCu, SiCu^+, and SiCu^− have been studied using a variety of high-level ab initio techniques. As expected on the basis of simple orbital occupancy and bond forming for Si(s^2p^2)+Cu(s^1) species, ^2Π_r, ^1Σ^+, and ^3Σ^− states were found to be the ground electronic states for SiCu, SiCu^+, and SiCu^−, respectively; the ^2Π_r state is not that suggested in most recent experimental studies. All of these molecules were found to be quite strongly bound although the bond lengths, bond energies, and harmonic frequencies vary slightly among them, as a result of the nonbonding character of the 2π-MO (molecular orbital) [composed almost entirely of the Si 3p-AO (atomic orbital)], the occupation of which varies from 0 to 2 within the ^1Σ^+, ^2Π_r, and ^3Σ^− series. The neutral SiCu is found to have bound excited electronic states of ^4Σ^−, ^2Δ, ^2Σ^+, and ^2Π_i symmetry lying 0.5, 1.2, 1.8, and 3.2 eV above the ^2Π_r ground state. It is possible but not yet certain that the ^2Π_i state is, in fact, the “B state” observed in the recent experimental studies by Scherer, Paul, Collier, and Saykally