Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Putting The Pieces Together: A Comprehensive Framework For Understanding The Decision To Contract Out And Contractor Performance, Anna A. Amirkhanyan, Hyun Joon Kim, Kristina T. Lambright

Public Administration Faculty Scholarship

Contracting out is currently one of the most prevalent mechanisms of the privatization movement. Understanding its trends and rigorously analyzing its implications is an increasingly salient issue for public management research. This article builds a multi-stage theoretical framework addressing two broad research questions. The first is to identify the array of economic, political, organizational, and institutional factors that may impact a government agency's decision to contract out. The second is to detail the various organizational and environmental factors influencing contractor performance. Particular attention is paid to effective contract monitoring and its relationship to contractor performance.

Effects Of Craving And Drd4 Vntr Genotype On The Relative Value Of Alcohol: An Initial Human Laboratory Study, James Mackillop, David P. Menges, John E. Mcgeary, Stephen A. Lisman

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Background Craving for alcohol is a highly controversial subjective construct and may be clarified by Loewenstein's visceral theory, which emphasizes craving's behavioral effects on the relative value of alcohol. Based on the visceral theory, this studyexamined the effects of a craving induction on the relative value of alcohol as measured by a behavioral choice task. In addition, based on previous evidence of its role in the expression of craving, the influence of DRD4 VNTR genotype (DRD4-L vs. DRD4-S) was also examined. Methods Thirty-five heavy drinkers (54% male; 31% DRD4-L) were randomly assigned to receive either a cravinginduction (exposure to personally …

Connecting To Students: Launching Instant Messaging Reference At Binghamton University., Sarah Maximiek, Elizabeth Brown, Erin Rushton

Library Scholarship

Binghamton University Libraries implemented an IM reference service using the Trillian client to monitor multiple IM accounts at two distinct reference service points. This paper addresses the process and practical considerations of implementing the service including selection of the appropriate software, creation of IM accounts for each service, development of a staffing schedule, and training of reference staff. Also included is an outline of future plans for improving IM services for students and academic library users.

Unintelligibility As Discourse Accessibility In A Senegalese Ethnomedical Encounter, Sabina Perrino

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

‘Unintelligibility’ is not an on–o¢¥ phenomenon, but rather a processual, bydegrees, and phase-relative phenomenon, as recent literature has demonstrated. With these facts in mind, this article approaches ‘unintelligibility’ in terms of discourse ‘accessibility’, emphasizing especially how ‘access’ is regulated in multiple ways (not only through language), and how it centrally involves changes in participation structure. Using a Senegalese ethnomedical encounter as my focus, I examine how the verbal and nonverbal regulation of accessibility helps bring into play forms of mediation, where the interactant conferring access o¢¥ers to the patient both expert knowledge and contact with incorporeal beings. During a divination …

Cross-Chronotope Alignment In Senegalese Oral Narrative, Sabina Perrino

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

While oral self-narratives are often presumed to be deictically anchored as ‘past’ by default, speakers routinely create more complex and varied temporalization effects, including tropic effects that are this article’s focus. One of the most well-known tropic temporalization effects is the so-called ‘historical present’, where speakers use non-past deixis to frame ‘past’ events. This juxtaposition of temporalization effects can be used to align the spatio-temporal universe of the story (the denotational text) and the here-and-now storytelling event (the interactional text) as ‘coeval’, as if they were part of the same spatio-temporal or ‘chronotopic’ frame. This article examines a Senegalese oral …

State Of Philanthropy 2006: A New Foundations Debate, David R. Jones, David A. Campbell

Public Administration Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Strategic Uses Of Gender In Household Negotiations: Women Workers On Mexico’S Northern Border, Leslie C. Gates

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

The study illustrates the potential of the ‘doing gender’ perspective to explain why employment helps women win some negotiations at home but not others. Eighteen in-depth interviews with women maquiladora workers in Mexico suggest that employment may help women gain new rights and extend the limits of respect accorded them by male companions and parents. Women were more successful when they used negotiating strategies that conformed to their gender identity, such as making offers, than when they used negotiating strategies that challenged traditional gender norms, such as withdrawing services or making threats.

A State’S Gendered Response To Political Instability: Gendering Labor Policy In Semi-Authoritarian El Salvador (1944-1972), Leslie C. Gates, Kati L. Griffith

Sociology Faculty Scholarship

Unlike much of the gender and welfare literature, this study examines why a regime that constrains pressure from below would adopt gendered social policies. The Salvadoran case (1944-1972) suggests that political instability rather than societal pressures may prompt semi-authoritarian regimes to adopt gendered labor reforms. We extend the motivations for adopting gendered labor reforms to include co-opting labor by examining gendered labor reforms in the context of El Salvador’s historically contingent labor strategy. This gendered analysis helps explain how a semi-authoritarian regime secured political stability and reveals the special appeal gendered labor reforms may have to semi-authoritarian regimes.

Philanthropy And 9/11: How Did We Do?, David R. Jones, David A. Campbell

Public Administration Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Intimate Hierarchies And Qur'anic Saliva (Tëfli): Textuality In A Senegalese Ethnomedical Encounter, Sabina Perrino

Anthropology Faculty Scholarship

This article examines the multimodal textuality of a videotaped ethnomedical

encounter between a Senegalese healer and his patient and considers these

findings in light of metadiscourses on healing that were collected in interviews.

The article demonstrates how a cultural figure of the healing process

is precipitated out of patterns of co-occurrence (or "textures") of linguistic,

paralinguistic, and nonlinguistic semiotic devices and suggests that this

approach is well equipped to illuminate ethnomedical practice in Senegal and

elsewhere.

Workshop To Identify Critical Windows Of Exposure For Children's Health: Neurobehavioral Work Group Summary, Jane Adams, Stan Barone Jr., Anthony Lamantia, Rossanne Philen, D. C. Rice, Linda Spear, Ezra Susser

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

Summarizes the deliberations of a work group charged with addressing specific questions relevant to risk estimation in developmental neurotoxicology. Importance of multiple factors addressing critical windows of exposure on neurological function; Role that compensatory mechanisms play in the manifestation of the effects of developmental exposures.

Report To The Roger L. Kresge Foundation, December 27, 1997 : Understanding Refugee Communities In Broome County, Mi̇Hri̇ İNal. ÇAkir, Michael M. Horowitz, Institute For Development Anthropology (Binghamton, N.Y.)

Institute for Development Anthropology Papers

No abstract provided.

The Competitive Advantage Of Librarians: Core Competencies For Document Delivery, Curtis L. Kendrick

Library Scholarship

The relationship of trust that patrons have for their librarians combined with various affects of culture within libraries contribute to a competitive advantage that librarians have as service providers.

Performance Measures Of Shelving Accuracy, Curtis L. Kendrick

Library Scholarship

Describes a process instituted at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook to measure the accuracy of its shelving operation. Performance measurement as an emerging trend in librarianship; An enhancement that should be made in the methodology of Stony Brook's performance measurement program; Survey of SUNY library; Purpose of the survey.

Social Organization And Water Control Among The Borana Of Southern Ethiopia, Johan. Helland

Institute for Development Anthropology Papers

The long-term success of pastoral production systems depends on the adjustment of the human and livestock populations, which are potentially expanding, to the range resource, which is finite. Among the Borana of southern Ethiopia, this adjustment has been achieved through a complex socio-political system controlling human reproduction and the maintenance and use of dry-season wells. A complex system of generation classes, known as Gada, helps limit population expansion, and access to water during the dry season is controlled by well councils whose membership and function are based on a flexible, but well defined, system of traditional rules.

Further Investigation Into The Role Of Education In The Demand For Health Care, Mohammad Al-Hadi Al-Bakir Al-Barazi

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation intends to examine the inconsistency prevailing in the health economics literature between theoretical predictions and empirical findings concerning the role of education in the determination of health care services. Starting from the premise that the household’s stock of health capital is a nondurable commodity which depreciates over time; that it can be augmented by investment; that the household production function for gross investment in health capital stock is homogeneous of degree one in both inputs of health care services and health care time; that a ‘factor-neutral’ education enters the production function of the household as an environmental variable …

The Effects Of Post-Training Strychnine Treatment Of The Long Term Retention Of Discrimination Training By Mice, Michael John Brennan

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

An attempt was made to determine the effects of post-training strychnine treatment on the retention of specific memory attributes over extended temporal intervals. Heterogeneous strain (Binghamton HET) mice were given two training trials (1 trial per day) on a discrimination problem for which there was two relevant redundant stimulus cues, a brightness cue and a spatial-sequence cue. Immediately after the second training trial, mice were administered intraperitoneal injections of either strychnine sulphate (1 . 0 mg/kg) or physiological saline. After retention intervals of either 1, 3, or 27 day s, mice were tested under either complete cue reversal (both training …

The Effects Of Environmental Switchovers Between Enrichment And Impoverishment On Brain And Behavior In Mice, Judith K. Ahroon

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Rearing rodents or primates in environments that are comparatively enriched or impoverished results in often impressive physiological and anatomical changes after a certain period of exposure. However, the anatomical and biochemical characteristics that respond to environmental experience (Bennett, Diamond, Krech, & Rosenzweig, 1964; Greenough & Volkmar, 1973; Walsh, Budtz-Olsen, Penny, & Cummins, 1969) have been subjected to a more sophisticated level of analysis than have the less consistent changes in behavioral tendencies. The specific nature of environmentally induced modifications in behavioral tendencies must be better understood, if substantive predictions about brain-behavior relationships can be made. Furthermore, the long-term effects of …

Verbal Short-Term Storage And Analysis-By-Synthesis Of Speech : Evidence For Common Mechanisms, James W. Aldridge

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

Since the late 1950s a great deal of research has been directed toward elucidating the process(es) by which humans retain verbal material for short intervals of time. The purpose of the present paper will be to explore the extent to which such memorial processes can be identified with processes which may be employed in information processing tasks in general, and speech perception and/or production in particular.

Attentional Processes In Auditory Discriminations, William A. Ahroon

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

A set of experiments is described which assessed the ability of human observers to monitor two earphone channels in order to perform one or two independent frequency discriminations. Performance (d′) was significantly poorer with dichotic stimulus presentation than in monaural control conditions. A detailed analysis of the data suggested that two factors were involved in the dichotic performance deficits. The first factor was a limited ability of the observers to perceptually separate the different stimuli presented to the two earphone channels. Under certain stimulus conditions, the channel-separation factor was significant enough to produce a low performance ceiling which overshadowed additional …

A Cash Flow Theory Of Conglomerate Mergers, Edward Barry Leviton

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

There have been three periods of intensive merger activity in the United States. The first merger movement of major significance occurred at the turn of the century, and its peak years were between 1898 and 1902. This early merger movement in many respects was the most significant of the merger waves. It saw the transformation of many industries, initially characterized by many small and medium sized firms, into those in which one or a few very large firms dominated. Nelson has said that in this period the pattern of concentration characteristic of twentieth-century American business was formed and matured. The …

Investment In Human Capital And The Nonwhite-White Unemployment Differential, Curtis Lloyd Gilroy

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This is a study of the differential incidence of unemployment between white and nonwhite male workers in the U.S. labor force. The general question to which this study addresses itself is to what extent can the higher incidence of nonwhite compared to white unemployment at a point in time and over a period of time be explained by differences in certain characteristics of the respective labor forces.

To measure and compare the relative unemployment burdens of white and nonwhite workers, the unemployment differential will be investigated. The differential can be of two types: the relative differential, denoted by the ratio …

Neural Correlates Of Cardiac Orienting Response Habituation, Judith Craig Sanwald

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

This study represents an attempt to determine some of the neural correlates of habituation to repetitive auditory stimulation, and to relate those correlates to the existing theories concerning habituation mechanisms. As the following literature review will reveal, a well controlled correlational study dealing with habituation to auditory stimulation is needed.

Dynamic Models Of Economic Development And International Capital Movements, Kiyoshi Abe

Graduate Dissertations and Theses

There has been a growing awareness that the traditional theory of international capital movements is static and must be reformulated by including dynamic elements that are common in the actual world. This awareness has long since occupied the mind of the present author whose study covers not only the so-called ‘classical’ theory of J.S. Mill, F.W. Taussig, F.G. Graham, et al, and the ‘modern’ theory of B. Ohlin, G. Harberler, R.F. Harrod, et al, in the field of international economics, but also the postwar development of the theory of economic growth initiated by R.F. Harrod and E.D. Domar. The lack …