School Classmates Research Articles

Guilty (Country) Secrets: Maria Beig’s Hermine: An Animal Life

Guilty (Country) SecretsMaria Beig’s Hermine: An Animal Life Matthew Neill Null (bio) Maria Beig, still living at ninety-six, is the startling chronicler of life in Swabia, a rural, Catholic region of southern Germany, a place of farms and rolling hills, of country fatalism and sublimated dreams. Her books capture the precariousness of women’s lives in that place. She maps their astonishing emotional territory but never resorts to sentimentality, detailing their interactions with priests and philanderers, scolding relatives and suspicious friends, stationed soldiers and half-hearted suitors. Without the labor of the National Book Award–winning novelist Jaimy Gordon and the German academic Peter Blickle, Beig’s work would be inaccessible to American readers. Twenty years after its German debut, Hermine: An Animal Life was published in 2004 by New Issues Poetry & Prose, in Gordon’s English translation. Here, Gordon and Blickle (Gordon’s husband and an authority on Beig) have selected six brief chapters to represent the novel, which recounts the life of Hermine, the misfit of a large farming family—perpetually underfoot, clumsy, on the edge of things, a problem to be solved or skirted. I don’t want to give much away, but I should say that Hermine is a bestiary of sixty-four animals; each chapter is characterized by her interaction with a different animal in that landscape, as she grows from infancy to childhood to married life as a school teacher. It is rare to encounter such a work of contemporary fiction that gives animal life its due. [End Page 150] I continue to be struck by Maria Beig’s bracing candor, her unwillingness to soften the essential brutality of life among people. I hope these chapters give a taste of this. Readers, if moved, should also seek out her amazing novel Lost Weddings, about four unmarried women who navigate a conservative culture where family, tradition, and mores are sacrosanct—all of which they are destined to disappoint, merely by continuing to exist. Last August, Gordon and I began our conversation about this Reclamation piece on a dying cellphone—I called her from Sistersville, West Virginia, one of Gordon’s favorite towns, where I was hiding out from a wandering cloud that could have killed me and my child. My own town had been evacuated when a rail-car carrying thirty thousand gallons of liquid chlorine cracked open and the chlorine turned to toxic gas. So I drove down the Ohio River to wait, listen to the police scanner, and see where the blue cloud moved. (Shades of Don DeLillo, another favorite of Gordon’s.) I reached Gordon at her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she was watching a horse race—anyone who’s read her work will know her abiding love for horses and track life. Hearing about the chlorine spill stunned her, as it wasn’t really picked up by national news. She was sure she wanted to include the “Mosquitoes” chapter from Hermine, as she had improved her translation since 2004, with new knowledge of the soldier’s nursery rhyme. She and Blickle would choose the rest together. The next day, I drove around to see where the chlorine left brown trees and dead gardens behind. That stretch of West Virginia was a fitting place to discuss Beig—a still-rural landscape with tentative patches of industrialization. Axiall, the chlorine plant, known in my youth as PPG, stands on the Ohio River between Sistersville and Moundsville—the latter the setting for Indian Mound Downs, the fictional racetrack featured in Gordon’s fabulous novel Lord of Misrule. Free trade and outsourcing have fallen like a hatchet on this place; the people continue to live in the wound. My great-grandfather represented the above-mentioned towns in the state senate, and nearly all of my high school classmates had parents who worked at the chlorine plant, a strike-hardened factory of union workers who had good homes and pensions and sent their children to college—a disappearing American life. Yet once you leave the river valley, you’re in ridges among second-and third-growth forests, country graveyards, trailer homes, modest churches, and farms dotted with Charolais cattle. If I squint...

The Effects of High School Peers' Gender on College Major, College Performance and Income

Using an originally constructed dataset that follows 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to the labor market, we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We exploit the within-school, cohort-by-cohort variation in the gender composition of high school classmates (peers), after controlling for school and teachers fixed effects. We find that male students graduating from classes with a large majority of male peers were more likely to choose “prevalently male” (PM) college majors (Economics, Business and Engineering). However, this impact was partially undone during college through attrition, worse academic performance and change in major. And in the long run it did not produce any difference in income or labor market outcomes. We do not find significant effects of the high school class gender composition on women. Our results are consistent with the fact that individuals are affected by the choice/pressure of the network of friends and with the observation that network size responds to class gender composition more for men than for women.

Learning from the gobiid

The purpose of specialization in medicine is to create physicians with divergent skills and approaches, each suited to a different domain. Yet when viewpoints inevitably conflict, the result is too often distrust and disparagement of our colleagues. Medical students are particularly well positioned to observe this phenomenon. We are sequentially absorbed into one specialty after another, rapidly absorbing the worldview of the physicians around us. We stand with one group after another, watching other teams involved with our patients do things that we find inexplicable and which we often judge as poorly thought out, not patient centered, or even stupid. The frustration born of this type of experience feeds into what have become deeply engrained specialty-based stereotypes. Whole groups of professionals are labeled as egocentric or ineffectual, rude, unskilled, or uncaring. Yet we all start as one group of medical school classmates who get along and admire each other greatly. How can we fail to see that, through specialized training paths, our approaches and perspectives are simply different, and that a seemingly unjustified action probably has a justification that we are now too differentiated to fully appreciate? I explore this issue, and briefly consider underlying factors and solutions.

The relationship between siblings’ college choices: Evidence from one million SAT-taking families

Recent empirical work has demonstrated the importance both of educational peer effects and of various factors that affect college choices. We connect these literatures by highlighting a previously unstudied determinant of college choice, namely the college choice made by one's older sibling. Data on 1.6 million sibling pairs of SAT-takers reveals that younger and older siblings’ choices are very closely related. One-fifth of younger siblings enroll in the same college as their older siblings. Compared to their high school classmates of similar academic skill and with observably similar families, younger siblings are about 15–20 percentage points more likely to enroll in 4-year colleges or highly competitive colleges if their older siblings do so first. These findings vary little by family characteristics. Younger siblings are more likely to follow the college choices of their older siblings the more they resemble each other in terms of academic skill, age and gender. We discuss channels through which older siblings’ college choices might causally influence their younger siblings, noting that the facts documented here should prompt further research on the sharing of information and shaping of educational preferences within families.

The impact of Chicago’s small high school initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.

Foreign-born Peers and Academic Performance.

The academic performance of foreign-born youth in the United States is well studied, yet little is known about whether and how foreign-born students influence their classmates. In this article, I develop a set of expectations regarding the potential consequences of immigrant integration across schools, with a distinction between the effects of sharing schools with immigrants who are designated as English language learners (ELL) and those who are not. I then use administrative data on multiple cohorts of Florida public high school students to estimate the effect of immigrant shares on immigrant and native-born students' academic performance. The identification strategy pays careful attention to the selection problem by estimating the effect of foreign-born peers from deviations in the share foreign-born across cohorts of students attending the same school in different years. The assumption underlying this approach is that students choose schools based on the composition of the entire school, not on the composition of each entering cohort. The results of the analysis, which hold under several robustness checks, indicate that foreign-born peers (both those who are ELL and those who are non-ELL) have no effect on their high school classmates' academic performance.

Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis by Robert Putnam

 2015 Children, Youth and Environments Children, Youth and Environments 25(2), 2015 Book Reviews Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis Robert Putnam (2015). New York: Simon & Schuster, 400 pages. $28.00 (hardcover); ISBN 978-1476769899. For those Americans who have been paying attention to children's welfare over the past several decades, these are sad times. The poverty rate among children in the USA, according to the Pew Research Center (DeSilver 2014), is approximately 22 percent (up from 14 percent in 1969); but this is just a number. In the course of day-to-day living, way too many American children experience systemic stress, indignity, and misery—in the form of poor nutrition, violent neighborhoods, jobless parents, and insultingly empty classroom testing. Perhaps most painful for these children is the absence, or improbability, of optimism—of seeing and living out a scenario in which things get better. Robert Putnam's book Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis explores the current state of American childhood, with a focus not so much on poverty per se, but on inequality and class: on the startling divisions between those children whose homes provide the elements of a middle-class (or better) upbringing, in the form of energetic schooling, attentive parenting, extra-curricular activities and clubs, and supportive human networks, and those children who lack most or all of those advantages. The guiding narrative of Putnam's book is that these divisions did not always exist, at least with the same ferocity, in American society. He begins his book with a look back at his own hometown of Port Clinton, Michigan, in 1959, the year that he graduated high school. His high school classmates were not free of doubt, or stress, but as a group they did not exhibit nearly the same bimodal distribution of opportunity. Even the less advantaged among the 1959 Port Clinton high school kids could look forward to a strong possibility of a well-lived life. There is much to learn from, and a great deal to admire in, Putnam's book. It gives voice to children in widely divergent circumstances, and in doing so performs an urgent service. It is a thoughtful and at times painful discussion of issues that are key to understanding American (and probably Western) society in general. At the same time, it feels crucially incomplete in its treatment and analysis of these issues. The book is in fact a frustrating subject for review. It is praiseworthy and disappointing; important and maddeningly incremental; scholarly, but hobbled by its patterns of selective attention and language. I recommend the book warmly, and fervently hope that it gets an attentive reading among educational policymakers ; but if that's all that happens, if the book is only successful on its own Book Reviews 291 terms, my own anxieties on behalf of American children will not be, I'm afraid, much assuaged. ********** Our Kids alternates, structurally, between what might be called close-up and bird'seye views. In the former, Putnam recounts interviews with families (or individual youngsters) at different strata of the American class system. Children from AfricanAmerican , Latino, and white families are interviewed (generally along with their parents), and the families vary geographically as well. A recurring theme among these interviews is the centrality of class, represented (as Putnam explains) roughly but reliably in the division between parents with or without a college education. Other factors matter in the lives of children—race, for example. Still, as Putnam's interviews with three black families in and around Atlanta illustrate, even within a particular racial group, class divisions loom large. At the upper-middle-class end, parents Simone and Carl and their son Desmond exemplify a style of parenting that would be familiar to better-off families all around the country: Desmond recalls that education was a priority for his mom, too. ‘She used to give me these workbooks, like Hooked on Phonics,’ he says, ‘and I would sit at the table before dinner, or maybe after dinner, and do work.’ The emphasis his parents put on education made Desmond take for granted that he would continue his education after high school and become a professional. ‘I always thought...

Peers' Composition Effects in the Short and in the Long Run: College Major, College Performance and Income

In this paper we use a newly constructed dataset following 30,000 Italian individuals from high school to labor market and we analyze whether the gender composition of peers in high school affected their choice of college major, their academic performance and their labor market income. We leverage the fact that the composition of high school classmates (peers), within school-cohort and teacher-group, was not chosen by the students and it was as good as random. We find that students graduating from classes with at least 80% of peers were more likely to choose prevalently male (PM) college majors (Economics, Business and Engineering). However, this higher propensity to enroll in PM majors faded away during college (through transfers and attrition) so that men from classes with at least 80% of peers in high school did not have higher probability of graduating in PM majors. They had instead worse college performance and did not exhibit any difference in income or labor market outcomes after college. We do not find significant effects on women.

Power and Obedience: Restoring Pacifism to American Politics

Power and ObedienceRestoring Pacifism to American Politics Fenton Johnson (bio) We were four brothers, sons of the Kentucky hills who came of age in lockstep with the escalating war in Vietnam. In 1964, my oldest brother volunteered for the Air Force, following an ancient tradition in which, for the sake of education or economic advancement, men from the working classes risk our lives to fight the wars of the rich. He nearly died in an [End Page 28] aborted rescue mission in the mountains of Vietnam. My second brother received deferments that carried him through the war. My third brother volunteered in 1971, as the war was winding down. In that same year, on my eighteenth birthday and well in advance of receiving my draft lottery number, I filed with the Nelson County, Kentucky, Selective Service Board as a conscientious objector (CO). Around the time of these events, in response to outrage over an induction system that provided escape routes for the rich (George W. Bush) or the clever (Bill Clinton), Congress largely eliminated deferments and exemptions, inaugurating a lottery instead. Men’s eligibility was determined by a number, assigned by random selection based on birth date. Of men born in 1952, those with numbers lower than 95 had been called up. I was born in 1953. The lottery for my birth year was conducted February 2, 1972, at 9 a.m. Eastern time. The men of my California dorm rose at 6 a.m. to watch it broadcast. The women posted the birth dates of every man, with a blank for recording his draft number. Trusting to the gods, I stayed abed, to be awakened by whoops from those who had received high numbers and by an audible hush outside my door. My number was 009, the lowest in my dorm. The following summer, though many of us were shy of induction age, men from my county were bused to the Louisville Veterans Administration Hospital for medical examinations, the goal being, I realize in retrospect, to intimidate us into volunteering. What my high school debate research taught in the abstract, that day illustrated in fact: the war was being fought by poor urban blacks and poor rural whites. The bus was filled with boys—men—some of them my grade school classmates; almost none were educated past high school. Most assumed they would be sent to Vietnam, a prospect they viewed with unbridled enthusiasm. [End Page 29] Two weeks later I was classified 1-A, eligible for service. My local draft board denied my written application, now months old, for a CO; I filed an appeal. I submitted the paperwork in person. Emily B. Hart, the draft board secretary, studied it carefully. She knew me, of course; she’d seen my picture in the local paper—boys’ extemporaneous speaking champion of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, president of the state student senate, scholarship winner, the sort of kid about whom the locals said, “That boy will be governor someday.” “Are you sure you want to do this,” she said, a statement, not a question. “Yes, ma’am,” I answered. With a country woman’s understanding of the ways of the world she said, “Forget about a career in politics,” and of course she was right. On the afternoon of my draft board hearing, held in August 1972, I told my mother I was going on a date and asked her to cut my hair. I borrowed the car and picked up two high school teachers who had agreed to serve as character witnesses. The board’s first question: “What the hell is a son of P.D. Johnson doing here?” The hearing lasted two hours, during which the Kentucky boys’ extemporaneous speaking champ gave the rhetorical performance of his very young life. Afterward, in anticipation of an appeal, I was required to record my version of the evening. I was covering page after page when Emily B. Hart emerged from the hearing room. I asked when I could learn the outcome and was told that I’d receive a letter “in a week or two.” The board met monthly. “That means they’ll make a decision tonight,” I said...

Rhubarb pie and science.

When I am asked how I became a developmental biologist, I say, “Jim hired me for my rhubarb pie and my Phi Beta Kappa key, and the rest is history.” I did not set out to become a scientist. I majored in history as an undergraduate—at Pomona College in Claremont, California, class of 1963—then bailed on graduate school and became an elementary school teacher in a vain effort to calm a boyfriend's jealousy. (He feared competition from my graduate school classmates.) A few years later, I married my high school crush and put him through college and medical school by teaching fifth grade. His medical practice under way and our younger child in kindergarten, I began to think about going back to work—but back to what? I was burned out on public school teaching. My daughter had become friends with the daughter of a professor in the biology department at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, near where we live. Our two families had frequent potluck dinners, and Jim—the biologist—came to be fond of my rhubarb pies. He concluded, I guess, that I knew how to follow a recipe and probably had enough brains to follow one written in metric units, because he offered me a job as a technician in his lab. ![Figure][1] “It was indeed a lot like baking pies.” ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER When I first started working, I had no training in biology except what I had picked up by reading my husband's textbooks while he was in college and medical school. If asked, I would probably have answered that a molar solution is something used to rinse your back teeth. In Jim's lab, I learned to make primary cultures of Drosophila embryos, run Northern gels, and extract polytene chromosomes. (This was the 1980s.) It was indeed a lot like baking pies: If you carefully followed the recipe—the protocol—your experiment would likely work, although the data might not tell you what you were hoping to hear. I took my first biology course: genetics. I got a B. A perk of being a Wesleyan employee is that you get to take courses for free, so I gradually filled the holes in my scientific education. Over the years, I've taken 17 biology courses, if you count organic chemistry, and I now have three Wesleyan graduate degrees, two in biology and one in science journalism. I've thought once or twice about getting a Ph.D., but I haven't done it. I guess I just don't want my boss's job. Principal investigators (PIs) slave away, teaching and writing grants, and the data come to them secondhand. For me, the fun part is doing the experiments! When Jim closed his lab, I moved upstairs to another cell biology lab, using mouse cells instead of Drosophila . I have stayed in Laura's lab for more than 20 years, doing embryonic stem cell culture, preparing cells for transplant into mouse brains, and immunostaining. Sometimes my job is to be skeptic-in-chief, and sometimes I'm the head troubleshooter. I read the literature, train students—graduate and undergraduate—and try to make sense of it all. Being an academic research technician is not a very profitable career—not, at least, at a small private university. In 2005, I left the university to work for a biotechnology company in Massachusetts and was paid twice as much. That biotech company may cure macular degeneration someday—I hope they do because I got stock options—but what I really want to do is find stuff out. So, after 3 years, I returned to Laura's lab for another few years of sometimes exasperating but always engrossing basic research. My name is on many of the papers that have come out of the lab. I'm seldom the first author and never the last, but along with the students, I am always the first to see the data, and when they have something important to say, I'm often the first to recognize it. You might say that Laura and I have a symbiotic relationship: I need a PI to lead and fund the lab, and she needs me to run it. [1]: pending:yes

The Impact of Chicago's Small High School Initiative

This project examines the effects of the introduction of new small high schools on student performance in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. Specifically, we investigate whether students attending small high schools have better graduation/enrollment rates and achievement than similar students who attend regular CPS high schools. We show that students who choose to attend a small school are more disadvantaged on average, including having prior test scores that are about 0.2 standard deviations lower than their elementary school classmates. To address the selection problem, we use an instrumental variables strategy and compare students who live in the same neighborhoods but differ in their residential proximity to a small school. In this approach, one student is more likely to sign up for a small school than another statistically identical student because the small school is located closer to the student’s house and therefore the “cost” of attending the school is lower. The distance-to-small-school variable has strong predictive power to identify who attends a small school. We find that small schools students are substantially more likely to persist in school and eventually graduate. Nonetheless, there is no positive impact on student achievement as measured by test scores.

Review: DNA: Secret of Photo 51

Photograph 51, originally a NOVA episode, is available as a DVD for classroom viewing. I highly recommend it to high school and college biology, women’s studies, and science history students, as a testament to the sexual discrimination once pervasive in science and still evident in some male-dominated professions. A lesson on DNA would benefit from a showing of this compelling DVD. Students already familiar with the names Franklin, Crick, Watson, and Wilkins who have read Watson’s bestseller The Double Helix may know that Rosalind Franklin, the noir heroine of DNA structure, died at 37. Our textbooks tell us how her discoveries inspired the Watson-Crick model of the structure of DNA, which was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. The fact that Franklin’s sine qua non research was not mentioned in Stockholm was not surprising, considering the time in which she lived. The scientists and friends interviewed on the DVD recount with outrage the purloining of her data, vilification of her character, and misrepresentation of her knowledge, the specific details of which may shock viewers whom we teach that science is fair, gender-neutral, and objective, none of which (editorial opinion) it is.Franklin’s intelligence and mastery of subjects is described by two of her public school classmates; says one, “If she understood something she expected to be running it.” As a result of her early research on coal, better gas masks were developed, aiding the war effort. J. T. Randall of King’s College offered her a position in his lab examining the structure of nucleic acids by x-ray crystallography. At that time it wasn’t clear what DNA looked like or how it worked. Her pictures, Photograph 51 among them, were obtained by bombarding DNA crystals with x-rays and collecting with a detector the x-rays diffracted (scattered) by the crystals. These diffraction patterns allow scientists to calculate the three-dimensional forms of complex molecules. Nowadays a computer can analyze diffraction patterns in seconds, but Franklin would have taken an entire year to analyze patterns from a single image, doing a thousand calculations by hand.Franklin’s photos of the “B” form of DNA showed the molecular signature of a helix: the “x” in the center revealed DNA to be a helix with 10 base pairs measuring 34 angstroms per turn; her symmetry data using the “A” form of DNA helped nail down the antiparallel nature of the two strands (the strands run in opposite directions), enabling Crick and Watson to figure out how the bases nestle on the inside of the helix.Franklin’s last work was on the viral structure and infectivity of tobacco mosaic virus and poliovirus. She died of ovarian cancer, having achieved her stated goal of “the improvement of the lot of mankind” in a multiplicity of ways.Science enthusiasts will enjoy the technical details, but our historians and gender-studies students can skip the science-geek bits using the scene selections menu. The DVD can springboard a group or individual activity uncovering other unsung (or sung) heroines of science, past and present. The website (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/) produced by WGBH contains inviting animations, photos, and interviews.

Law & Psychiatry: Does the Constitution Require an Insanity Defense?

Idaho is one of four states that have abolished the insanity defense. Hence, John Delling, on trial for two murders in Idaho, was unable to plead insanity or to argue that he lacked intent to kill, the only available option under Idaho law. After being sentenced to life in prison without parole, Delling challenged the constitutionality of Idaho's law. The state's supreme court rejected his appeal, holding that--despite the long history of the insanity defense and its widespread acceptance--there was no constitutional right to an insanity defense. Delling's petition to the U.S. Supreme Court was turned away, leaving the constitutional status of the insanity defense uncertain.

I Will Dance in My Aqua Gown! A Personal Reflection

Ilive my life as narrative. Every experience is the stuff of a good story, and the stories get better each time they are told. Although my role in the storytelling will soon come to an end, my story will continue in the narratives of those I leave behind. I have stage 4 colon cancer. I will not bore you with the details of a rogue cell multiplying and metastasizing, wreaking havoc with my GI system. It is a not good thing, but it is a thing that can bring about good. I am a retired registered nurse and have seen my share of living and dying in the nursing home and elsewhere. I have made the decision to live the rest of my days without life prolonging or lifesaving medical interventions—no surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, intubation, or resuscitation. Just I and my tumors sharing the same body until the body can no longer hold us. I am not clinically depressed, and I am not in denial. I simply choose not to treat. I don't think it's an irrational decision, I really don't. I think it's a knowledgeable one. I am a wife of 45 years, the mother of 4 grown children, and the grandmother of 9 grandchildren, ages 3 through 17 years. If I had done nothing else in my life, I would consider myself a success. We are a close family of nurses, teachers, and other medical professionals. My best friends are the girls I met in nursing school. I have my own personal care team. They don't always agree with my choices, but they have deferred to my decision to let nature take its course. I handle the grandchildren with care. They are afraid of the unknown. I made them a promise that I would let them know when changes occur and signs of further decline emerge. Until further notice, however, I have reassured them that today is not different from yesterday, and tomorrow will most likely be as today. My dying will be gradual and there will be no dramatic drop into the abyss. I enjoy weekly outings and regularly scheduled gatherings of my nursing school classmates. Most of all, I am content right here at home where children and grandchildren drop in and hang out daily. My self-prescribed comfort care consists of a recliner and a garden full of flowering plants, fish ponds, and toys for my grandchildren. My hospice medication kit is in the refrigerator in case pain, breathlessness, nausea, constipation, anxiety, or any of a list of other distressing symptoms become present. It sits alongside the liquid nutritional supplement, which has become the staple of my diet. I am right with God. I have received the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick (formerly known as last rites) and feel strengthened by the spiritual nourishment. I am in a state of grace with a clarity that resonates powerfully in the face of death. The challenge is to remain so graced throughout the rest of my days. Those who know me cannot help but smile at the notion. I am, and will continue to be, a spirited woman! As summer eases into autumn, I look forward to my son's wedding. It his second marriage, but the bride's first time at the altar. Rightfully so, it will be celebrated with embellishment and grandeur. As the mother of the groom, my role is limited, but I will be featured prominently in the mother-son dance at the reception. These undoubtedly will be my last moments in the limelight, but I am determined to make them memorable. I will dance in my aqua gown! I am ready to make my transition to what I believe to be heaven. My parents and infant son await me. What a joy it will be to hold him in my arms once again. I have my “going away” outfit ready, minus shoes. I will be laid out in a three-piece pantsuit with matching socks. Until then, I will continue to live, love, and laugh. On a good day, which characterizes most days lately, I see humor in the human condition. I laugh at the foibles of family and friends as well as the ironies of life. I laugh at the funny stories we tell about one another and the silly antics of daily living. Most of all, I embrace laughter as the single most authentic way to live out the last chapter of my storied life.

Remembering my mentor, Dr. Irena Koprowska

Remembering my mentor, Dr. Irena Koprowska

The 50th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists

The 50th Annual Meeting of the International Association of Forensic Toxicologists (TIAFT2012) took place in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan, on June 3–8, 2012. The meeting venue was the Act City Congress Center together with the Okura Act City Hotel Hamamatsu, which is located in the center of Hamamatsu City. TIAFT2012 was held as a joint meeting with the 96th Congress of the Japanese Society of Legal Medicine (JSLM96), which took place at the same venue on June 7–9, 2012. The Japanese Association of Forensic Toxicology (JAFT) acted as the hosting body for TIAFT2012. Preparation for TIAFT2012 started 4 years ago and many thanks are due to Secretary-General Dr. Kunio Gonmori, my laboratory staff, JAFT members, and my high school classmates for their great efforts. TIAFT2012 was very successful, with 472 participants from 47 countries in attendence, despite the backdrop of the terrible earthquake and tsunami disaster that struck eastern Japan on March 11, 2011. There was one keynote lecture, and a symposium of seven lectures on chemical warfare agent terrorism in acknowledgment of Japan as the only country to have experienced episodes of sarin and VX terrorism in 1994 and 1995. There were 96 oral presentations and 225 poster presentations during the meeting, while informally, participants took the opportunity to discuss the various worldwide problems on drug abuse and to exchange information on new designer drugs. We sincerely hope that TIAFT2012 will contribute greatly to further progress in research and practice in the field of forensic toxicology. In addition to the academic events of TIAFT2012, we prepared various social programs for the participants. I owe many classmates my thanks for their devoted efforts in preparing and running the social programs. As a result, many young scientists from abroad were able to engage with and enjoy the unique culture and customs of Japan and its people. In this special issue of TIAFT2012, we present only ten articles, because Forensic Toxicology has only emerged as a fully international medium since 2006. I express my thanks to Ms. Aiko Hiraguchi and her colleagues at Springer Japan for their generosity in providing the space for the special issue papers in Forensic Toxicology.

SOCIAL INTERACTIONS AND COLLEGE ENROLLMENT: EVIDENCE FROM THE NATIONAL EDUCATION LONGITUDINAL STUDY

This paper uses nationally representative data on high school students to test for several types of social influences on the decision to enroll in college. An instrumental variable strategy is used in order to manage the well‐known reflection problem in social interactions research. Additionally, I am able to incorporate several usually unavailable group‐level factors to reduce the possibility of important group‐level characteristics driving the relationships. I present evidence that a 10 percentage point increase in the proportion of high school classmates who attend college is predicted to increase an individual's probability of attending college by approximately 2–3 percentage points. (JEL I2, J24, J18)

Schizophrenia, 3rd ed

Article AbstractBecause this piece does not have an abstract, we have provided for your benefit the first 3 sentences of the full text. This large and comprehensive compendium of research and clinical findings pertaining to schizophrenia represents the contributions of a total of 71 coauthors, including the 2 editors, in a total of 33 chapters (7 new, and 11 replaced since the previous edition), covering virtually every aspect of the topic. The contributing authors and editors constitute an international list of "who's who" in contemporary schizophrenia research. The original leadership of this massive undertaking was provided by my expatriate medical school classmate, Professor Steven Hirsch, MD, of London, whose position as co-editor is continued by Professor Paul Harrison of Oxford University.

Factors that Motivates the Teacher Trainees of Teacher Training Institutions to Possess an Excellent Personality through Hermeneutic Analysis Method

Motivation plays an important role in determining one’s achievement level. Therefore, future teachers who are responsible in leading their pupils’ need to be motivated so that they will be well prepared to face all the upcoming challenges in the education field. This research discusses on to what extent do the trainee teachers of Tamil option are familiar with the factors that motivate them to posses an excellent personality as a trainee teacher of Teacher Training Institute. The respondent’s research has been analysed using the hermeneutic analysis. The finding of the research has shown that the trainee teachers of Tamil option are wise about the factors that motivate them to get hold of an excellent personality as a trainee teacher. About 14 motivational factors that motivate this trainee teacher’s have been identified. These include the lecturers’, learning facilities, encouragement from the family members, primary school teachers, classmates, ambitions, dreams or desires, teaching methods, teachers’ role, teaching experience, the love for the mother tongue, self-confidence and life goals’, surroundings, systematic concern and friendly administrations, co-curricular activities and outdoor education. This research has also identified the factors that trainee teachers know that it motivates them and the factors are useful. Thus, knowledge of knowing the motivating factors that the trainee teachers get hold of can be utilized by parties who are directly involved with the trainee teacher to plan and conduct more effective teaching and learning activity.

Does The Moral Arc of the Universe Really Bend Toward Justice?

Does The Moral Arc of the Universe Really Bend Toward Justice?