Dorm Room Research Articles

From the lab to the dorm room: metacognitive awareness and use of spaced study

Laboratory studies have demonstrated the long-term memory benefits of studying material in multiple distributed sessions as opposed to one massed session, given an identical amount of overall study time (i.e., the spacing effect). The current study goes beyond the laboratory to investigate whether undergraduates know about the advantage of spaced study, to what extent they use it in their own studying, and what factors might influence its utilization. Results from a web-based survey indicated that participants (n = 285) were aware of the benefits of spaced study and would use a higher level of spacing under ideal compared to realistic circumstances. However, self-reported use of spacing was intermediate, similar to massing and several other study strategies, and ranked well below commonly used strategies such as rereading notes. Several factors were endorsed as important in the decision to distribute study time, including the perceived difficulty of an upcoming exam, the amount of material to learn, how heavily an exam is weighed in the course grade, and the value of the material. Further, level of metacognitive self-regulation and use of elaboration strategies were associated with higher rates of spaced study. Additional research is needed to examine student study habits in a naturalistic setting, and to explore effective ways to encourage behavior change through motivational and teaching techniques.

Sages Before and Forever

It seems just a few years ago—surely not 40 years ago—that I decided that teaching math and music might not bring in the cash reserves that nursing had in store for me. I came from a family of caring professionals, especially a hardworking and loving mother who encouraged me to take a 60-hour certified nursing assistant course with her in the summer after I finished high school, which began my unwritten and unbelievable future. Sage alert! We both worked at the local hospital in our cute white shirts and aqua pinafores. RNs, especially LPNs, encouraged me and (illegally) allowed me to perform those special tasks. Elder nursing assistants guided me and showed me how it was all done. Sage alert! My sister, who was 5 years older, attended a diploma RN Catholic school of nursing. As she scurried around her “all is forbidden” dorm room in a long, starched dress uniform, labored over the exactness of the fold in her starched white cap, and studied to work and worked to study, I knew that this scene would not influence any of my future decisions on becoming a nurse, but I did like her paychecks. Sage alert$! I thought that if she could do this, I could too! Finding sage mentors was never an issue for me; in fact, they always seemed to find me and try to spin me in the right directions. Here are some examples. A brilliant brother (now a renowned structural engineer) who breezed through calculus and trigonometry and drew artwork free-handed to depict the organisms of the world looked at me hopelessly as he handed me his old slide rule to eventually figure it out on my own. Sage alert! A stop by my old neighborhood elementary school and a brief moment of counsel with the principal left me with advice for an ideal future. “Whatever you do, get your degree!” Sage alert! I had no clue what he meant at all. By circumstance and luck—and a belief that my father, who had died when I was 12, was somehow looking down from above—I attended a BSN program. Hippie era, flower power, black power, rebellious vote-out-the-white-nurses-cap—all of that happened in time, just 1 year before graduation! Sage mentors appeared mysteriously through unexpected student loans, scholarships, grants, hometown sorority scholarly believers, and veteran service organizations. Who were all these sages, and how could I let them down? Sage alert! My first VA chief nurse personally met with each new graduate nurse or new nurse, but what could she possibly want to see me about? What in the world does she mean by “never sell yourself short”? Hmmm, sage alert! Sage gone bad alert! One supervisor did not want me to continue my education to obtain a master’s degree in nursing because she could not pass statistics—and I had even offered to assist her! Sages were my colleagues who willingly allowed me to work every weekend to attend evening classes through the week. Finally comes my most supportive boyfriend and now husband, who tried to get me to join the “other branch of the military” when I chose the Army Reserve. Sage alert! Perhaps the math helped to add the additional monies and benefits of being a part of the military nursing corps, where I found key nurse leaders who continued to help me create the future I wanted. Opportunities, professional associations, challenges, travel, and courage came in many experiences that a civilian nurse would never envision. So, after 40+ years with the Department of Veterans Affairs and 28+ years with the Army (active and reserves), it’s time to sage-on, as I retire and do all of the things left on my sage alert list, which was excitedly given to me. I will continue to pass it on to others along the way!

World Literature on Facebook

These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

Three improved variants of simulated annealing for optimising dorm room assignments

Assigning dorm rooms to thousands of students with complex and interdependent preferences is a difficult constraint satisfaction optimisation problem. In this paper, we describe three methods that were developed to solve the whole dorm room assignment problem. They are three different improved variants of simulated annealing: informed simulated annealing, very fast simulated re-annealing and simulated annealing with non-monotonic reheating. We perform experiments of each of the algorithms on real datasets from the dormitory at HCMC University of Technology. Experimental results show that among the three selected improved variants of simulated annealing, simulated annealing with non-monotonic reheating is the most suitable algorithm to be applied to the dorm room assignment problem.

Jeffrey Robbins

Jeff Robbins’ climb through the ranks as a top scientist has been rather unique in that he has accumulated only friends, rather than enemies, and in fact, he is universally praised for his integrity, benevolence, mentorship, and generosity of spirit. But another word always comes to mind when discussing Jeff: pixie. The dictionary definition is “playfully impish or mischievous; prankish” and anyone who has spent any significant amount of time around Jeff, or been given for a ride in his 1997 Ferrari 550 Maranello, would understand the reference. This personal characteristic carries over to his science and the almost magical ways he makes mischief in the heart by transgenesis. Always unpredictable but consistently rigorous, Jeff either gets credit or blame for helping to shape our field and its attitudes. However, his childlike wonder and enthusiasm at the way things work always shines through. —Mark Sussman & Jeff Molkentin For the past 20 years, Jeffrey Robbins has been picking apart the protein mechanics of the heart. To get at these cardiac nuts and bolts, Robbins, who is Professor of Pediatrics, Chair of Molecular Cardiovascular Biology, and Executive Co-Director of the Heart Institute at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, established gene-targeting techniques in the mouse and other organisms.1,–,3 His transgenic tools have unraveled the functions and failings of cardiac proteins, such as myosin, desmin, troponin, and more, and have provided insights into diseases, such as cardiomyopathies, hypertrophy, and heart failure.4,–,8 Robbins has been dedicated to science and experimentation since childhood, but did not enter the field of cardiovascular biology until he was turning 40. This is perhaps due to the fact that he took an unfamiliar research route to the heart—one that included studies of paramecium, homing pigeon behavior, spinach …

Milestone documents in world history: exploring the primary sources that shaped the world

Our award-winning Milestone series continues with History, featuring our groundbreaking approach combining primary source documents with in-depth expert analysis. Plus complimentary online access to the full content of this great reference set is available. The printed reference includes: four volumes, including 2,100 pages; 125 documents with full analysis; eight teachers' guides; and, appendixes, indexes and resource listings. Features of the online subscription include: fully supported; complimentary online access; unlimited users at your library; full access from home or dorm room; immediate access via online registration; a simple, intuitive interface; user profile areas for students and patrons; sophisticated search functions; complete content, including appendixes; and, fully illustrated. Modeled after the award-winning, critically acclaimed Milestone Documents in American History, this new set extends the Milestone series into world history. The four-volume set covers 125 iconic primary source documents from ancient times to the present and from virtually every geographical region. Each entry offers the full text of the document in question as well as an in-depth, analytical essay that places the document in its historical context. With content aligned to the National Standards in World and signed essays written by a team of 75 esteemed historians, Milestone Documents in World History offers an unparalleled reference tool for students conducting primary source research. It's particularly useful for AP World students, community college students, and world history survey courses for undergraduate college students. In-depth teacher activity guides make the set extremely useful at the classroom level, and every entry includes study questions that assist teachers in engaging students with further research. Scope & coverage: Among the documents included in the set are iconic legal and constitutional documents such as the Code of Hammurabi, Magna Carta, Meiji Constitution, and African Union Constitutive Act; famous treatises such as the Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the Communist Manifesto, and Osama bin Laden's Declaration of Jihad against America; important legislative acts from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the Treaty of Najing to the Treaty of Versailles; and, cultural and political declarations such as Martin Luther's 95 Theses, Gandhi's Quit India Speech, and Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address. The purchase of Milestone Documents in World History entitles a school or library to a complimentary subscription to Salem History, our online historical database, including all the content in this set 'plus' all the content in any of the other Milestone Document titles a library owns.

Dorm room dealers: drugs and the privileges of race and class

Dorm room dealers: drugs and the privileges of race and class

Predicting alcohol consumption during the month before and after beginning college

BackgroundWe sought to determine predictors of drinking the month before and after beginning college, as well as changes in drinking between these two periods among adjudicated students. We conducted these analyses to inform individual and university-wide approaches to addressing underage drinking, particularly among the heaviest drinkers.MethodsThe sample consisted of 143 students entering college, adjudicated during their first semester, and interviewed during the same semester. The sample consisted of 43% women. Drinking data were collected through the Time-Line Follow-Back interview.ResultsThe average number of drinking days (DD) during the first month of college was 7.0 (SD = 4.7), the average number of drinks per drinking day (DDD) was 7.4 (SD = 3.4), and the average volume of standard drink units consumed during this month was 56.3 (SD = 51.2). Students had volunteered for a two-year college facilitation study, and had been invited to participate after receiving a citation for violating university alcohol policies. Analyses consisted of nine backward elimination regression analyses with nine variables entered as predictors (one was a control variable). Age of first intoxication was related to every dependent measure. Men had a higher August DDD, September DDD, and September volume than women. Roommate drinking level was associated with September DDD and September volume. Out-of-state students had a lower August volume than in-state students. High school rank was inversely related to September drinking days. SAT score, declared major status, and fraternity/sorority status were not related to drinking according to these multivariate analyses.ConclusionsResults suggest that approaches to underage drinking for adjudicated students may need to be tailored according to age of first intoxication. Results also suggest the drinking level of the heaviest drinking roommate may moderate individual level interventions. Further, interventions applied to an entire dorm room may prove efficacious. Results also suggest that high school rank, rather than SAT scores, should be used as college entry criteria to yield a drier incoming class. Results may not generalize to non-adjudicated students.

Book Review: Dorm Room Drug Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

Book Review: Dorm Room Drug Dealers: Drugs and the Privileges of Race and Class

Coming to Washington

To sit in your dorm room and believe you can change the world may be a certain kind of American collegiate tradition, akin to tailgating at Homecoming, taking Bob Marley seriously, and holding your roommate's head over the toilet bowl after his first frat party. Yet as I paced around my Bard College dorm room on a freezing February night in 2007, on a conference call with other students across the country hoping to organize ourselves for Barack Obama's nascent presidential campaign, I was convinced of only thing: we were not going to change the world. Obama might be a generational spokesman, he might invoke the memory of John Kennedy, but he was facing the most powerful family in Democratic politics, as an inexperienced liberal senator from a major city. And he was black. Why should young people get behind such a futile cause? Why should anyone?

Goodbye, Arkansas

51 BARRETT HATHCOCK GOODBYE, ARKANSAS I crossed the bridge the first time to amuse a girl. Her name was Clay Ann and she came from Amarillo, Texas. At the time, during that desperate fall of my freshman year, I was on her heels in the way I was on the heels of every woman who smiled twice at me. I’d call Clay Ann a neo-hippie if that wouldn’t diminish her exoticism for me. She was a hippie’s hippie , an aggressive female slacker, an endangered species at my college. She showed those hippie pretenders—with their Phish bumper stickers and compulsive Widespread Panic concert attendance and overpriced marijuana paraphernalia—how a true degenerate behaved. She came to class more than once knocked clear out of her skull on some pills but never had the druggie’s wisdom just to pipe down and not go for the daily participation grade. She would smoke pot in her dorm room with no rolledup towel underneath the door, no pretense of hiding what she was up to. She was generous and communal not only with her drugs but with her drug-related wisdom: “Barrett,” she said to me one time, “whatever happens, don’t ever do acid. You’re entirely too paranoid and insecure already. It would destroy you.” (I consider this some of the best advice I’ve ever received.) In retrospect I’d like to think she was a lesbian, but in truth she was really just not that into me. But before making this discovery I found myself driving her around Midtown Memphis one night, trying not to be boring. “Have you ever?” she asked. “No, I don’t think so.” “You need to. It’s amazing.” I gunned the engine up the incline of the entrance ramp, sending us away from the civilized light of downtown and into the dark wilderness beyond. I was nervous double-fold because this seemed like the beginning of some sort of intimacy and because I was running out of gas. Somehow I hadn’t noticed this until we’d hit the ramp onto the bridge, but there it was—the fuel gauge warning light. It bespoke of a routine personal flaw: ev- colorado review 52 ery time I pretended to be cool, to live without mundane cares, to engage in unprepared bridge-crossings, or their equivalent, the reality of the world tripped me up. Here the culprit was the willfully devious gas gauge. No matter what car, it always runs the same way: You fill it up, and it takes forever for the first quarter of a tank to disappear. The next half a tank vanishes somewhere—I’ve only been to school and the dry cleaners!— and then you’re down to the precarious last quarter of a tank. And this last purportedly equal fourth vanishes while you’re getting out of the driveway. So there we were: the fuel light alert, the needle collapsed at the end of its register, and a short life’s worth of panicky thinking about fuel and cars and the perils of wooing while driving, combining in my mind as we elevated to the bridge’s full height and its central illuminated M-shaped arch began to encage us. “Just how long is this thing?” I asked. “Look at the fucking water!” Clay Ann shrieked, her head out the window. I had fleeting concerns about the possibility of her head getting cut off by one of the passing struts, but shoved that concern aside to calculate the amount of increased drag and decimated fuel created by her open window and outside head. But then all of that was superseded by the need to keep the car in its lane and not swerve into the oncoming semitrailers. What I couldn’t notice then but would come to appreciate later was how beautiful crossing the river could be—the perpendicular highway of water glinting in the bridge light and moonlight, the car rocking along, encased in that industrial-age skeleton, one’s view broken briefly every second by a passing rib. Then I drove fast, noticing so little, while Clay Ann leaned aggressively outside, letting her...

Robots in the classroom ... and the dorm room

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, to argue that despite some disappointing results in using robots in the computer science classroom in the past, we should not yet conclude that robots do not belong there. Second, to present the results of a small pilot study comparing two approaches to teaching an introductory computer science class -- one traditional and one which used robots. While the study is not sufficiently controlled to be considered proof of success, initial results are compelling and support the need for further investigation.

Food Environments in University Dorms: 20,000 Calories per Dorm Room and Counting

Few young adults meet national dietary recommendations. Although home food availability likely has important influences on dietary intake, little research has examined this issue among young adults. The objective of this research was to conduct a detailed, observational assessment of food and beverages available in college-student dormitory rooms. Dormitory-residing students (n=100) were recruited from a large, public university. Research staff completed a detailed inventory of food and beverages in the dorm rooms, including nutrient contents and purchasing sources. Data were collected and analyzed in 2008. The mean number of food and beverage items per participant was 47 (range: 0-208), with 4% of participants not having any food or beverages. More than 70% of students had each of the following types of items: salty snacks, cereal or granola bars, main dishes, desserts or candy, and sugar-sweetened beverages. Fewer students had low-calorie beverages, fruits and vegetables, dairy products, tea/coffee, and 100% fruit/vegetable juice. The average number of calories per dorm room was 22,888. Items purchased by parents had a higher calorie and fat content than items purchased by students. Findings indicate that students maintain a wide array of food and beverages in their dormitory rooms. Parents purchased a substantial amount of food for their children's dormitory rooms, and these food items were less healthful than the food that students purchased. The foods observed in college students' living spaces may have an important impact on eating habits. Overall, young adult-oriented obesity prevention efforts are needed, and improving the various facets of campus food environments may mark an important component of such strategies.

Freshman flashbulbs: Memories of unique and first-time events in starting college

Students from the Lafayette Class of 2011 (N=100) described events that occurred during their transition to college. Three were unique events (receiving their acceptance letter, being left alone on campus, and taking the class photograph) and three were first-time experiences (first seeing their dorm room, meeting their roommate, and attending their first college class). The definitional criteria for flashbulb memories (FBM) was met for all six events; memory reports included what participants were doing, where they were, who they were with, the emotions they experienced, and other idiosyncratic details. Therefore, transitional events are a productive analogue for traditional FBM research. Unique events were rated as more emotional and significant than first-time events, yet both were recalled with similarly enhanced vividness and confidence and both included similar content. Extensions of this method to investigations of other open questions in FBM research are discussed.

Table of Contents

Abstract Cover Story Workplace violence training covers whole spectrum of violence Workplace violence training program covers entire spectrum of bad behavior, not just worst‐case scenarios Workplace violence program is delivered in 2 parts to ensure everything's being covered Bright Idea Ask questions to better assess possibility of violence News Briefing Man robs English class at gunpoint Student arrested in throat slashing case UC Davis researchers put on alert Charges filed against Greek groups Leaders & Innovators MICHAEL ALSUP, CHIEF OF POLICE, WILLIAM RAINEY HARPER COLLEGE Upping education requirements, providing training turn unit around Word of Advice Treat your constituents like your family Policies & Procedures Pay attention to details, work with others to ensure a safe commencement Model Policy Prepare guests for emergencies Crisis Management New documents reveal Va. Tech's shortcomings in dealing with shooter Managing Your Office Understand the process for successful, fair hiring Resources Prevent, deal with identity theft more effectively Lawsuits & Rulings FREE SPEECH University's sexual harassment policy held unconstitutional POLICIES & PROCEDURES Warrantless search in dorm room ends in suppression of evidence Lawsuits & Rulings PERSONNEL University stops former employee from relitigating in federal court University can't introduce new argument during trial Legislative Watch Legislative Watch: State legislative bills Texas bill would curb cell phone use by teen drivers N. Dakota bill hopes to make sexual orientation protected class

Program Marks New Direction in Schizophrenia Treatment

Program Marks New Direction in Schizophrenia Treatment

Table of Contents

Abstract Cover Story Lessons from Va. Tech massacre were not lost on NIU NIU's response to shooting reflects lessons learned from Va. Tech News Briefing Lawsuit over student deaths dismissed Students disciplined for cyberbullying Pharmacy prof. under investigation Iowa school to ban smoking Leaders & Innovators RANDY ERVIN, CHIEF OF POLICE, LAKE LAND COLLEGE Create support system to achieve your goals for your unit Bright Idea Test your emergency response to live shooter with full‐scale exercise Alcohol Reach out to feeder schools to tackle campus drinking problem Did You Know? Addressing real concerns keeps consortium going strong Parents, feeder high schools can help reduce high‐risk drinking Prevent unsafe consumption through education Managing Your Office Avoid inappropriate questions when interviewing potential hires Resources Computer security issues continue to plague institutions Information technology is changing the face of campus safety Lawsuits & Rulings FIRST AMENDMENT Student's vandalism isn't First Amendment protected speech FOURTH AMENDMENT Search of student's dorm room didn't violate 4th Amendment, court rules PERSONNEL Officer not entitled to notice of FMLA calculation Court upholds attorney's fee award for Nevada university Legislative Watch Legislative Watch: State legislative bills

"A Small Man in Big Spaces": The New Negro, the Mestizo, and Jean Toomer's Southwestern Writing

Taos is an end-product. It is the end of the slope. It is an end-product of the Indians, an end-product of the Spaniards, an end-product of the Yankees and puritans. It must be plowed under. Out of the fertility which death makes in the soil, new people with new form may grow. I dedicate myself to the swift death of the old, to the whole birth of the new. In whatever place I start work, I will call that place Taos. --Jean Toomer, Drama of the Southwest (Notes) (n.d., c. 1935) (1) A photograph of Jean Toomer taken by his second wife, Marjorie Content, shows him posed at table with his typewriter before him, replete with sheet of paper. (2) Content was noted photographer and this portrait has the posed look of book jacket. Its composition seems highly constructed: the ream of paper next to the typewriter and the books on the shelf in the background are perfectly placed. The writer is artfully posed with his hand under his chin, as if thoughtfully contemplating his work. Words are barely visible on the sheet of paper exiting Toomer's typewriter; the distance from which this portrait has been taken has obscured them. They appear faint, apparitional, and illegible. The year is 1935, more than decade after the publication of Cane (1923). While this image might be read as contrived, as little more than fantasy of authorship for writer who, according to most critical accounts, had already by this date, the possibility of this photograph as documentary evidence remains. After all, this is the same year that Charles Scruggs and Lee VanDemarr suggest that Toomer's writing reengaged with a radical analysis of the politics of his time, although ... an open discussion of racial matters (219). Like Content's photograph, scholarship on Toomer has continued to represent dichotomously the writer best known for Cane. In effect, critics and biographers have created two Jean Toomers. One is the writer of Cane, often considered the signal text of the Harlem Renaissance. He is politically engaged, interested in race, and aesthetically experimental. This Toomer looks back to the Southern past and slavery, and views black folk as sources for emergent, modernist, New Negro sensibilities. The other Toomer is post-Cane and is not poet, but psychologist, philosopher, or spiritual guru. This second Toomer disconnects himself from the New York scene of Waldo Frank, Broom, or Harlem. He denounces his black heritage, marries white women, and becomes little more than mouthpiece for his spiritual mentor, George Gurdjieff. The promise of Toomer's early experimental writing is thus diminished and he is characterized as never again achieving the literary merit of Cane. Charles R. Larson, for example, wonders why Jean Toomer failed as writer after the publication of that one brilliant work. What diminished whatever potential there was in his later works? (xiii). These oppositional narratives about Toomer's career have remained relatively untroubled. Content's photograph, however, raises more than just the question of whether Toomer was writing in this period. It also exposes where he was writing. This is not an image captured in Sparta, Georgia, in the small cabin adjacent to the school where Toomer acted as substitute principal, domicile eerily recreated in the Kabnis section of Cane. It is also not the lush interior of Toomer's childhood brownstone in Washington, DC, its propriety mimicked in the stifling atmosphere of Mrs. Pribby's house in Cane's Box Seat. Nor is it the Chicago dorm room recorded in Bona and Paul, perhaps modeled on Toomer's education at that city's American College of Physical Training. Instead, this photograph shows Toomer's books stacked neatly on the imperfectly curved bookshelf of hand-built adobe house. He writes by the warmth of distinctive, semi-circular kiva fireplace, fixture of Pueblo architecture in the New Mexican Southwest. …

Introduction to the Fifteenth Anniversary Issue

Demokratizatsiya is in constant change, just like the region it studies. Founded by undergraduate students in a dorm room with the help of three visionary deans at American University (AU), it quickly became a normal, professional publication. It began as a biyearly publication that soon thereafter expanded to a quarterly. After two years on its own but in partnership with AU, Moscow State University, the International Freedom Foundation and later the American Foreign Policy Council, the journal became part of Heldref Publications--created by scholars from the American Political Science Association concerned about the survival of worthy scholarly journals. After years with the same familiar look, Demokratizatsiya recently changed its format to make it more suitable for newsstands and bookstores. It fluctuates between hard scholarship and policy-relevant scholarship, reflecting the five stakeholder groups that shaped it: Western Sovietologists, NIS scholars, Western policymakers, NIS policymakers, and scholars from other disciplines coming in contact with the NIS. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, legal experts, economists, and policymakers make the journal interdisciplinary. Our online edition (through Metapress) has been more successful than anticipated--even surpassing the print version. The students who were instrumental in founding the journal--Kelly Adams, Vasilios Fotopoulos, Ruth Pojman, David Bain, Paula Orlikowski, Frederick Williams, Chris Dwyer, and Steve Cruty (later joined by Peter Serenyi, Grant Benson, Natalia Melnyczuk, Laurence Olson, Rangarajan Soundararajan, John Knab, Chris Corpora, Shinjinee Sen, Dmitri Iudine, Birgit Brauer, Svetlana Bagaudinova, Liesl Heeter, Kelly McKenna, Brian Simon, Craig Coulter, James Stevens, Ross Phelps, Timothy Scott, and Glenn Bryant, among others)--paid the price of their youthful indiscretion by moving on to bigger and better NIS-related katorga (hard labor). Five years ago also mentioned the instability of cadres in the journal, as its editors are highly successful and mobile types who get big appointments and have to rotate out of their editorial responsibilities. Those of us familiar with the business world see this as normalno (as the Russians see their society becoming, according to Richard Rose in this issue). The journal practices what it preaches, subject to the classic formula of democracy: predictable publication every three months, but unpredictable outcomes! Because it is blind peer reviewed and its editorial leadership decentralized, the journal can essentially run itself. But there is also room for editorial leadership and individual editors nonetheless have left their indelible marks, which proved fortuitous because they are outstanding scholars who predicted defining trends very early. If there is one expert who can say I told you so, it is our former executive editor J. Michael Waller, whose articles on the KGB since 1992 predicted to a tee the phenomenon we now call Putinism. So can Louise Shelley and her focus on corruption and organized crime. Nikolai Zlobin, Michael McFaul, Sally Stoecker, Vladimir Brovkin, and Fiona Hill also brought numerous and highly diverse insights of their own and through the networks of scholars they invited to write for the journal. Marshall Goldman's pioneering work on oil and gas politics is proving no less relevant for today, as is Christopher Marsh's extrapolations on the transition in China and Henry Hale's outstanding analyses of party-state structure. Demokratizatsiya is a journal of academic and policy Cassandras. Originally provoking unease among some established Sovietologists (one even vowed to smash us back in 1992), the journal today is published in partnership with the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and its avant-garde position today is the mainstream--not least because events proved us right, but also because the then-emerging and maverick scholars that formed the journal have gradually taken over the academy. …

AGENT-BASED MODELING: USE WITH NECESSARY CAUTION

Agent-based modeling—a tool employing multiple interacting agents to reveal emergent properties of systems that are not properties of the individual agents themselves1—has made significant in-roads into many social science disciplines,2 including public health. I congratulate Dennis Gorman and his colleagues on their effort to leverage these new tools to address specific public health concerns.3 However, given the novelty of agent-based modeling methodology and the resistance of those favoring traditional analytic methods,4 great care in application is necessary to increase the likelihood of acceptance. In this spirit, I offer a few concerns. Most important, it is imperative to be clear about what agent-based models have to offer. Gorman et al. claim that their “models demonstrate that the basic dynamics underlying social influences on drinking behavior are shaped by contacts between drinkers and focused by characteristics of drinking environments.”3(p2055) The offered models demonstrate no such thing. At most, the models provide insight into the spatial dynamics of agents following programmed rules that respond stochastically to other agents in a highly stylized environment.5 Whether this teaches us about drinking behavior is an empirical question.4 Similarly, the “bar”3(p2058) is nothing more than a probabilistic sink that guarantees to attract the “drinkers” who in no way “chose to spend a greater portion of their time at this site”3(p2059) (emphasis added). Ecological validity and simple face validity are also important concerns. In one instance, Gorman et al. sought to identify ecological components of drinking behavior that they suggest might be thought of as a college population that moves from a specific site with a given probability each day, operationalized as a random walk.3(p2056) However, each of these students will have his or her own sink in the form of an apartment or a dorm room that he or she should return to (at least on most days). Gorman et al.’s random-walk method quickly produces probabilistic homelessness. Finally, precision is required in specifying models and reporting results. For example, a lattice can be bordered or unbordered (i.e., moving off the right side puts you on the left side) and conversion can be asynchronous or synchronous (all agents determine the new agent type before all agents convert together). I replicated a family of models with NetLogo 3.1.1 (Center for Connected Learning and Computer-Based Modeling, Evanston, Ill) to determine the likely characteristics of Gorman et al.’s models, with good results (Figure 1 ▶). (The “bar” model runs 20000 periods in approximately 40 seconds on a 1.6 Ghz Pentium processor; models are available from the author upon request.) This replication also helped me to sort out the mathematical error in Gorman et al.’s Figure 1 ▶3(p2056) (The ordinary proportion for conversion from susceptibles to drinkers, FIGURE 1— Replication of Gorman et al.’s3 primary model: P = .3; γ = .3; ρ = .3 on an unbordered lattice with synchronous conversions. shown on the state diagram, rather than double this proportion as specified in the body text of the diagram is what I believe was intended.) With this replicated model, I was also able to investigate concerns about the authors’ claim that with a “bar” on the lattice, susceptibles leveled “off at a constant nonzero value.”3(p2059) Analytically, this could not be the case. Indeed, the clustering of drinkers makes the conversion of a susceptible on a random walk a low-probability event, but the susceptibles do eventually go to zero (taking a mean of 10 822 periods over 50 runs), a characteristic missed because of incorrect assumptions of scale (Figure 2 ▶). FIGURE 2— Replication of Gorman et al.’s3 “bar” model: P = .3; γ = .3; ρ = .3. For agent-based modeling to meet its promise, practitioners should resist the temptation to overstate the implications of model outcomes, carefully design agent-based models with an eye toward ecological validity, and provide precise specifications and results based on families of models subjected to repeated tests.