Lot Of Stuff Research Articles

“I Done Been Through a Lot of Stuff and I Done Seen a Lot of Things”: A Qualitative Analysis of Chronic Stress and Violence Among Justice-Involved Black Men

In the United States, low-income Black men endure substantial stressors shaped by their social ecology (e.g., impoverished neighborhoods) and societal systems (e.g., criminal legal system) that produce racialized harm over the course of their lives. Although the stress literature has demonstrated a strong relationship between stressors and adverse health consequences, much remains unknown as to how low-income Black men experience trauma and adversity. This study draws on semistructured interviews with 20 men to understand how they experience and cope with trauma. Findings reveal that Black men experience multiple and enduring stressors—childhood trauma, interpersonal violence, loss of loved ones to violence, and police violence, throughout their lives. Participants’ chronic exposure to trauma resulted in adverse psychological outcomes including desensitization, hypervigilance, and fatalism. Finally, how low-income Black men responded to trauma, sometimes resulted in additional adversity and further involvement in the criminal legal system.

Louise Howard: addressing gender gaps in mental health

It matters where and how you started in life, and what you were exposed to, but it may be possible to be shaped by your experiences in a helpful way. Louise Howard, Professor in Women's Mental Health at Kings College London, appears to embody this precept: “My mother had a disability and my father was a World War 2 Mauthausen (labour and concentration camp) survivor. His mother, whom I am named after, died in Auschwitz. Inevitably that trauma had a huge impact on our family”. She recalls how this created an “atmosphere where another catastrophe might happen at any time.” We needed to be prepared for anything, she says, so education was a priority but, notably, “a lot of stuff was not spoken about”.

Facilitators and barriers to getting obstructive sleep apnea diagnosed: perspectives from patients and their partners.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a prevalent and debilitating condition that is significantly underdiagnosed. The majority of adults sleep with someone-a partner. Partners can play a significant role in the patient's OSA diagnosis. The goal of this work is to describe facilitators and barriers to OSA diagnosis as discussed by patients with OSA and their partners. This was a qualitative secondary analysis with results drawn from 20 dyadic interviews, conducted 1 couple at a time, in 20 newly diagnosed adult patients with OSA and their partners. Qualitative interview data were analyzed using conventional content analysis. Facilitators of OSA diagnosis were partners pushing patients to seek care, patients actively seeking care, and care providers identifying the patient's risk of OSA. Barriers to OSA diagnosis were patients' lack of serious attention to symptoms, patients' negative perceptual framing of diagnosis and treatment of OSA, and poor coordination of health care services. We recommend engaging partners in the OSA diagnosis and developing educational and behavioral interventions to raise public awareness about OSA. It is important to educate clinicians on atypical presentations of OSA. Further investigation is needed to evaluate the impact of health care services on OSA diagnosis. Ye L, Li W, Willis DG. Facilitators and barriers to getting obstructive sleep apnea diagnosed: perspectives from patients and their partners. J Clin Sleep Med. 2022;18(3):835-841.

A Great Conversation With Dr. James Corbett

A Great Conversation With Dr. James Corbett

POST-COVID-19HEALTHCARE:TRANSITIONTOANEW NORMAL

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged the health care system to face extraordinary circumstances. These challenges bring forth a new era with a certain high point like the transition to the fusion of in person and digital health practice framework. Post COVID-19 there is a lot of sludge in health care, inthe form of administrative processes and requirements that slow down the core activities of providing care. COVID-19 crisis is used as an opportunity to reduce administrative burdens which most of the times made a primary care physician feel demoralized and burned out'. The focus of healthcare has shifted from hospitals to homes using telemedicine technologies which enabled virtual visits and remote care delivery. COVID-19 signified the telemedicine to be an essential component of healthcare delivery. It proved to an effective and safe way of treatment and avoiding nosocomial infections’. Previously, telemedicine was not considered to be a normal consultation method, nowadays it’s part of the normal lives of the patients as well as health care providers. The other big advantage of this great tool is that one can consult doctors even from very remote areas, which is impossible to consult physically. Different technological advancement like Artificial Intelligence-based diagnostics, cloud-based storage of medical records and integration of information in and outside hospitals were explored and adopted in the COVID-19 pandemic. Data is the key to advance research and refine health care process and outcomes for the COVID-19 patients. The digitalization of the health care system can provide significant benefit’. The phenomenon of digitalization of healthcare system is especially benefited for the developing world, because, in the resource-limited environment, a lot of cost and resources can be saved by opting paperless systems. When people were locked down, social media was pivotal in creating awareness and educating people in a short period*. There was a lot of stuff regarding COVID-19 pandemic on social media and most interestingly it was portrayedin a way that one could not be able to neglect the content. Consequently, intentionally or unintentionally many of the users opted some of the measures for prevention of the deadlyinfection. The pandemic has shown us that countries with the more robust public health system, primary care services and a healthier population perform well in the fight against the pandemic. Safeguard of voluntary and community organization is essential’. At the same time the countries with fewer resources and with limited measures for controlling massive disasters, in the form of this pandemic, got exposed. This is an alarming situation for global organizations like the World Health Organization and other health-related global leaders to work together for making sure that health resources be equally provided to all the countries across the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic educated the underdeveloped countries regarding infection control measures like Biosafety and Biosecurity. Health official shifted their resources in maintaining hygienic measures to patients, doctors and support staff. Overall, this led to great impact in revolutionizing patient care and improving quality standards. The deficiency of trained staff in Intensive Care Unit and Accident & Emergency is also highlighted in this pandemic. Hence the focus should be on enabling the existing resources to acquire skill in these specialties. The people started making the right food choice, adapting to healthy physical exercise and ensuring therapies to relieve stress and anxiety’. The pandemic brings changes to the healthcare system, whichis not entirely new, these were introduced by technologists earlier; the system is going back to normal that is stronger, smarter and healthier. Hospitals should ensure that their infrastructure is sufficiently ready to cope with the advent of digitalization.

The keys to social media success in a professional environment: Develop shareable content and build brand ambassadors

A quick look at social media can leave the user overwhelmed. There is a lot of stuff – otherwise known as content – being thrown on to the web. Getting one’s message through the clutter can be a daunting task when faced with the competition. Nevertheless, taking the time to think differently about one’s content and deliver the right message in a way that will hit the right audience on the right platform will build brand awareness and position one’s organisation as a main player in its respective industry. But beyond developing content, it is vital to identify and nurture brand ambassadors – both internal and external – that will help spread these messages to their respective audiences and thus increase reach. The following case study examines the efforts of a team of communication experts from Intermountain Medical Center as they coordinate social media efforts (in addition to numerous other marketing and communication strategies and tactics) to build brand awareness of the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute among other physicians and researchers in the cardiology space.

Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors

Reverse Ethnography and the Recovery of Indigenous Anthropological Ancestors Richard Handler Margaret M. Bruchac, Savage Kin: Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2018. 280 pp. They've got a lot of stuff there, but they don't know much about it. Staff member at a Kwagiulth tribal center, referring to the University of British Columbia Anthropology Museum (as quoted in Clifford 1997:122) Margaret M. Bruchac begins Savage Kin with a meditation on the naming, or re-naming, practices of settler societies that allowed anthropologists and other authorities to assert control over knowledge about indigenous peoples on the North American continent. If those peoples' ethnonyms could be replaced by generic terms like "savage," "primitive," and "Indian," then it made sense, from the anthropologists' perspective, to treat such people as objects of knowledge but not as subjects capable of producing their own knowledge about the world and about themselves. Their "myths" became anthropologists' facts—social facts about savages, not historical facts about a collective past or cosmological facts about the world. And yet, to "collect" such facts, and the artifacts through [End Page 1119] which they were represented, anthropologists had to work with their "savage kin," their Indigenous interlocutors, who had their own reasons for translating knowledge about their worlds into terms anthropologists could understand. In Savage Kin, Bruchac, who is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, dissects the social and historical processes through which Americanist anthropologists constructed their scientific authority. They did this by collecting Indigenous artifacts and knowledge, and then working to control the stories the collected materials could be used to tell about Indigenous peoples in museums and publications. Savage Kin is a brilliant first step in reversing that process, as Bruchac works backward from museum objects and the archival documentation associated with them to recover some of the hitherto lost stories of how those objects were detached from Indigenous cultural contexts and drafted into service in a quite different context. The book that has resulted from such a research procedure is both a collection of fascinating tales about anthropological ancestors and a theoretical and methodological treatise that is challenging in the best sense of the word: it demands that we rethink our assumptions. Chapters 2–6 of this 8-chapter book trace new histories of North Americanist anthropologists and their savage kin—anthropologist-collectors and the Indigenous "informants" and "assistants" who were far more central to the work of knowledge-creation than such terms suggest. These chapters are bracketed by introductory chapters and a conclusion in which Bruchac describes a research program she calls reverse ethnography (19). When she began looking for "materials that might document Indigenous commentary" on "early anthropological encounters" (177), she did not know what to expect; but, to her surprise, she discovered a wealth of documents—letters, field notes, and publications. Yet, those documents had been hidden through an organized disorderliness she calls cataloging erasures (177). Most white collectors, anthropologists, and museum curators considered collected objects to be theirs (either the property of the institution for which they worked or their personal private property), just as they considered the work of collection and research to be theirs. Their Indigenous collaborators—especially those who were women—were written out of the record. [End Page 1120] To maintain such fictions, white collectors treated much of the documentation relevant to museum objects so cavalierly that something like Bruchac's reverse ethnography is necessary to restore the record. Documents were "detached" (sometimes willfully) from objects (17) and "scattered" (177) among multiple museums, archives, and caches of personal papers. Documents were also detached from their creators in the sense that the writings of Indigenous collaborators were absorbed into the archives of white anthropologists and then "concealed by indexing processes that identified them as works by their non-Native collaborators" (177). For example, in Bruchac's chapter on Franz Boas (1858–1942) and George Hunt (1854–1933), we learn not only how Boas relied on Hunt—who by now is well-known in the history of anthropology—but how Hunt relied on the women of his household, who have been historically invisible. In...

Naruto by M. Kishimoto

Kishimoto, Masashi. Naruto. [Series]. Tokyo: Shueisha, 1999. Print.I chose to read Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto and published by Shueisha. It’s about a boy that has a spirit inside him. His parents died. He lives by himself. He wants to be the greatest ninja ever. What I like about this book is that mostly every one is a ninja. I like that it’s funny. I also like that there is a spirit inside of him. I didn’t like that a lot of people died, especially some of my favorite characters. I'd give 5 stars out of 5 for this book because it's an awesome book for boys my age. Highly Recommended: 5 out of 5 starsReviewer: EthanMy name is Ethan. I like reading manga because there a lot of fighting in it. I think reading is important because you can learn a lot of stuff.

"I did a nice thing": David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy

"I did a nice thing":David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy James McAdams (bio) I The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation. Joseph Conrad Nigger of the Narcissus While david foster wallace only began writing seriously halfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self-described "hard-core syntax weenie," Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme's "The Red Balloon." Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special "clicks" one encounters in academia, described by a professor as "mathematical experiences," were essentially "aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce's original sense" (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for [End Page 119] his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title. However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the University of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, "there's a lot of stuff in that novel I'd like to reel back in and do better" (136). Much of his ambivalence involved the novel's penchant for what he identifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that "deny" the essential fact that "the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader's over there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think." Wallace laments, "The paradox can't be resolved, but it can somehow be mediated—re-mediated" (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent but, rather, as a gift. At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their works' ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic innovation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time in late-80s Arizona: I was just really stuck about writing … I didn't know whether I really loved to write or whether I'd just gotten some kind of excited about having some early success. The story at the end of Curious ["Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way"], which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn't going to write anymore. (61) In "Westward," Mark Nechtr, Wallace's alter-ego, observes "metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It's the act of a lonely solipsist's self-love." Conversely, the narrator reveals, Mark Nechtr "desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write [End Page 120] something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you're going to die. Maybe it's called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn't know. He wonders who the hell really cares" (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain...

America's Corporate Legends Tackle Academic Healthcare:An Interview with Jack and Suzy Welch

America's Corporate Legends Tackle Academic Healthcare:An Interview with Jack and Suzy Welch

Book review “Cell formation in industrial engineering: theory, algorithms and experiments” by Boris Goldengorin, Dmitry Krushinsky, Panos M. Pardalos

When I saw the title of the book, I thought of that as another sortie at bioinformatics by the operations research community. Indeed by googling “Cell formation” one gets within a lot of stuff on the biological cell processes. What a group of combinatorial optimization experts can do to advance a murky business of life developments? Yet by looking at the intro, I see the book is on “industrial cell formation”, which is a quite different business. It appears the cell formation problem (CFP) here belongs in a growing field of research related to the issues of partitioning a set of technology units in clusters that concentrate as many operations as possible within themselves so that those remaining in-between are minimized. I cannot help but bring inmymemories related to this “discovery”. That was exactly the problem posed before me by Arkady Gelman who unexpectedly entered my office in the Summer 1967 at which I, a fresh PhD in ComputationalMathematics, was trying to penetrate the mathematics of competitive equilibrium and fixed point theorems. This was the starting point of my lifelong addiction to cluster analysis research. Back then I formalized the Gelman’s problem as of finding a partition with the maximum within cluster summary similarities or, equivalently, the minimum between-cluster summary similarities. Jointly with my only collaborator of that time, late Volodia Kupershtokh (1945–2001), we came to the conclusion that the problem as is, at nonnegative similarities, has trivial solutions only. One way to go was to restrict ourselves with pre-specified cluster cardinalities at which we came up with what later was called Kernighan-Lin algorithm, and estimates that hold “almost always” ([1], Our first results: [2]). Another way tomove onwas foundwhenwe noticed that the problem

Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History by Debra Hamel (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History by Debra Hamel Jennifer T. Roberts Debra Hamel . Reading Herodotus: A Guided Tour through the Wild Boars, Dancing Suitors, and Crazy Tyrants of The History . Pp. xxv, 329 . $60.00 (hb.). ISBN 978–1-4214–0655–8 ; $29.95 (pb.). ISBN 978–1-4214–0656–5 . “But hold! I hear you cry. I had a cup of bull’s blood with my breakfast this morning and I’m just fine. And so you are. Because in fact bull’s blood isn’t poisonous. . . .” So Hamel writes in just one of the witty passages in this loose retelling of Herodotus’ History. Her book, she promises, will contain only the “juicy bits,” leaving the “boring bits” safely out of sight on the cutting-room floor. Hamel delivers this and more: the “guided tour” of her title is in fact undergirded by considerable scholarship—just enough to introduce readers to alternative accounts of important elements in Herodotus’ work (the usurpation of Gyges, the death of Croesus) but not more than the general reader will be game for, and [End Page 558] giving due consideration to occasions when Herodotus may have been misled by his sources. I learned from reading the book several things that I had not known—that a mule, for example, had in fact foaled in Colorado in the spring of 2007! (This was confirmed by DNA testing. So much for the impossibility of such a thing.) And speaking of animals, the discussion of woman-on-goat (or goat-on-woman) sex in Egyptian Mendes, also mentioned in Pindar fragment 201, gives rise not only to a discussion of Mendesian goats and Satanism but inspired Hamel to include (65) a remarkable 1854 drawing by Eliphas Lévi of the “Baphomet of Mendes,” a memorable hybrid goat/human figure—with wings. Hamel constantly draws her reader in with her use of first-and second-person pronouns—“you guessed it” appears frequently. The language is colloquial throughout. A man is often a “guy,” children “kids,” and lots of stuff is, well, “stuff.” One of her favorite words is “hightail.” Some readers will find this grating; others will be charmed (as I was). Chapter and section titles are designed to keep interest alive: the equine contest that led to Darius’ accession is labeled “The Neighs Have It.” Her reconstruction (39) of the conversation between Spako and Mitridates when Mitridates brings the infant Cyrus home and tells Spako of his orders to kill the baby is hilarious. (Spako: You can’t kill it! You just can’t! Mitridates: I must! Spako: You mustn’t. Mitridates: If I don’t, Harpagus will kill me. Spako: Okay, okay, I’ve got a plan. . . . ) Although the book has much to say to scholars, it is directed primarily to the general reader, and, at over 300 pages, of such readers it asks a lot. I myself hit the proverbial brick wall on page 206—not that there was anything wrong with page 205, but I had just had enough. Why, I said to myself in full Hamelesque mode, reading this book is a Marathon! Pruning by a good editor might have made it a better book, although, to be fair, much the same has been said of Herodotus, and with that I would not agree. Perhaps I am selling the general reader short. The body of the text is preceded by a time line adapted from Robert Strassler’s Landmark Herodotus, plus a breakdown of each book of The History and four very clear maps. Still more welcome are the chronologies at the outset of each chapter. Hamel also includes, in addition to footnotes and a very full bibliography, a brief appendix on Xerxes’ Heralds and the Medizing of the Greek States (7.131–132). One minor drawback is the poor paper quality, but this is only an issue where there are illustrations, which are few and not central to the narrative (although one would not want to miss the electrifying Baphomet of Mendes). Jennifer T. Roberts City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center Copyright © 2014 The Classical...

The snow scraper

The snow scraper

The Role of Control Attributions: A Sample of Hurricane Survivors

A statement by Cathy seems to capture the process of transitions from pre-HK goal-strivings, to damage and blockage of goals, to emotional reactions and circumstances, to a statement of conclusion. “I had graduated, it was summer, I was having fun with my friends and I was working, in a relationship, everything was kind of going, and then it was like ‘bam,’ everything just kind of got turned upside down. It was almost like it made me bitter, like, ‘Damn you, you know, damn you Katrina for what you did,’ because it did take a lot of stuff. And just kind of changed the course of my life and everyone’s.” The findings suggest that everyone experienced goal strivings prior to HK. The hurricane caused significant damage to their homes and communities as well as the progress of their goals. Emotions and circumstances served as mediating factors upon one’s ability to find peace with their losses. Finally, emotions and circumstances seemed to either settle or not, thus describing a state of well-being at the time of the interviews, over a year past HK. It seems that those individuals who had or were able to obtain a great amount of primary control after their blockage of goals have been able to find the greatest sense of well-being. In contrast, those who had attributions of no control, or had attributions to an “untrustworthy” secondary control, seemed to experience a decreased sense of well-being. A visual construct representation in the form of a “Control-Attribution Model of Well-Being” displays the transition through through these individuals’ processes.

The Deeper Meaning of Tupperware: Consumer Culture and the American Home

The Deeper Meaning of Tupperware:Consumer Culture and the American Home Liette Gidlow (bio) Kristin L. Hoganson . Consumers' Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv + 402 pps.; ill.; ISBN-13: 978-0-8078-5793-9 (pb). Charles F. McGovern . Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890-1945. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xv + 536 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8078-5676-5 (pb). Bob Kealing . Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper, and the Home Party Pioneers. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. x + 250 pps.; ill.; ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-3227-6 (hb). There's no place like home. In our imagination if not in our experience, home is a place of warmth, security, and comfort. It is the place to which we return, and it is where we are supposed to belong. But it takes more than love to make a home. Apparently, it also takes a lot of stuff. Three recent contributions to the history of consumption in the United States after the Civil War explore how Americans used stuff—the amazing array of goods produced by the new consumer economy—to communicate belonging, affiliation, and other meanings of "home." That consumer economy grew out of an interlocking series of social and economic changes that made inexpensive manufactures more widely available, aggregated potential buyers into markets, and afforded workers more time for leisure. Between the 1870s and 1920s, migrants and immigrants congregated in cities, concentrating laborers and consumers into accessible workforces and markets. Businesses created new corporate structures and built mass production factories, turning out boxcars full of inexpensive goods. Railroads developed an increasingly complex national network, delivering products from greater distances and more cheaply than ever before. New techniques in photography and printing lowered publishing costs and spurred advertising. These developments and others created an expanded national marketplace in which mass-produced consumer goods, including automobiles, appliances, ready-made clothing, processed foods, leisure magazines, movies, recorded music, and more, became plentiful and increasingly affordable.1 Consumer goods mattered, then and now, and not [End Page 195] only because their production and use impacts the environment, changes standards of living, and stimulates the senses. According to the historian Gary Cross, they also perform important cultural work, for consumer goods "give meaning to individuals and their roles in society."2 The books under review document a range of ways in which Americans between the end of the Civil War and the early cold war used consumer culture to define their place in the world, construct cultural boundaries that distinguished their national home from others, and negotiate new roles for homemakers in public life. Kristin Hoganson's Consumers' Imperium uncovers how American homemakers' passion for imports made them important players in the politics of empire. Charles McGovern's Sold American explores how early twentieth-century advertisers and consumer advocates connected national feeling with consumer culture, helping to make consumption a key element of American identity and belonging. Bob Kealing's Tupperware Unsealed recounts the life of Brownie Wise, the marketing genius who made Tupperware a household name. Together, these works add complexity to scholarship on the interrelationship of consumer culture, gender, and home, a literature with roots in Elaine Tyler May's classic 1988 text on cold war domesticity, Homeward Bound.3 In Consumers' Imperium, Hoganson demonstrates the increasing maturity of historical approaches that situate the United States "in the world." She shatters what is left of the boundary between the foreign and the domestic, a boundary that once isolated the history of foreign relations from the histories of just about everything else, by locating American encounters with the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world in women's everyday activities of homemaking, shopping, and socializing. These ordinary pursuits regularly brought American women, especially those who were middle-class or elite and white, into contact with the "foreign," and many of these activities—interior decorating in the popular "Oriental" style of the period, cooking exotic dishes, entertaining guests with slide shows of travel abroad—took place in the most domestic of spaces, the home. No longer the Victorian haven from the outside world, home in...

Taking shape

The promise of 3-D printing is tantalizing: You envision something, draw it with the right software, and then print it in three dimensions regardless of how many parts it has, how they interlock, or whether they will even be accessible once your creation is completed. With this strategy, anyone can make almost anything. Someday, lots of stuff will be manufactured this way, on demand.

Patterns of Stepchild-Stepparent Relationship Development

Thirty-two stepdaughters and 17 stepsons participated in this grounded theory study of emerging adult stepchildren's perceptions about how relationships with their stepparents developed. The theory created from this study proposes that the degree to which stepchildren engage in relationship-building and -maintaining behaviors with stepparents is a function of stepchildren's evaluative judgments about the stepparents' positive contributions. Stepchildren's judgments about stepparents are made with inputs from biological parents and other kin. Stepchildren's ages when relationships began, gender of stepchildren and stepparents, and time spent together because of custody arrangements provided the context within which relationships developed. The outcomes in this grounded theory were six patterns of step-relationship development: accepting as a parent, liking from the start, accepting with ambivalence, changing trajectory, rejecting, and coexisting. These patterns of development were distinct trajectories that related closely to qualitatively different stepparent-stepchild relationships. Only 30% of stepchildren with multiple stepparents evaluated them similarly. Key Words: grounded theory, remarriage, stepchild, stepparent. adore Jim. I despised Bill. Greta was great. Laura 1 did like: I disagreed with her on a lot of stuff, but 1 did really get along with her. And Babbette just isn't a pleasant person. - Nina, about her stepparents. Although clinicians (Visher & Visher, 1996) and researchers (Crosbie-Burnett, 1984) have long focused attention on stepparent -stepchild relationships as key to overall stepfamily functioning, surprisingly little research exists on the processes by which these relationships develop (Ganong & Coleman, 2004; King, 2006). Given that almost one third of U.S. children will live with a stepparent before they reach adulthood (Bumpass, Raley, & Sweet, 1995) and that lower levels of well-being among stepchildren compared to children in nuclear families have often been attributed to adjustment problems related to acquiring a stepparent (Ganong & Coleman), it is important for researchers to better understand how step-relationships develop, particularly step-relationships that are satisfying for the individuals involved. Knowing how affirming step-relationships develop is useful for practitioners and researchers. Stepparents ' Contributions to Step-relationships Several researchers have reported that steprelationships are closer when stepparents take a supportive role with stepchildren and let biological parents do most of the disciplining (CrosbieBurnett & Giles-Sims, 1994; Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992). Additionally, authoritative stepparents - who favor high warmth and flexible control as a parenting style - have better relationships with stepchildren than authoritarian stepparents, who demonstrate low warmth and high control (Golish, 2003; Henry & Lovelace, 1995). Some stepparents recognize that their stepchildren are more willing to accept them if they treat them warmly (EreraWeatherly, 1996; Svare, Jay, & Mason, 2004) and engage in friendship-building strategies early in the relationship (Ganong, Coleman, Fine, & Martin, 1999). These research findings echo clinicians' advice for stepparents to befriend stepchildren and try to build close relationships with them before attempting to discipline them (Visher & Visher, 1 996). Although the idea that stepparents should engage stepchildren in activities that are supportive and fun until relational bonds are firmly established may seem logical, not all stepparents do this (Ganong et al., 1999). Many stepparents quickly try to set rules and administer discipline (Berger, 1998; Bray & Kelly, 1998; Erera-Weatherly, 1996; MacDonald & DeMaris, 1996), which often results in conflict and emotionally distant relationships (Bray & Kelly, 1998; Ganong et al. …

Wanting more than you have and it’s Consequences for Well-being

Americans have a lot of stuff, but are not necessarily happier for it. One possibility is that even if we want what we have, we want more. Wanting more may increase have-want discrepancies and reduce well-being. In this paper, we introduce the construct wanting more, and show that it negatively predicts well-being. We then identify materialism as a mediator of this relationship. Wanting more negatively effects well-being at least in part because those who want more are more likely to be materialistic. Finally, we show that wanting more than one has and wanting what one has are distinct constructs, and that wanting what one has moderates the relationship between wanting more and well-being. Those who want more are less happy only if they also do not want what they have. Wanting what one has may reduce attention to have-want discrepancies that result from wanting more.

The Divine Proportion, matrices and Fibonacci numbers

A friendly engineer recently sent me a version of Figure 1 below, and asked me to explain the connection between it and the well-known Fibonacci Problem (FP) about calculating a population of rabbits. He knew that Figure 1 was related to the ‘Divine Proportion’ or ‘Golden Ratio’ ϕ ( = ½(√5 - l), which also occurs in the solution to FP, and wondered how such different problems could be related by such a number. (He unfortunately regarded ϕ as 0.618 exactly, thus missing a lot of stuff to arouse curiosity.) I knew of various references that I could recommend, but none covered all the things my engineer mentioned, so I constructed the following mathematical development, leaving the relations with biology and architecture to be explained in the books referenced later, see for example [1]. A matrix approach is used here, and may be new to those readers of the Gazette who may be quite familiar with the other material.

Home and Loss

Home and Loss