Worth Something Research Articles

History on the Cheap: Using the Online Archive to Make Historicists out of Undergrads

1. I want my students’ essays to identify a real problem, not something like “Does Hawthorne use symbolism in his story ‘Young Goodman Brown?’ ” or “What does the color blue signify in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’?” or “When Frederick Douglass writes that his spirit triumphed over slavery, is he right?” or some other nonissue pitched to some imaginary reader who likes to spend his weekends begging the question. I want the essay to identify a real problem because I want to be compelled to read onward, not dragged through the essay like Hector being dragged by Achilles around the city of Troy because, like Hector, I waited too long to run in the other direction. 2. Besides being interested, I want to get the feeling, while I’m reading my students’ essays, that the writer is possessed of something like specialized knowledge. I’m not saying I expect the essay to sound like the latest monograph by Wai-chee Dimock, but I am saying I’d like my students to pursue their real problems in ways that suggest this is after all a fi eld of inquiry for which the special training we off er is worth something.

It Can Be Quick Trip From Patient to Advocate

It Can Be Quick Trip From Patient to Advocate

More BLAST for the buck.

Time and money—they are the essential, yet most often, the limiting factors in people’s lives. Sequence comparisons via computer searches are certainly no different. For the sequence similarity search, time is determined by how long it takes to compare your sequence of interest to the burgeoning sequence information available, whereas matches found are the currency. Of course, not just any sequence match is worthwhile—only matches that are likely to have biological significance; your money should be worth something. To obtain such matches requires a program that is both sensitive (able to pick up relevant matches of weak similarity) and selective (provide a list of matches that are all biologically relevant). The balance between these two can greatly increase the time it takes to run a program—too high a sensitivity and it will take too much time and produce too many nonbiologically relevant sequences; too low a sensitivity and the program will run much faster, but meaningful matches may be lost. The BLAST program has been the primary method for doing database searches to detect related sequences for the purpose of classifying proteins into functional families and identifying unknown functional units. Now, a paper by Altschul et al. (1997) provides modifications to the current algorithms in the BLAST program that save the user time and provide far greater return on the investment.

Vera Brittain: A Life (review)

Reviewed by: Vera Brittain: A Life Russell Gollard (bio) Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life. London: Chatto and Windus, 1995. 581 pp. Clothbound, £25.00 net in UK only. Vera Brittain (1893–1970) is of interest because of her literary output (29 published works including histories, novels, and poetry) and also because of her classic memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth, which traces her movement from jingoistic patriotism to pacifism and recounts the loss of her fiancé, brother, and virtually all her male friends in the carnage of the Western Front. Unlike most women of her generation, Brittain did not witness that carnage vicariously; she served as a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), first in her home town of Buxton and later in France and Malta in the brutal conditions of military trauma-evacuation hospitals in the pre-antibiotic age. Vera Brittain: A Life is a full-length biography of this British feminist, pacifist writer whose stature will certainly be enhanced by this excellent work. Nowadays, most readers familiar with Brittain’s work were [End Page 266] introduced to it at university or through the infrequently repeated BBC dramatization of her Testament of Youth. The trajectory of Brittain’s fame reached its apex during the thirties, when she was a best-selling author as well as a sought-after and renowned lecturer both in England and the United States. She was also a famed pacifist (as opposed to isolationist)—not a popular position with the rise of dictatorships during the thirties. Berry and Bostridge in many ways follow the methodology set by their subject in her two most famous works, Testament of Youth (London: V. Gollancz, 1933) and Testament of Experience (London: V. Gollancz, 1957). Like Brittain, they follow a chronological pattern and offer rich details from letters, interviews, and other histories in order to bring life and nuance to their work. The biography begins several hundred years before the birth of Vera Brittain in Victorian England, in a first chapter appropriately but forbodingly titled “A Bad History of Inheritance and Environment.” The lack of an intellectual tradition in her own family coupled with Brittain’s own early identification with both special teachers and women writers (such as the early feminist Olive Schreiner) encouraged an academic ambition that took her to Somerville, one of Oxford University’s women’s colleges. It is difficult not to read the chapters that follow without a sense of gloom, knowing the effects that World War I would have, both on a personal and international level. Her attraction to Roland Leighton, whose family bore a literary pedigree that impressed Brittain, is superbly chronicled in this biography, with many details of Buxton life, and Brittain’s own evolving thoughts on warfare and patriotism while at Oxford. Difficult as it is to add new detail to Brittain’s second chapter of Testament of Youth, aptly titled “Provincial Young Ladyhood,” Brittain’s biographers manage to convey the stultifying social expectations of this Victorian spa town on an intelligent young woman, as well as her reaction to them. We also learn of Brittain’s need to contribute something of worth to her country, a compulsion that would continue through World War II (by which time she was an avowed pacifist) and that led her to train to wear “the starched blue and white uniform of an auxiliary VAD nurse.” Berry and Bostridge continue, The VAD scheme had been established in 1909 to provide aid to the sick and wounded in the event of a military invasion. At the outbreak of war, the Voluntary Aid Detachments had 74,000 members, and their numbers increased dramatically less than a year later when it was expanded to deal with the severe shortages in the [End Page 267] supply of professional nurses created by the devastating effects of trench warfare. Unlike other war work for women—in the munitions factories or the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, for instance—VADs were almost exclusively drawn from middle- and upper-class families. It was therefore an entirely respectable occupation for a girl of Vera’s background, and Mrs. Brittain had happily cooperated in making arrangements for her at...

The Informational Efficiency of the Art Market

Two measures of informational efficiency are applied to the market for paintings. The first is a measure of market efficiency as captured by serial dependency in returns. The serial correlation in an index of art returns suggests the possibility of persistent trends in the art market, however there is no empirical evidence that these trends can be easily exploited. The second is a measure of “price risk,” or instantaneous uncertainty about the immediate resale value of a work of art. The magnitude of the price risk suggests that there is a major role for dealers in the art market. Using historical data, I find that the price risk has been declining since the beginning of the painting market, indicating increasing informational efficiency. Paintings are like stocks and a dealer is like a broker. Someone makes money, then there is someone else who's really good at investing in stocks, and he tells the investor what to buy. If someone tells you to go to a good gallery rather than one that's not so good, you'll get a painting that might turn out to be worth something, a painting you like that's also a good investment. Its like having a broker tell you what stocks to buy. Andy Warhol

Andries Bongcn (ca. 1732-1792) en de Franse invloed op de Amsterdamse kastenmakerij in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw

Andries Bongcn (ca. 1732-1792) en de Franse invloed op de Amsterdamse kastenmakerij in de tweede helft van de achttiende eeuw

Census tract of residence and the use of C.M.H.C. services

As the need grows to understand how health care can be targeted, in the relative absence of money price, to those who need it most, studies on the effects of travel distance and other measures of time price will become increasingly important. And in order to assure the equitable distribution of services it will also be important to understand how travel distance is ade facto rationing mechanism. The methods used in this investigation easily could be applied to subscribers of Health Maintenance Organizations to determine the effect of travel distance on the utilization of preventative medical services as opposed to more expensive secondary and tertiary care. Out-of-pocket payments for health care are relatively insignificant for many people for many different reasons. In order to ration scarce services and in order to plan for the implementation of health, mental health, and other human service policies it is important to understand what other factors apart from money act as prices in the demand for services. Travel distance as a surrogate for time price, as we have seen, plays a significant role in the demand for mental health services. Time has value to us; it is worth something. And time must be given up in order to attain certain things and services so that some benefit can be derived from them. This is really rather a simple notion, but one that is too often overlooked. The idea that price has to do with more than just money (which is, after all, something of man's own making) is well expressed by Adam Smith inThe Wealth of Nations where he writes: “The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.”

Sequential Methods in Model Construction

Inl statistical inference proper, the model is never questioned. . . . The methods of mathematical statistics do not provide us with a means of specifying the model. 1 Few would question the profundity of the above quotes. Yet in practice the methodological dictum contained therein is invariably violated. In practice we ordinarily face data with an imperfectly specified model and learn of our imperfection from the data themselves. For an example, a second round estimation procedure to clean up residual serial correlation is often employed after a Durbin-WVatson statistic turns out to be insufficiently close to two. For another, we often read of a choice of algebraic form based on computation of R 2s. And few of us can deny deciding whether to drop a variable based on the outcome of a t-test. Such procedures seem sensible from an intuitive point of view -data may not speak for themselves but they can raise a voice hard for a sensible man to ignore when a model is badly misspecified. The opposite extreme, complete empiricism, is just as unattractive perhaps more so. Theory is worth something. Meaningful research does not come from exhaustively searching through lists of potential explanatory variables. Presumably it is safe to ignore sunspot data and the length of women's skirts in studying the demand for food. The reader of a research report is unconvinced by even nice results if he is made aware that a large number of trials with alternative specifications led sequentially to those results. Most would agree to the broad statements made so far. The purpose of this paper is to define more rigorously the balance between two untenable methodological attitudes; that, on the one hand, data should not be allowed to interfere with specification and, on the other, specification must be achieved mainly by experimentation. The vehicle used in the sequel to investigate costs and returns of sequential investigation is a lFnear regression model relating a regress and to two potential regressors. The assumption is that the researcher's interest lies mainly in the effect of the first regressor and the question is whether to include or exclude the second independent variable in regression. Thus, the specific problem considered here is so limited that it arises seldom in practice as a specific case. But the simple problem contains within it features that are common with those of more realistic problems of model construction. The same considerations arise in more complex situations. The results that follow are rigorous but the mode of presentation is nonrigorous. Those interested in proofs of results are referred to appropriate sources.

The Analogy: Pathway to Relevance

of helping them to understand symbolic meanings in poetry. Other teachers view the analogy as a somewhat dubious method of developing an idea in expository prose-it will illustrate, students are cautioned, but will seldom serve as evidence to prove the validity of that idea. Yet this same analogy, if used systematically as a catalyst for discussion and composition based on literature, can provide genuine relevance that leads many students to deeper insights into both life and literature, additional skill at organized thought and expository writing, and far greater enjoyment of reading, discussion, and composition. Students love to find the parallel (draw the analogy) between a situation they're reading about and one they have experienced or observed in real life because doing so draws on their knowledge and thereby makes that knowledge worth something. But this kind of activity is not simply another way of ask-s ing students that most banal of all questions-how they feel about the work in question. Neither does it bring literature down to the students' level, a procedure that teachers often object to. Instead, it equates the students' own knowledge and experience with the vicarious experience in the literature. The result for

Case Study: When the Golden Rule Yields No Gold

Zach Jordan (a real person but not his real name), the owner of a small business in Connecticut, may not be able to compete any longer in the spring manufacturing industry. Overseas competition has put him at a significant cost disadvantage, and the losses continue to mount year after year. At the same time, he’s deeply committed to care for his handful of employees — people who are dependent on him and who he considers “family.” Now at a crossroads, he faces an apparent dilemma: (1) gamble $200,000 on rent to extend the jobs of his employee family or (2) liquidate the business while it’s still worth something, sending his employees to the unemployment line during a bad economy. There may be other, more attractive options and identifying them and selecting from among them is largely what this case is about. Framed from a Christian worldview, the case comes down to this: In an intensely competitive environment, how can we faithfully serve employee needs while effectively stewarding the business?

The Research Department of Courtaulds Limited

Before I describe the Research Department of Courtaulds Ltd, I must first give a brief description of the activities and organization of the Company as a whole. Broadly speaking, Courtaulds Ltd is engaged in all aspects of the man-made fibre industry, including primary raw materials at one end and garments at the other, though the industrial effort is far from uniformly spread between these limits, the major strength of the Company being concentrated in the production of the cellulosic-based fibres known as viscose and cellulose acetate rayon. In addition, the Company has large investments in subsidiary and associated rayon producing companies in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.S.A., while in England the manufacture of Cellophane is carried out by the subsidiary company of British Cellophane Ltd, and that of nylon by the associated company British Nylon Spinners Ltd, so that the parent company is partly a manufacturing organization and partly a holding company. All the subsidiary and associated companies have their own research departments of varying sizes and complexities but I shall not attempt to describe these, and I shall confine my remarks to the research department of the parent company. As I have already mentioned, the major industrial activity of Courtaulds Ltd in the United Kingdom is the production of cellulosic-based fibres. The rayon factories run 168 hours a week, there being four shifts. The number of hourly-paid operatives is at present about 15000 and the sales are of the order of £50000000 per annum. The value to be placed upon the fixed assets is largely a matter of opinion, but in considering the effect of technical innovations upon the operations of the Company the fixed assets can be assumed to be worth something of the order of £80000000.The number of operatives is therefore small; the capital investment is high and the turnover is relatively low.

The Research Department of Courtaulds Limited

Before I describe the Research Department of Courtaulds Ltd, I must first give a brief description of the activities and organization of the Company as a whole. Broadly speaking, Courtaulds Ltd is engaged in all aspects of the man-made fibre industry, including primary raw materials at one end and garments at the other, though the industrial effort is far from uniformly spread between these limits, the major strength of the Company being concentrated in the production of the cellulosic-based fibres known as viscose and cellulose acetate rayon. In addition the Company has large investments in subsidiary and associated rayon producing companies in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.S.A., while in England the manufacture of Cellophane is carried out by the subsidiary company of British Cellophane Ltd, and that of nylon by the associated company British Nylon Spinners Ltd, so that the parent company is partly a manufacturing organization and partly a holding company. All the subsidiary and associated companies have their own research departments of varying sizes and complexities but I shall not attempt to describe these, and I shall confine my remarks to the research department of the parent company. As I have already mentioned, the major industrial activity of Courtaulds Ltd in the United Kingdom is the production of cellulosic-based fibres. The rayon factories run 168 hours a week, there being four shifts. The number of hourly-paid operatives is at present about 15000 and the sales are of the order of £50000000 per annum. The value to be placed upon the fixed assets is largely a matter of opinion, but in considering the effect of technical innovations upon the operations of the Company the fixed assets can be assumed to be worth something of the order of £80000000. The number of operatives is therefore small; the capital investment is high and the turnover is relatively low.

The psychology of nervous habits

P SYCHOLOGY is the baby among the sciences. In it we have done a great deal, but there is much yet to be done. On this question of nervous habits, there has been comparatively little done about the analyzing, classifying, and building up of a. vocabulary and terminology that are worth something, that are scientific. “Nervous” means too much nerve. A “habit” is something that you are supposed to have learned; something that someone has taught you or that environment has taught you; something that can be unlearned. Thus we find that our practice in regard to nervous habits does not fit in at all. We do not know where a nervous habit begins and where an emotional state starts in. We do not know where a tic begins or ends-a spasm, a phobia, a fear, a mania. We have a very loose terminology. We have not explored or charted the field, but there is a great deal that can be learned. We can go into the primer stage of these so-called nervous habits. I am going to limit myself so far as I can, although not strictly, to the field of nervous habits. I shall have to define the field also by telling you where we cannot go. First of all, you have to realize there are certain habits, so-called nervous habits (I prefer to abandon the term “nervous” and use the term “emotional” habits) of which the individual is conscious. For instance, in thumbsucking the baby is conscious that he is sucking his thumb. You see it, and you tell him about it. You think you know what causes it., and you want to know how to stop it. You put some bad tasting things on the baby’s thumb, or put a cage on it, or strap it. You put a glove on it or wrap it up, but none of these remedies will do the trick, because it is all poor therapy. It is treating the symptom and not the cause. We have other habits, such as picking the nose, nail-biting, stammering, sniffling, and banging the head, all classed as nervous habits. We know them as symptoms of an emotional state, and generally that emotional state is based upon a condition of anxiety, insecurity, inferiority, and tension. We are concerned chiefly with the nervous habits of children. I wish that I could get you to a’dopt one attitude toward these children; get a “sense of otherness. ” Get the point of view of what would have caused you to do that particular thing, if you were the child. The child is seeking satisfactions. He wants attention. In the case of stammering and stuttering, for instance, I analyzed and classified 300 cases of stammering and stuttering up at City College. The remarkable thing that came out of this study was that t.hey all began at or about the age of six years. Why should that be! These 300 cases were all boys. Incidentally, there are very many more boys that stammer and stutter than there are girls because the relationship of the boy to his mother is altogether different

The Art of Flying Landplanes and Seaplanes

Since this paper is prepared at the request of the Council of the Royal Aeronautical Society–a body which represents in the main the scientific aspect of aviation–I have endeavoured in preparing it to remember that I must infuse into its composition something of worth to the technician as well as to the pilot. If I manage to convey to the former some of the problems which confront the latter and which are not quite the same as those with which he is himself faced, I may have rendered some small service in response to the honour which the Council of the Society has done me in asking me to undertake this duty.

Discussion on Paper Entitled “Roentgenologic Diagnosis of Cholecystic Disease.”

Dr. A. W. George (Boston): I thought when Dr. Camp started that I could follow him, and I did for a little way, but my head is in such a whirl with the figures and the vastness of the work that I cannot. I suppose next Friday night there will, all of a sudden, come to me certain questions I would like to ask and argue with him. It is a great deal like the presidential campaign at the present moment; there is a President, he is there and doing certain things, hopes he will continue to do so, and perhaps a little later he will be out and somebody else will be in. This work is a good deal like that to me, just at the present moment. It is a tremendously big problem, and if we,—I say we, Dr. Leonard and myself,—have seemed to be over-enthusiastic, perhaps a little too positive at times, it has been perhaps in an effort to stimulate others to help us; in other words, to help the whole problem. I do not know whether, right off hand, I can say that this work of Dr. Carman's is constructive or destructive; whether we have to begin and start all over again, or whether, when we see his figures on paper and can analyze them, they will be of distinct help to us. It is so vast, when you are talking of 2,500 cases—I would not dare to say how long it would take us to get 2,500 cases or how long it has taken him. How long has it taken? Dr. R. D. Carman (Rochester): About a year. Dr. George: Well, of course, we have seen about 2,500 cases in about the same time, including all kinds of gastro-intestinal cases. Every kind of gastro-intestinal case has just the same kind of X-ray examination for the gall bladder that the gall-bladder case has. He has given us a great deal to think about. Whether you and I agree on the primary or indirect evidence or not makes very little difference, if, altogether, we are gradually getting facts that are worth something. We cannot go on with this work alone; we must have your help. We can do so in Boston, because a great majority of the men in Boston are satisfied with the work, or we would not be doing it every day and doing it in such large volume, but it is not helping the great mass of men if there is any great controversy about it. I believe the Bucky diaphragm is the most important instrument that has been given to us among all that we have. I think we could do away with films and double screens, go back to the glass tube and use glass plates, and still, if we could have the Bucky diaphragm, we would do just about as well as now; but take away the Bucky diaphragm and we would be greatly handicapped. Our plates, Dr. Kirklin's and Dr. Carman's, are of the standard, but do not think for a moment that I believe Dr. Carman, Dr. Kirklin and I can do 50 per cent better technical work, but if we make a happy average of his figures and ours, we are going to have a good average together. So, I believe in the use of the Bucky diaphragm, without any question, for gall-bladder work and gastro-intestinal work.

Cost Account Figures

Every, college poultry student ought to have in his advanced courses, an opportunity to figure out production, losses and cost accounts of a poultry farm. In order to do this he must estimate such things as egg production, mortality, egg prices, feed consumption, cost of hatching and rearing, per cent fertility and hatchability of eggs, mortality of chicks and other factors entering into the managerial side of Poultry Husbandry.To make these figures and estimates fair, indicative and worth something, an abundance of data and opinions are necessary. The writers experience in trying to obtain data from his colleagues and commercial poultrymen has led him to believe that figures of the kind wanted are either not kept or are not available.As this magazine should be a medium of exchange of ideas the following figures are submitted as estimates of what is fair to expect on a commercial poultry farm …