Search

The article examines the intellectual career of Leonard Lieberman, a renowned sociologist and anthropologist, focusing on his efforts to discredit the scientific validity of the concept of 'race'. Topics include Lieberman's academic background and his studies at UC Berkeley and Michigan State University, his wide-ranging contributions to sociology and anthropology, and his significant impact in challenging the concept of race as a scientific construct.

The article stresses that sociologists from the Midwestern states of the U.S. have always exerted a major influence on the evolution of American sociology. Two thirds of the founders of American sociology represented the Midwest. Three prominent proponents of the sociology of knowledge in the U.S. included Louis Wirth and Kurt H. Wolff, who worked in the Midwest. Three assumptions that characterize American sociology are superiority of democracy over other political systems, capitalism as the necessary condition for an efficient democracy and the purpose of sociology is to solve the problems resulting from prevailing social order.

This study examines the temporal structure of projected futures. The sociology of time is an established line of inquiry, but the existing literature lacks empirically grounded description of the cultural and cognitive dimensions of projected futures. When individuals imagine their futures, what is the qualitative nature and temporal structure of their projected futures? In order to address these questions, we used a mixed-methods strategy of interviews and surveys with 126 persons from a small college in North Carolina. We asked the participants to tell us about their futures. The resulting descriptions form a strongly chronological pattern. When asked about the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow or next week), they tersely describe the tasks that must be completed. In their descriptions of the near future (i.e., next month or next year), they begin to anticipate enjoyable experiences. When they describe the intermediate future (i.e., five to ten years from now), their responses are characterized by detailed and optimistic enthusiasm for the possibilities they envision. They pay little or no attention to the distant future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of high powered electric devices is a driving force in the rising of peak power demand from electric power utilities. One way to accommodate these rising consumption patterns involves the deployment of high capacity dispatchable, but largely unsustainable peak generation systems. To avert these extravagant costs and the likelihood of grid overload, demand response (DR) strategies can be employed to curtail overall consumption, thus reducing peak patterns. In this paper, we propose a distributed real-time DR approach. The proposed method fosters seamless cooperation between DR participants for rapid convergence to expected aggregate load curtailment, while accounting for individual consumer satisfaction needs. We assess this paper through theoretical analysis based on population game theory and simulations to demonstrate its inherent flexibility, scalability, and resilience making it attractive for practical widespread deployment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multimodal optimization (MMO) aiming to locate multiple optimal (or near-optimal) solutions in a single simulation run has practical relevance to problem solving across many fields. Population-based meta-heuristics have been shown particularly effective in solving MMO problems, if equipped with specifically-designed diversity-preserving mechanisms, commonly known as niching methods. This paper provides an updated survey on niching methods. This paper first revisits the fundamental concepts about niching and its most representative schemes, then reviews the most recent development of niching methods, including novel and hybrid methods, performance measures, and benchmarks for their assessment. Furthermore, this paper surveys previous attempts at leveraging the capabilities of niching to facilitate various optimization tasks (e.g., multiobjective and dynamic optimization) and machine learning tasks (e.g., clustering, feature selection, and learning ensembles). A list of successful applications of niching methods to real-world problems is presented to demonstrate the capabilities of niching methods in providing solutions that are difficult for other optimization methods to offer. The significant practical value of niching methods is clearly exemplified through these applications. Finally, this paper poses challenges and research questions on niching that are yet to be appropriately addressed. Providing answers to these questions is crucial before we can bring more fruitful benefits of niching to real-world problem solving. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an overview and analysis of 10 studies on violence and injustice from the perspective of youth. These articles are contained in the issue of< Journal of Social Issues entitled Youth Perspectives on Violence and Injustice and, in the articles, the authors offer a unique opportunity to go far beyond the current discursive terrains of youth and violence. Through a reinterpretation of what is conceptualized as normative, an expansion of the conceptualization of “youth” and an exploration of a broad range of topics, contexts and methods, the issue explores five provocative and significant critical themes. These themes are:methodology is critical; youth as subject, not object; gift and danger of a clinical approach; centrality of school?and at the intersection of social justice and development.The impact of popular culture on youth and violence and the importance of examining what adults value as “entertainment” are discussed also. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The algebraic definitions presented here are motivated by our search for an adequate formalization of the concepts of social roles as regularities in social network patterns. The theorems represent significant homomorphic reductions of social networks which are possible using these definitions to capture the role structure of a network. The concepts build directly on the pioneering work of S.F. Nadel (1957) and the pathbreaking approach to blockmodeling introduced by Lorrain and White (1971) and refined in subsequent years (White, Boorman and Breiger 1976;Boorman and White 1976; Arabie, Boorman and Levitt, 1978; Sailer, 1978). Blockmodeling is one of the predominant techniques for deriving structural models of social networks. When a network is represented by a directed multigraph, a blockmodel of the multigraph can be characterized as mapping points and edges onto their images in a reduced multigraph. The relations in a network or multigraph can also be composed to form a semigroup. In the first part of the paper we examine "graph" homomorphisms, or homomorphic mappings of the points or actors in a network. A family of basic concepts of role equivalence are introduced, and theorems presented to show the structure preserving properties of their various induced homomorphisms. This extends the "classic" approach to blockmodeling via the equivalence of positions. Lorrain and White (1971), Pattison (1980), Boyd (1980, 1982), and most recently Bonacich (1982) have explored the topic taken up in the second part of this paper, namely the homomorphic reduction of the semigroup of relations on a network, and the relation between semigroup and graph homomorphisms. Our approach allows us a significant beginning in reducing the complexity of a multigraph by collapsing relations which play a similar "role" in the network. © 1983.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Xiogang Deng and Joseph Bebo on drug and alcohol use and another by Lorenzo Boyd on identifying effective programs within the criminal justice system.

The theory of regular equivalence has advanced over the last 15 years on a number of different fronts. Notation and terminology have developed often making it difficult to obtain a coherent view of the area as a whole. This paper attempts to provide a framework in which to develop and explore the general mathematical theory of regular equivalence and to place a number of the more important results into that framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We review evidence of the psychological and social costs associated with punishing. We propose that these psychological and social costs should be considered (in addition to material costs) when searching for evidence of costly punishment “in the wild.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]