A century (plus) of parenthood: Changes in living with children, 1880–1990

This paper summarizes the broad foundations of the changing nature of parenthood by examining trends in coresidence with children under age 15. Our study uses data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples (IPUMS) to provide a portrait of demographic parenthood in the US over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In describing changes in parenthood over the past 110 years, we distinguish between those living with own children and those living with other children. We focus in particular on changes in gender patterns of coresidential parenthood and changes in the likelihood that divorced men and women live with children. We also examine the impact of the baby boom on parenting. Our findings support a recasting of ongoing discussions of the parental roles of American men and women by shifting the historical demographic focus from biological transitions to the social aspects of parenting.     

Regulating technology: Can administrative agencies cope with technological change?

The debate over scientific issues has made a difficult transition from the scientific community to the public-polity process. The traditional view of scientists undertaking “pure” science in their laboratories did not envision government intervention into scientific and technological discovery through administrative agency regulation of risks associated with the results of such research. Yet examples of government regulation of technological risks abound as the nation grapples with nuclear power issues, new-drug testing, and environmental issues, to name a few. This paper considers whether the presently constituted regulatory apparatus is capable of responding to dramatic advances in technology in a timely and effective way. Concluding that it is not, the paper examines the circumscribing characteristics of the regulatory process. Then it discusses alternate approaches for regulating the risks posed by science and technology without doing too much violence to due process or the notion of public participation in the regulatory function.     

Sex Differences in Age Patterns of Delinquent/Criminal Careers: Results from Poisson Latent Class Analyses of the Philadelphia Cohort Study

Applications of latent class analyses to the study of criminal careers have yielded results with implications for criminological theory. Distinct latent classes of individuals within various samples have been identified based upon the similarity of individuals with respect to their rate of offending across the teen and adult years, net of the effects of other regressors. In previous research on samples of males taken from the cities of London and Philadelphia, four and five such categories have been identified respectively, ranging from a group of nonoffenders to a group of chronic offenders. However, the question of whether similar findings hold for females has not been adequately addressed, in part due to the scarcity of longitudinal samples with sizable female populations. Data from the Second Philadelphia Cohort are used to address this and related questions. First, are there latent classes of female offenders? Second, if such categories do exist, how do they compare? Third, how do classes of male and female offenders compare on key measures of criminal careers? Analyses of the samples yield differing numbers of classes for males and females. Gender invariances as well as differences in patterns of offending are also found and are discussed.     

ATP’s impact on accelerating development and commercialization of advanced technology

One of ATP’s legislated mandates is to accelerate industry’s development and commercialization of new technologies. This survey of 28 projects funded in 1991 found that ATP helped cut technology development cycle time by 50% in most cases. Slightly more than half of the interviewees provided quantitative estimates of the economic value of reducing cycle time by a single year. Most interviewees expected the positive impact on cycle time experienced in the applied-research stage to flow through to later stages in the technology development cycle allowing them to enter the marketplace more quickly. Cycle-time improvements in other technology development projects were attributed by the companies to their ATP project. Two types of acceleration were implied: (1) overcoming delays in starting technology development projects, and (2) speeding up performance of research once it is under way. This paper is based on work performed by the author when she was serving as an industry consultant to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The author acknowledges the contributions of Rosalie Ruegg, Richard Spivack, Ernesto Robles, and Gregory Tassey, all of NIST, to the study. In addition, she expresses appreciation to the 28 company representatives who participated in the project interviews.     

Moral Agency and Moral Responsibility in Humanitarian Intervention

This paper sets out a preliminary taxonomy of potential collective moral agents in humanitarian intervention, based on six recent cases involving international organisations. The settings for the cases are Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Attributing moral responsibility to a group actor requires first discovering whether its characteristics are enough like an individual moral agent's to support an analogy. Groups in humanitarian intervention that appear to choose between one course of action and another, and have a clear structure of leadership and a capacity to control their collective activities, meet criteria that characterise individual moral agents. If they can also distinguish between policies using the language of morality we can call them collective moral agents, and hence subject to some moral responsibilities.     

Research integrity — it's about more than misconduct

The definition of integrity is "the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles that you refuse to change" (meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary). Yet research integrity is frequently discussed through the lens of misconduct or concerns around reproducibility. However, as we can see from this quote, integrity is about more than that. It is about who you are as a person and your behaviour. Your behaviour in terms of how you do your work, towards your immediate colleagues and towards those with whom you communicate; whether across the research and innovation (R&I) system or the general public.