Ironies of inclusion: social class and deinstitutionalization

This paper discusses changes in the social organization of mental institutionalization as they relate to developments in the wider social and economic environment. Despite dramatic changes in the system of inpatient psychiatric care during the last three decades, the historic division of labor between the private and the public system (with the latter treating the poor, the unemployed, and the nonwhite) has not ceased to exist. At the same time, under the influence of the postwar trend towards greater political integration of disadvantaged and marginal groups into society's central value systems, treatment of the mentally ill has become less segregated and more voluntary. An important implication of these two interacting trends--the changed legal position of the patient vis-à-vis the provider and the deteriorating economic position of the user of public psychiatric facilities--has been the exceeding irrelevance of one of the basic tenets of psychiatric care: that clinical treatment precedes social functioning. With two vignettes of chronic patients the article illustrates how symptoms and survival are fused in the contemporary, inclusionary system of care.     

A median-voter model of economic regulation

A basic median-voter model is developed and extended to analyze issues of economic regulation and public policy outcomes. The model is used to generate comparative static results relating changes in public-policy outcomes to changes in relative group sizes, total population, information costs, and population heterogeneity. The model is also used to explore the issue of optimal group size — the size of the special-interest group that maximizes the group's per capita public policy gains. Comparative static analysis reveals how optimal group size and gains per capita are affected by changes in population heterogeneity, the size of the total population, and relative knowledge levels.     

WinID2 versus CAPMI4: two computer-assisted dental identification systems

Disasters produce victims that require identification. Comparing antemortem and postmortem dental records provides an important means of identification. Computers have assisted this process. Currently, the principal computer programs are CAPMI4 and WinID2. The present study compared these programs on a sample of 100 simulated victims and 105 simulated postmortem fragments. CAPMI4 provided 48 correct matches and WinID2 provided 71 correct matches. In addition, comparisons were made within WinID2 to determine which of its three dental data sets was the most successful for suggesting correct matches.     

Between the lines: Surf texts,prosthetics, and everyday theory

The texts of surfing have been largely neglected in serious cultural commentary. Surfing, as with other texts in popular culture, cannot be adequately explained through the deployment of existing theoretical and analytical paradigms. We must move beyond de Certeau's psychoanalysis and Fiske's semiotic essentialism in order to explain satisfactorily the ideo‐political and consumer dimensions of textual surfing.