My visit to the living Buddha

There has been a catastrophic decline in the numbers of India's vultures, on which the Parsis once depended for the disposal of their dead. Parsi numbers are falling too. Their community represents only 0.0005 per cent of the population of the Indian subcontinent, yet they have made such a mark in so many walks of life. Could Zoroastrian culture explain their disproportionate success? Parsi shipbuilders built frigates of Malabar teak for the British Navy and the EIC, Parsis provided the brains behind India's nuclear programme, the backbone of India's manufacturing industry and such international musical icons as Zubin Mehta and Freddie Mercury, as well as the first Asian MPs at Westminster and the first Indian cricket team to tour England,. Parsi merchant-princes made fortunes in the opium trade yet rivalled Andrew Carnegie in their philanthropy.     

Orientations to the future: A comparison of adolescents in Australia and Singapore

Using an event-listing approach, this study examined the personal and societal future orientations of 15-year-old males and females in Singapore and Sydney. Three aspects were examined: content, affect, and time span. Overall, the study found that adolescents perceived their personal and societal features in separate noninterlocking planes, seeing more pleasant, proximal, personal futures, and more unpleasant, distal, societal futures, especially in relation to nuclear war and political problems. Demographic and personal construct variables influenced this general pattern of future orientation.Ph.D., social psychology, La Trobe University. Research interests: adolescence, education and social policy.Ph.D., education, Sydney University. Research interests: adolescence, psychometrics, and statistics.     

The dynamics of interest group evaluations of Congress

We apply a dynamic spatial model to interest group ratings of the members of Congress over the period 1959–1981. Spatial distances between an interest group and the members of Congress are assumed to be monotonic with the ratings. Our pooled cross-sectional time-series data set consists of 203,387 ratings by 59 interest groups. We restrict the spatial coordinates of the interest groups and members of Congress to be polynomial functions of time. Two significant dimensions are recovered: the first dimension, which accounts for approximately 75% of the variance, represents liberal-conservative positions on economic issues; the second dimension, which accounts for approximately an additional 5% of the variance, represents liberal-conservative positions on social issues. Nearly all the interest groups and most members of Congress are ideologically consistent. They are either liberal on both dimensions or conservative on both.     

The diffusion of feminist ideology

According to Converse, the ideas/beliefs of an ideology are diffused in packages—i.e., diffusion necessarily involves constraint. However, a person may become aware of these packages and the substance of an ideology of which they are a part without accepting them. Consequently, diffusion produces an increase in both awareness and constraint with the former increasing more than the latter. Diffusion may also take two forms. The ideology may be accepted by more members of the same social class from which the movement's leaders were recruited (horizontal diffusion); or the ideology may spread beyond the confines of the original class to attract the support of the less advantaged (vertcal diffusion).We apply this model of diffusion to the feminist movement in the United States for the period 1972 to 1976. The weight of our evidence indicates that significant horizontal as well as vertical diffusion has occurred. It appears that as the general public became more aware of feminist ideas and beliefs, support for these ideas and beliefs increased along with the constraint between various measures of them.