Reassessing the WIC effect: evidence from the Pregnancy Nutrition Surveillance System.

Recent analyses differ on how effective the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) is at improving infant health. We use data from nine states that participate in the Pregnancy Nutrition Surveillance System to address limitations in previous work. With information on the mother's timing of WIC enrollment, we test whether greater exposure to WIC is associated with less smoking, improved weight gain during pregnancy, better birth outcomes, and greater likelihood of breastfeeding. Our results suggest that much of the often reported association between WIC and lower rates of preterm birth is likely spurious, the result of gestational age bias. We find modest effects of WIC on fetal growth, inconsistent associations between WIC and smoking, limited associations with gestational weight gain, and some relationship with breastfeeding. A WIC effect exists, but on fewer margins and with less impact than has been claimed by policy analysts and advocates.     

INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY OF GOVERNMENT'S RELIANCE UPON OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS TO PROVIDE ANALYSIS AND MANAGEMENT SERVICES

The federal government spends vast sums of money for management and analysis services. The authors contend that the selection process to determine the winners of the awards of contracts to perform these services too often disregards cost competitiveness as a factor in the award. The relative importance of technical proficiency and cost are examined and a model is proposed whereby a high level of technical expertise can be obtained at a more reasonable cost.     

Microeconomic Reform and National Competition Policy: Misconceptions and Problems

Microeconomic reform and the so-called National Competition Policy (NCP) have entered political discourse but often with little discussion of their specific meaning. The terminology tends to be emotionally and intuitively appealing. It implies that any microeconomic reform per se is necessarily 'good' for the achievement of economic efficiency. Moreover, misconceptions about the meaning of economic efficiency frequently result in the belief that a higher level of competition is always 'good' for the achievement of that objective.
While there are many features in the new competition policy which deserve the wide acceptance and support it has been given, there are also aspects of it which do not stand up to closer scrutiny. It is those aspects, including the problems which will arise when ambitious but vague principles are put into practice, which will receive attention in this article.     

Variation in midfacial tissue thickness of African-American children

Forensic anthropologists use facial reconstruction to develop a likeness of an unknown individual in order to generate public interest that may lead to a positive identification. Tissue thicknesses of the face from living persons or cadavers are an essential part of the reconstruction method. The purpose of this study is to add to the growing database of tissue thicknesses along the facial midline of African-American children and to begin to examine the possibility of geographic differences between children of the same ancestral group. Results indicate that significant differences do not exist between males and females or between African-American females from the Midwest and Southeast U.S. Only age was determined to have a significant effect on mean tissue thickness variation, in our sample, with the majority of change occurring in the facial region.     

A community response to a 9/11 hate crime: Restorative justice through dialogue

Nearly two hours after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a hate crime was committed against the Islamic Cultural Center in Eugene, Oregon. Rather than following the conventional criminal justice process, the director of the center and his wife chose to engage in a process of restorative dialogue with other community members and the offender himself. This case study of moving from hatred to healing occurred in the larger context of restorative justice, a movement that is now developing in many hundreds of communities in more than 17 countries. Social workers committed to community practice have played an active role in this reform movement, which has developed over the past two decades.     

Cross Pressure Scores: An Individual-Level Measure of Cumulative Partisan Pressures Arising from Social Group Memberships

Early studies of voting behavior hypothesized that the degree to which an individual was “cross-pressured” might affect how she participates in politics. However, attention to this topic waned before returning in recent years, mainly within the narrower confines of social networks analysis. In an effort to encourage broader consideration of the role of cross-pressures in political behavior, we present a new approach to estimating cross-pressures that (1) is individual-specific, (2) reflects the cumulative cross-pressures faced by an individual from her many intersecting social strata and group memberships, irrespective of the mechanism by which those pressures are experienced, and (3) can be estimated using widely-available data in party systems of any size, thus making it easier to study the effect of cross-pressures cross-nationally and over time. We demonstrate that these estimates are robust to many estimation choices, correspond well to existing measures of cross-pressures, and are correlated with patterns of political engagement and participation predicted by extant theories.