Book reviews

Richard Parsons. The Carpets of Afghanistan. London: Oriental Textile Press, 1983; £25.

Michael Rywkin. Moscow's Muslim Challenge: Soviet Central Asia. London: C. Hurst & Company, 1982. 183 pp., bibliography and index.     

The last days of “Bukhara the great”

Réforme et Revolution chez les Musulmans de l'Empire Russe. Bukhara 1867–1924. By Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Preface by Maxime Rodinson. Cahiers de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques. Paris, Librairie Armand Colin, 1966. Pp. 320. ‐Index.     

War on Black Men: Arguments for the Legalization of Drugs

Abstract

The leadership of the black community is concerned with welfare, with equality, with unemployment, with discrimination, with racism, with the pay gap, and with dozens of other such traditional issues. Oh, yes, they are also apprehensive about the use of addictive drugs. But, as we speak, young male members of this community are being incarcerated at frightful rates, and, even worse, are killing each other to boot. One would think that this latter issue would occupy the interest of black leaders front and center. After all, there are few worse problems than being jailed or killed. The present paper is dedicated to making the case that the black leadership has its priorities all wrong; that if they were to exercise true leadership, they would see the jailing and murder of young black men as perhaps the greatest threat to their community; and, if so, they would fervently support the legalization of all drugs.     

Mental health disorders and functioning of women in domestic violence shelters

This study investigates the presence of mental health symptoms and disorders reported by 74 women in a domestic violence shelter and the impact of those symptoms on function in work, school, and social encounters. Findings are compared to estimates of U.S. women generally, based on a national sample of over 65,000 women drawn from the 1995 National Health Interview Survey. The sheltered sample presents significantly higher rates of mental conditions and functional impairments affecting their work, school, and social functioning. These women are also less educated and poorer and use more health services than the U.S. population. Mental health conditions must be identified in shelters to improve functioning and facilitate independence from abusers.     

Measuring employees' psychological capital using data mining approach

In this research, the logistic regression model was employed to develop a classifier that measures psychological capital of workers in organization. Psychological capital (PsyCap) is the positive state of an individual, comprising of self‐efficacy, optimism, hope, and resilience. Employees with high psychological capital contribute positively to objectives and business strategy of an organization. An experimental dataset comprising of the psychological capital information of 329 employees in an organization was used to fit a data mining classification model. To ensure model accuracy, 220 observations were used as training set, whereas 109 were set aside to validate the model. Various statistical tests for goodness of fit and predictive accuracy were deployed to test model performance. The model has the ability to classify an individual's psychological capital into either high or low class with a predictive accuracy of 93%. The classification model is expected to serve as a tool in human resource management when measuring psychological capital of employees during recruitment interviews and promotion appraisals.