People covered by public pensions are often the subject of "pension envy": that is, their benefits might seem more generous and their contributions lower than those offered by the private sector. Yet this book points out that such judgments are often inaccurate, since civil servants hold jobs with few counterparts in private industry, such as firefighters, police, judges, and teachers. Often these are riskier, dirtier, and demand more loyalty and discretion than would be required of a more mobile labor force in the private sector. The debate challenges traditional ideas about how the public employee labor contract is structured and raises questions about how such employees are attracted to the public sector, retained and motivated on the job, and retired, via an entire compensation package of wages and benefits. Authors explore aspects of these schemes, addressing the cost and valuation debate, along with the political economy of how public pension asset pools are perceived and managed, an increasingly important topic in times of global financial turmoil. The discussion also explores ways that public pensions can be strengthened in the US, Japan, Canada, and Germany.
The volume captures a vigorous debate currently underway by academics, financial experts, regulators, and plan sponsors, all seeking to define a new future for public retirement systems. It will be of substantial interest to a wide range of readers, since public sector employees and their representatives will naturally find the comparisons and arguments over valuation of keen interest. Public pension administrators and policymakers seeking an explanation of what makes these plans so costly will gain a new understanding of how the arguments stack up. Private sector employers and plan sponsors can learn much from efforts to reform these retirement systems in states and countries around the world. Finally, investors and the taxpaying public more generally may be at risk to cover these long-term promises, so it behooves them to pay close attention to the financing and investment practices of these plans, along with their valuation.
This volume represents an invaluable addition to the Pension Research Council / Oxford University Press series as it includes actuarial, economic, and financial perspectives making it useful for academics, retirement plan administrators, and public employees wishing to understand the challenges facing public pensions.

In December 1982, the Centers for Disease Control received the first reports of cases of children with HIV/AIDS. Since that time, the child welfare system, as well as other human service organizations, have been coping with and responding to the crises of children and families living with HIV/AIDS, including the considerable number of children affected by AIDS through the illness of their parents, siblings, or other family members. This volume is intended as a resource for personnel within the child welfare field serving children and families whose lives are touched by HIV and AIDS. The contributors add insight to and fuel the discussion of the fight against AIDS. They provide tools to help better serve the children and adolescents that the current epidemic so tragically affects. Chapters and contributors include: "Factors Associated with Parents' Decision to Disclose Their HIV Diagnosis to Their Children" by Lori S. Wiener, Haven B. Battles, and Nancy E. Heilman; "Custody Planning with HIV-Affected Families" by Sally Mason; "Correlates and Distribution of HIV Risk Behaviors Among Homeless Youths in New York City" by Michael C. Clatts, W. Rees Davis, J. L. Sotheran, and Aylin Attillasoy; and "HIV Prevention for Youths in Independent Living Programs" by Wendy F. Auslander, Vered Slonim-Nevo, Diane Elze, and Michael Sherraden. Originally published as a special issue of 'Child Welfare', this volume examines lessons learned from a variety of perspectives and settings, and identifies a number of continuing challenges facing the field. 'Children and HIV/AIDS' is an invaluable compendium that should be read by social workers and health specialists and all those affected by the epidemic.

First published in 1995: Clinically Applied Microcirculation Research combines state-of-the-art microcirculation technology with present and potential applications in clinical medicine. This comprehensive guide unites the expertise of clinicians and basic researchers from around the world. Many of the chapters are authored by scientist/physician teams. The book provides a broad overview of how microcirculation is involved in clinical research. This is also a valuable reference source for both the history of and latest developments in microcirculation research.

First published in 1995: Clinically Applied Microcirculation Research combines state-of-the-art microcirculation technology with present and potential applications in clinical medicine. This comprehensive guide unites the expertise of clinicians and basic researchers from around the world. Many of the chapters are authored by scientist/physician teams. The book provides a broad overview of how microcirculation is involved in clinical research. This is also a valuable reference source for both the history of and latest developments in microcirculation research.

Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest--among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel.

Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.

In December 1982, the Centers for Disease Control received the first reports of cases of children with HIV/AIDS. Since that time, the child welfare system, as well as other human service organizations, have been coping with and responding to the crises of children and families living with HIV/AIDS, including the considerable number of children affected by AIDS through the illness of their parents, siblings, or other family members. This volume is intended as a resource for personnel within the child welfare field serving children and families whose lives are touched by HIV and AIDS. The contributors add insight to and fuel the discussion of the fight against AIDS. They provide tools to help better serve the children and adolescents that the current epidemic so tragically affects. Chapters and contributors include: "Factors Associated with Parents' Decision to Disclose Their HIV Diagnosis to Their Children" by Lori S. Wiener, Haven B. Battles, and Nancy E. Heilman; "Custody Planning with HIV-Affected Families" by Sally Mason; "Correlates and Distribution of HIV Risk Behaviors Among Homeless Youths in New York City" by Michael C. Clatts, W. Rees Davis, J. L. Sotheran, and Aylin Attillasoy; and "HIV Prevention for Youths in Independent Living Programs" by Wendy F. Auslander, Vered Slonim-Nevo, Diane Elze, and Michael Sherraden. Originally published as a special issue of "Child Welfare," this volume examines lessons learned from a variety of perspectives and settings, and identifies a number of continuing challenges facing the field. "Children and HIV/AIDS" is an invaluable compendium that should be read by social workers and health specialists and all those affected by the epidemic.

In the past decade, a number of advances have been made in genetic engineering as applied to farmed animals. This book has been developed from invited presentations at a conference held in California in August 1997, to address this issue. It is written by representatives from the leading laboratories involved in attempts to improve agriculturally important mammals, poultry and fish. Current knowledge, methodology, technical improvements and successes in the applications of transgenic technology to a range of animals which are important in agriculture are brought together for the first time under one cover. This book is essential reading for research workers in animal genetics, breeding and biotechnology.

Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast. To capture the manifold forms of southern haunting and horror, Undead Souths explores a variety of media and historical periods, establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside of the U.S., and employs diverse theoretical and critical approaches. The result is an engaging and inclusive collection that chronicles the enduring connection between southern culture and the refusal of the dead to stay dead.

Fundamentals of Educational Research succeeds in cutting through the complexities of research to give the novice reader a sound basis to define, develop, and conduct study, while providing insights for even the accomplished reader.
This best-selling book is of value to all social researchers, but in particular to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers employed in private industry, management and government agencies. Anderson discusses the research process and offers a wealth of information on how to define a research problem, plan a study, develop a research framework, collect the data, analyse it and write it into a credible paper or thesis. He has captured the essential components of the research process in a book that balances the quantitative and qualitative perspectives through both the academic and consulting research traditions.

The momentous events of 1989-1991 marked the end of the Soviet Union and, as a result, its threat to the interests of the free world. One of those free-world interests was-and is-the ability to use the planet's seas and oceans on all lawful occasions. Another is not to be threatened by hostile seaborne forces.

Anyone who cannot decide the merits of supporting the Republican Party should read this book before deciding This book exposes the unseemly behavior of a couple of Tea Party Republicans, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan. These two have a special relationship with hedge funds. That disturbing relationship needs to be explored in the light of misplaced Tea Party moral demands.

Nonphilosophy poses a challenge to philosophical thought, inspired by the work of Francois Laruelle. It questions the idea that philosophy, or other disciplines, can tell us what it means to think. This edited collection brings together an internationally known and interdisciplinary group of scholars, including a major new essay by Laruelle himself. Together they use nonphilosophy to cross the boundaries between philosophy and performance. Philosophers have been busy for centuries looking for the foundations of truth, value, and reality. They try to say what it all means and how it all fits together. Areas of life like science and art have to wait for the philosopher to show up to tell them what they are really about. Theory dictates meaning: performance just puts it into effect. Nonphilosophy is different. It says that reality is not an object out there that we can think and understand. The Real is the place we stand: it is where we think from. Crucially, nonphilosophy understands philosophy itself to be performative. It enacts modes of thinking that do not dominate the material of thought and do not capture the Real in concepts. Philosophy is mutated by its performances; and performances themselves think, are modes of theory. What happens when we bring philosophy, art, and performance together, without hierarchy? How can they get inside and change one another? The thinkers in this collection answer these pressing questions.

Depictions of the undead in the American South are not limited to our modern versions, such as the vampires in True Blood and the zombies in The Walking Dead. As Undead Souths reveals, physical emanations of southern undeadness are legion, but undeadness also appears in symbolic, psychological, and cultural forms, including the social death endured by enslaved people, the Cult of the Lost Cause that resurrected the fallen heroes of the Confederacy as secular saints, and mourning rites revived by Native Americans forcibly removed from the American Southeast. To capture the manifold forms of southern haunting and horror, Undead Souths explores a variety of media and historical periods, establishes cultural crossings between the South and other regions within and outside of the U.S., and employs diverse theoretical and critical approaches. The result is an engaging and inclusive collection that chronicles the enduring connection between southern culture and the refusal of the dead to stay dead.

American-German relations are in transition. A number of explanations have been given for this fact: some focusing on the personalities of politicians, some on political and attitudinal disparities, still others pointing to disagreements about foreign policy objectives since the end of the Cold War and 9/11. This volume, written by American and German scholarly experts, while not denying the relevance and validity of such explanations of the transatlantic estrangement, address the extent, resilience, and the causes of misconceptions, misunderstandings, and confrontations in the transatlantic relationship as well as highlighting commonalities and enduring ties between the U.S. and Germany. The chapters analyze domestic and foreign policies, political cultures, and compare trends in business relations, migration, culture, education, journalism, law, and religion. The authors contend that differences in political cultures, societal priorities, and national interests are inevitable, perhaps even desirable and not necessarily an obstacle to a continuous and mutually beneficial exchange or even the development of a special relationship. But first of all they need to be acknowledged, then understood, and finally dealt with in an atmosphere of mutual trust recognizing common ground. The book ends with suggestions about how to deal with different interpretations and perceptions in order to reclaim a strategic partnership for progressive changes in an increasingly multipolar world.