We are a multidisciplinary group of Stanford faculty who propose ten principles to guide the use of racial and ethnic categories when characterizing group differences in research into human genetic variation.

Student alienation is a major cause of dropping out of school, gang activity and poor peer, school-student, and teacherstudent relationships. A considerable amount of research has focused on factors that distinguish between students who are engaged in the learning process and those who are not. This study examined the relationship between students and their perceptions of school life. A survey was distributed to over 200 students at two high schools in a large, urban school district in the southern United States. Results suggest that gender, race/ethnicity, and placement in special education are all strong factors in influencing whether students perceive school and/or life in general as alienating. The limitations of the study as well as future research directions and implications for practice are discussed.

Social theorists have long recognized that changes in social order have cultural consequences but have not been able to provide an individual-level mechanism of such effects. Explanations of human behavior have only just begun to explore the different evolutionary dynamics of social and cultural inheritance. Here we provide ethnographic evidence of how cultural evolution, at the level of individuals, can be influenced by social evolution. Sociocultural epistasis-association of cultural ideas with the hierarchical structure of social roles-influences cultural change in unexpected ways. We document the existence of cultural exaptation, where a custom's origin was not due to acceptance of the later associated ideas. A cultural exaptation can develop in the absence of a cultural idea favoring it, or even in the presence of a cultural idea against it. Such associations indicate a potentially larger role for social evolutionary dynamics in explaining individual human behavior than previously anticipated.Taiwan Aborigines ͉ cultural evolution ͉ demographic change ͉ marriage customs

Previous studies indicate that rifle shooting performance while standing is compromised when fatigued. Apprehension of suspects by police officers may involve foot pursuit and firing a weapon from a standing position. The purpose of the current study was to investigate pistol shooting performance in police officers under similar conditions of physical fatigue. Participants (mean age: 30.1 years; 4.4 years of experience as police officer) completed two shooting trials separated by an acute bout of exercise on a cycle ergometer to voluntary exhaustion. Each trial consisted of three rounds of five rapid-fire shots at a target, each round separated by a 15-s rest. Participants' backs were turned to the target between rounds. Despite physical exertion, with an average heart rate of 164 bpm, shooting accuracy (mean distance of the closest 4 shots from the center of the target) and precision (diameter of the tightest 4-shot grouping) remained unchanged on postexercise trials relative to preexercise trials. This suggests that automatic shooting reactions override the adverse consequences of fatiguing exercise on shooting performance.

School connectedness is the extent to which a student feels that adults and peers at school care about his or her overall well-being. Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) may experience difficulty with developing high levels of school connectedness, which may lead to engagement in health-risk behaviors. The purpose of this study was to determine the levels of school connectedness of students with EBD and compare them with their general education peers. A questionnaire was created for this study with participants attending elementary, middle, and high schools. The results of the analysis indicated that of the four factors of school connectedness (that is, school bonding, school attachment, school engagement, and school climate), the students with EBD reported significantly lower levels of school bonding than did their general education peers. The results indicate that students with EBD experience school differently than their general education peers, particularly in terms of school bonding.