THE、TRIANGLE、FACTORY FIRE
1The fire at the Triangle WaistCompany in New YorkCity was one of the worst workplace disasters in the history of labor. The incident highlighted the inhumane working conditions faced by many industrial workers, including low wages, excessively long hours, and an unsanitary and dangerous work environment. The Triangle WaistCompany, a shirt factory, was a typical sweatshop in the heart of New York’s garment district. Most of the workers were women, some as young as 15 years old, mostly recent Italian andEuropean Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States with their families to seek a better life.Already struggling with a new language and culture, these workers could not speak out about working conditions for fear of losing their desperately needed jobs, and this forced them to endure exploitation by the factory owners.
2On March 25, 1911, one of the five hundred employees of the Triangle Waist factory noticed that a rag bin near her eighth-floor workstation was on fire. She and her co-workers immediately tried to extinguish the flames, but their efforts proved futile, and piles of fabric ignited all over the eighth floor. The factory manager ordered his employees to unroll the fire extinguisher hose, but they found it rotted and useless. Panic erupted as the fire spreaD、
3The shirt factory occupied the top three floors of the ten-storyAschBuilding. The seventy employees who worked on the tenth floor escaped the fire by way of the staircases or by climbing onto the roof, where students from New York University, located across the street, stretched ladders over to theAschBuilding. The 260 workers on the ninth floor had the worst luck of all.Although the eighth-floor workers tried to warn them by telephone, the call did not reach them, and by the time the ninth-floor workers learned about the fire, their routes of escape were mostly blockeD、When they found many of the exit doors locked, some managed to climb down the cables of the freight elevator. Others crammed into one narrow stairway. Still others climbed onto the single, inadequately constructed fire escape. However, the fire escape led nowhere, and it bent under the weight of hundreds of workers trying to escape. The spindly structure separated from the wall, falling to the ground and carrying many people with it.
4To combat the disaster, the New York FireDepartment sent thirty-five pieces of equipment, including a hook and ladder. The young women trapped on the ninth floor waited on the window ledges to be rescued, only to discover that the ladder, fully raised, stopped far below them at the sixth floor. Water from the hoses could not reach the top floors, and many workers chose to jump to their deaths rather than to burn alive. Within minutes, the factory was consumed by flame, killing 146 workers, mostly immigrant women.City officials set up a temporary morgue in a building on 26th Street, and over the next few days streams of survivors filed through the building to identify the deaD、
5The ten-storyAschBuilding was a firetrap typical of the working conditions of the period, and the Triangle fire tragically illustrated that fire inspections and safety precautions were very inadequate. The victims of the fire were trapped by the lack of fire escapes and by management’s practice of locking the exit doors during work hours. The incident had a profound impact on women’s unionism and job safety, affecting local and national politics in the process.An era of progressive reform began to sweep the nation, as people decided that government had a responsibility to ensure that private industry protected the welfare of workers. There was a public outcry for laws to regulate workplace safety. The New York Factory InvestigatingCommission was formed to examine the conditions in factories throughout the state, and their report led to many new

Social Readjustment Scales
Holmes and Rahe (1967) developed the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) to measure life change as a form of stress.
The scale assigns numerical values to 43 major life events that are supposed to reflect the magnitude of the readjustment required by each change. In responding to the scale, respondents are asked to indicate how often they experienced any of these 43 events during a certain time period (typically, the past year). The person then adds up the numbers associated with each event checkeD、

The SRRS and similar scales have been used in thousands of studies by researchers all over the worlD、
Overall, these studies have shown that people with higher scores on the SRRS tend to be more vulnerable to many kinds of physical illness--and many types of psychological problems as wellDerogatis &Coons, 1993; Gruen, 1993; Scully, Tosi &Banning, 2000).
More recently, however, experts have criticized this research, citing problems with the methods used and raising questions about the meaning of the findingsCritelli &Ee, 1996 ; Monroe & Mc0uaid, 1994; Washington, 2000).
First, the assumption that the SRRS measures change exclusively has been shown to be inaccurate. We now have ample evidence that the desirability of events affects adaptational outcomes more than the amount of change that they require (Turner & Wheaton, 1995). Thus, it seems prudent to view the SRRS as a measure of diverse forms of stress, rather than as a measure of change-related stress (McLean & Link,1994).
Second, the SRRS fails to take into account differences among people in their subjective perception of how stressful an event is. For instance, while divorce may deserve a stress value of 73 for most people, a particular person’s divorce might generate much less stress and merit a value of only 25.
Third, many of the events listed on the SRRS and similar scales are highly ambiguous, leading people to be inconsistent as to which events they report experiencing (Monroe & McQuaid, 1994). For instance, what qualifies as "trouble with the boss" Should you check that because you’re sick and tired of your supervisor What constitutes a "change in living conditions"Does your purchase of a great new sound system qualifyAs you can see, the SRRS includes many "events" that are described inadequately, producing considerable ambiguity about the meaning of one’s response. Problems in recalling events over a period of a year also lead to inconsistent responding on stress scales, thus lowering their reliability (Klein & Rubovits,1987).
Fourth, the SRRS does not sample from the domain of stressful events very thoroughly.Do the 43 events listed on the SRRS exhaust all the major stresses that people typically experience Studies designed to explore that question have found many significant omissionsDohrenwend et al., 1993; Wheaton, 1994).
Fifth, the correlation between SRRS scores and health outcomes may be inflated because subjects’ neuroticism affects both their responses to stress scales and their self-reports of health problems. Neurotic individuals have a tendency to recall more stress than others and to recall more symptoms of illness than others (Watson,David & Suls, 1999). These tendencies mean that some of the correlation between high stress and high illness may simply reflect the effects of subjects’ neuroticismCritelli &Ee, 1996). The possible contaminating effects of neuroticism obscure the meaning of scores on the SRRS and similar measures of stress.
The LifeExperiences Survey
In the light of these problems, a number of

Iodine and Goiter
Iodine is a well-known example of a trace mineral whose lack in the body creates an easily treated disease. When the thyroid gland is not supplied with sufficient iodine to manufacture hormones, it enlarges and forms a goiter or swelling of the neck.At the same time other symptoms, such as fatigue and sluggishness, weight gain, coldness of the body, and depression, may occur.
In the United States goiter was first noted in the Great Lakes region, where in the 1930s, as many as 40 percent of the people in some areas had goiter, due mainly to iodine-deficient soil. This scarcity had been caused by ice age glaciers melting and washing the iodine out of the soil.
The inhabitants of mountainous regions ofEurope had suffered from iodine deficiency for centuries for similar reasons.
It was discovered in the alpine region of Switzerland in the nineteenth century that in areas in which the drinking water contained less than 0.5 micrograms of iodine per liter there was a high incidence of goiter.
In contrast to mountainous or inland regions, areas by oceans or in the vicinity of ocean breezes usually contain enough iodine to prevent this affliction.
As a fairly accurate rule of thumb, if a map is drawn showing the parts of the world where the water supply is deficient in iodine and then superimposed on a map showing the areas where the inhabitants suffer from goiter, the two mapped areas coincide.
To understand how iodine deficiency leads to goiter, it is necessary to look at the underlying physiology of the thyroid glanD、The human thyroid gland is the only place in the body where iodine is stored, and it requires a daily supply of about 150 micrograms of iodine entering the body. When food or water is digested, the iodine it contains is either taken up by the thyroid or eliminated from the body through the kidneys into the urine. When supplies are low, the kidneys still eliminate iodine from the body so the capacity of the thyroid to preserve an adequate supply of raw material is threateneD、
The thyroid gland consists of thousands of balls of cells, called thyroid vesicles, which enclose a space filled with a jellylike protein called thyroglobulin. These cells have an extraordinary ability to trap iodine from the bloodstream, and the efficiency of this trap can be increased if the amount of iodine in the blood circulation decreases. Once the iodine is trapped by the thyroid vesicles it passes into the thyroglobulin, where the actual manufacture of two kinds of thyroid hormones takes place. The hormones are stored here until they travel back through the thyroid vesicles to enter the bloodstream. The thyroid hormones are then taken to every part of the body where they influence the rate at which the chemical processes of every cell proceeD、They have a pervasive effect on the control of oxygen consumption and heat production of the whole body, and they are essential to the healthy growth of body and minD、
The thyroid tries to keep constant the amount of circulating thyroid hormone entering the cells of the body. When iodine supplies are low, the pituitary gland, a small pea-sized gland at the base of the brain, secretes a thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) that in turn regulates the power of the thyroid to trap iodine and increase the output of the thyroiD、If the thyroid is continually stimulated by TSH, the cells get larger and eventually the whole gland enlarges with an increase in the number of its cells. The thyroid may have many temporary crises where iodine supplies are not adequate and where swelling in induced unde

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