‘Coming of Age’: An Individual Perspective*

An outsider's view of family therapy in Australia which raises the question of professional responsibility within the profession and towards the larger system.     

Barriers to returning to work for people with spinal cord injuries: a focus group study

The rate of employment for people with spinal cord injuries is relatively low, especially among Asians. To help individuals with spinal cord injuries return to work or retain employment, rehabilitation professionals must understand the barriers to employment and intervene to reduce or remove them. Hence, a focus group study was administered to 16 people with spinal cord injuries to explore return to work barriers. Various ideas, beliefs, responses, and values at different stages of work resettlement were elicited from both employed and unemployed participants, and then summarized. According to the results, several modifications of existing forms of rehabilitation intervention are necessary, as are further research directions.     

Validation of the Chinese version of the Oswestry Disability Index

This study aimed to collect evidence on the structural and substantive validity, and test-retest reliability of the Chinese version of the Oswestry Disability Index (CODI). Seventy-nine patients suffering from chronic low back pain were assessed with the CODI. The results of explorative factor analysis primarily suggested a single-factor structure with nine out of 10 items (factor loading = 0.66-0.79). The sex life item was found to load on a different factor. The Cronbach's alpha of all 10 items was 0.81 (p<0.05). When the sex life item was removed from the analysis, the alpha value was increased to 0.89 (p<0.05). The test-retest reliability was estimated based on 56 participants who completed two administrations of CODI in 48 hours. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) computed for the total CODI scores was 0.86 (95% C.I. = 0.81-0.91). The reliability estimated for the item scores using Kappa statistics ranged from a high of k=0.80 for the sitting item to a low of k=0.49 for the traveling item. Kappa statistics were not available for three items. The Chinese version of the Oswestry Disability Index demonstrated satisfactory validity and test-retest reliability, and so could be considered as an appropriate instrument for assessing chronic back pain-related disability in Chinese patients in Hong Kong. Further research should address the cross-cultural and measurement issues in regard to sex life in order to further improve the test content of the instrument.     

Explaining Official Delinquency: a Spatial Study of Class,Conflict and Control*

The correlation between social class and official delinquency is one of the more stable findings of sociological research. Consensus, conflict and organizational explanations of this correlation are examined with a coordinated set of survey, interview, and official data gathered in the central area of a middle-sized Canadian city. These data make possible the consideration of behavior and official rate-producing processes in a model that lends support to a combination of conflict and organizational perspectives. Consideration is given to the need for additional research using a similar frame-work in other types of community settings.     

负面清单制度的国际经验及其对上海自贸区的启示

负面清单作为上海自贸区改革一大亮点,体现了我国开始着手建立高标准的投资规则。国外的负面清单制度已发展得较为成熟,无论是多边协定NAFTA,或是各双边协定,其负面清单模式都可为上海自贸区的建设提供经验和启示。在上海自贸区负面清单模式推行中,应对重点行业实施重点保护,将负面清单制度化,使经济开放与经济安全相平衡,使宏观经济管理与微观经济自由相平衡,使立法与司法制度相结合。     

Time Series Modeling of Degradation Due to Outdoor Weathering

Environmental variables have an important effect on the reliability of many products such as coatings and polymeric composites. Long-term prediction of the performance or service life of such products must take into account the probabilistic/stochastic nature of the outdoor weather. In this article, we propose a time series modeling procedure to model the time series data of daily accumulated degradation. Daily accumulated degradation is the total amount of degradation accrued within one day and can be obtained by using a degradation rate model for the product and the weather data. The fitted model of the time series can then be used to estimate the future distribution of cumulative degradation over a period of time, and to compute reliability measures such as the probability of failure. The modeling technique and estimation method are illustrated using the degradation of a solar reflector material. We also provide a method to construct approximate confidence intervals for the probability of failure.     

Discrimination of AR,MA and ARMA time series models

The problem of discrimination between two stationary ARMA time series models is considered, and in particular AR(p), MA(p), ARMA(1,1) models. The discriminant based on the likelihood ration leads to a quadratic form that is generally too complicated to evaluated explicitly. The discriminant can be expressed approximately as a linear combination of independent chi–squared random varianles each with one degree of freedom, the coefficients, of which are eigenvalues of cumbersome matrices. An analytical solution which gives the coefficients approximately is suggested.