What About the Kids?

ABSTRACT

Although rhetoric about family-centered services and breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty has survived many failed public welfare strategies, few meaningful collaborative efforts between school systems and the public welfare system have emerged. The following case study describes the processes in which a county DSS director successfully engaged the school system to change the educational trajectories of its children in poverty by using the university as a bridge partner. Capitalizing on the freedom associated with using block grant funds for innovative programs, the collaborating partners redefined the relationship between the two systems through a common goal. Successes, barriers, practice implications and lessons learned are identified and discussed in the case example.     

Financial forecasts during the crisis: Were experts more accurate than laypeople?

The main goal of this paper was to examine the accuracy and confidence of financial forecasts during the 2009/2010 crisis. The study was carried out in February 2009 in Poland. The participants represented two groups: financial analysts and laypeople (people without knowledge or skills in finance). All participants were asked to forecast future stock market performance and foreign exchange rates. Additionally, they marked their confidence on a 100-point scale. The results showed that the forecasts significantly differed from the real values. In forecasting both the stock market and the currency exchange market, the prediction error significantly differed from zero. Even if the participants were optimistic in making the directional stock market forecasts, they were pessimistic when making point index predictions, which suggests a judgmental paradox. The experts were slightly better than the non-experts in predicting the stock market. However, their accuracy was generally not better in the exchange market forecasts. The next step of the analysis focused on the confidence factor. The results of this part of the research showed that the laypeople were less confident than the experts in all the judgments.     

What to Do with the Informal Sector?

Almost all informal firms in the Kenyan manufacturing sector are managed by Kenyans of African origin. Formal enterprises are run by Kenyans of both African and Asian origin. These three groups are distinct in terms of experience, productivity and access to finance. Asian formal firms are the most efficient, while there is no significant productivity difference between informal and formal African firms. There are thus weak incentives for African informal firms to become formal. At the same time, Kenya needs higher investments and larger exports to achieve economic take‐off, and this can only be achieved through an efficient formal sector. Therefore policy should aim to integrate the sectors by improving infrastructure, capacity‐building, credit delivery, and supporting networks.     

What determines wage differentials across the EU?

We analyse determinants of the wage differentials observed between thirteen European countries using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The empirical decomposition is based on a proportional hazards model. The approach based on rank invariant estimators is borrowed from the literature on failure time data and has been adapted by Donald et al. (Rev Econ Stud 67:609–633, 2000) to analyse differences in wage distributions. Extending this approach and using natural splines to allow for nonlinear regression effects we isolate three different underlying forces for wage differentials: differences in characteristics, differences in weights of characteristics and differences in the returns-to-skill functions. The analysis reveals that country differences in returns-to-skill functions contribute most to observed wage differences while differences in observed characteristics contribute surprisingly little.     

What Helped Nonprofits Weather the Great Recession?

This study examined the effectiveness of several financial strategies for nonprofit organizations in fighting the Great Recession. Using data from human services and community improvement organizations in the state of New Jersey, we tested hypotheses about the relationships between three measures of financial sustainability and various fundraising efforts and financial indicators. We found that (1) except for strong external funding relationships, funding efforts were generally not effective in enhancing financial sustainability during the crisis; (2) higher operating margin and equity ratio improved an organization's ability to generate revenue and maintain expense levels, but higher debt ratio and administrative cost ratio were generally harmful; and (3) revenue diversification might aggravate fiscal stress and cause more expense cuts in a severe crisis. These findings improve our understanding of the mechanics of nonprofit management during times of harsh fiscal conditions and suggest useful ways for nonprofit organizations to navigate future financial crises.     

What Does the Medina Bring to Children?

Respect or Idolatry? SOME call today's children television children. They are the generation surrounded by media, television, radio, newspaper, and electric games--all have become close pals during their early years. More and more facts and surveys indicate the media's influence on children's moral development, their modern concepts and socialization.     

What Is Different about the Profile of the Social Entrepreneur?

In recent years, the term social entrepreneur has become increasingly common in academic and business circles. Social entrepreneurs engage in a variety of activities, but always with the intention of solving social problems. Social entrepreneurs are not merely people who perform acts of charity; they have an evident desire to improve social well‐being and develop projects with long‐term vision. The creation of sustainable social value is a key characteristic that differentiates them from well‐meaning individuals who simply engage in charitable works. There are, however, significant gaps in our understanding of social entrepreneurs and few empirical studies on the subject. This present study attempts to identify the characteristics of more socially oriented entrepreneurs, using sociodemographic variables and the theory of universal values toward work. Analysis of a sample of approximately 400 people shows that more than half of entrepreneurial orientation can be explained through the possession of the values of self‐enhancement (with an inverse relationship in this case), self‐transcendence, and conservation. The theory of universal values has proved extraordinarily useful for studying the characteristics of social entrepreneurs.     

What,to the law,is the former slave?

This essay examines a subset of Reconstruction-era cases decided in Southern appellate courts that dealt with the legacies of slavery. Drawing on suits that either described emancipation as legal death or considered black civil rights, it argues that judges placed freedpeople into a distinct legal category – the former slave – in order to preserve the antebellum legal status quo. Opinions differentiated free-born citizens from those who acquired rights after emancipation, and marked freedpeople with stains of their previous servitude, which limited their potential for the equal enjoyment of newly acquired civil rights.     

What Has the Marriage Law Done for Women?

LAW has been drawing closer to the lives ofordinary Chinese people since the 1980s. Overthe past 10 years or so China has issued manylaws in rapid succession. Governing the statebased on law was put into the Constitution of thePRC in March 1999, laying a solid foundation forthe realization of the nation's four modernizations. I became a lawyer in 1985. Since becoming astaff member of the All-China Women'sFederation (ACWF), I have consulted on theMarriage Law and other regulations and clausesrelated to it.     

What Fills the Gaps Left by Employer-Provided Insurance?

Employer-provided insurance is the leading source of medical insurance for non-elderly Americans. However, it leaves many without coverage. Evidence suggests that the non-group insurance market does a poor job of filling in these gaps, for those with both short- and long-term uninsurance. It does so for all income and age groups, as well as for both genders. It does fill some of the gaps in employer-provided coverage for those with middle and high incomes, though very incompletely.     

What Can We Do To Protect the Environment?

THE progress of modern science and technology has brought with it not only the rapid growth of the global economy but the large-scale exploration and utilization of natural resources as well. Increasingly, people are realizing that they cannot afford not to pay attention to issues of ecological balance and environmental protection. Taking     

What do lesbians do in the daytime? Recover

This paper examines a narrative taken from an ethnographic interview, for the speaker's conversational construction of lesbian and other identities along with ideologized personal history. To tell her story, Marge shifts to the discourse style used in the meetings of addiction recovery groups. She prioritizes the recovery (twelve-step) program's coherence system, structuring her life story in conformity with its terms while narrating a complexly queered identity. Four analyses are given, beginning with a Labovian formal examination and proceeding with a consideration of three types of discourse echoing: interdiscursivity, intratextuality, and manifest intertextuality. This study demonstrates the analytical linking of nonpublic linguistic discourse to social discourses; individual identity construction to social construction (and its coherence systems); and personal history to historical eras. The paper adds the concept of a metalevel complicating action to narrative theory and develops a means of examining intratextuality for critical discourse analysis. It presents a revised view of essentialism for the sociolinguistic study of gender and sexuality.     

What shall we do with the cyclic profile?

A Condorcet method for a single-seat preferential election is defined by the way it handles cases without a Condorcet winner. Such cases are described in terms of cyclic candidate triples. Sometimes election theory considers intricate patterns of intersecting cyclic triples. In practice, cyclic triples are rare, but they may be created as part of strategic voting against a Condorcet winner. This strategy, often called burying, is difficult to apply, but critics will detect a missed opportunity and regard it as a punishment for honest voting. A new Condorcet method, SV, lets a cyclic triple be won by the candidate with the smallest opportunity to defeat a Condorcet winner this way. A new geometric model allows visual comparison of the opportunities under various methods.     

Will the EU Disintegrate? What Does the Likely Possibility of Disintegration Tell About the Future of the World?

Is it true that either the EU will be democratised or it will disintegrate? I concur that the current policies, principles, and institutions of the EU both generate counterproductive politico-economic effects and suffer from problems of legitimation. These effects and problems, which are not confined to Europe, give rise to tendencies towards disintegration. My second point concerns the timing of the required learning and reforms. Modest policy proposals and tentative steps within the existing EU Treaty framework may be too little too late. The question is whether there is enough time for deeper transformations in Europe—and also globally.