Individual and ecological assets and positive developmental trajectories among gang and community-based organization youth

The Search Institute framework for conceptualizing developmental assets was used in a longitudinal study of African American male youth involved in gangs or in community-based organizations (CBOs) serving youth. Analyses of intraindividual change indicated that individual and ecological assets are linked to positive developmental trajectories among these youth.     

Producing More with Less? Community Forestry in Durango,Mexico in an Era of Trade Liberalization*

Abstract Through a qualitative case study of peasant‐organized forestry in Durango, Mexico, this paper examines how neoliberal policy reform is reshaping the community forestry sector. Post‐1992 agrarian and forestry laws facilitate the emergence of new forms of association in ejidos (collective property communities created by agrarian reform) and agrarian communities, and reorganize the delivery of forestry technical services. These developments indirectly undermine peasants' capacity to deal with the sector's long‐standing internal problems, putting at risk their ability to provide themselves with the services they need for sustainable community livelihoods and forest exploitation. Nevertheless, this study of a forest peasant federation shows that institutional change is a process peopled by groups of social agents who respond creatively to external structure from local organizational and community contexts. Ethnographic methods can be used fruitfully to study complex interactions between multiple levels of political‐economic structure and local action, which both constrain and provide opportunities for the organization of common‐pool resource management regimes.     

INFORMATIONAL INTIMACY AND FUTURISTIC FLU: LOVE AND CONFUSION IN THE MATRIX

Cyberpunk's influence upon our understanding of the information revolution is indicated by the fact that its seminal novel, Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), is accredited with the coining of the now widespread non-fictional concept of cyberspace. Beyond providing this resonant concept, however,some of the genre's more recent work known as biopunk is shown to provide fresh insights into the cultural experience of a society increasingly transformed, not only by the extent of technological change in a new informational age, but also its unprecedented pace. This paper reviews cyberpunk to demonstrate the vivid ways in which it uses its fictional licence to catalogue and articulate imaginatively a profoundly ambivalent aspect of contemporary culture in the age of information. We find ourselves interacting more and more closely and rapidly with information, yet at the same time, we feel increasingly run down by the effort demanded of such close and rapid interaction: hence the title-phrases, informational intimacy and futuristic flu. Numerous examples are provided of cyberpunk'szeitgeist-capturing qualities in the face of a profound and rapid information-induced paradigm shift. A mismatch is shown to exist between the conceptual categories we have at our disposal and the qualitatively new scenarios created by the latest information technologies. This paper argues, however, that assuming one maintains a healthy sense of its various deliberate ironies, cyberpunk's fictional exaggerations are seen as potentially instructive elements for a society striving to avoid a bout of techno-influenza.     

宋元转变的汉人精英家族：儒户身份，家学传统与书院

1315年恢复科举制度前后,士大夫家庭已通过兴办书院从而把利用教育作为维护社会地位和经济地位的战略。元初那些通过资助,兴办或以其他形式与书院联系,从而维护儒学学术传统的家族,获得入仕的有利机会。元朝建立后,书院时南方士大夫家庭的命运起着重要作用。书院除了为书院山长提供潜在的仕途外,还帮助元朝指定的儒户,即传统的士绅家庭维持特权。元初,恢复科举制度前,通过建立和扩大书院对当地教育有所贡献的家庭,经常受到官方任命作为奖赏。除了具有教育传统的家庭兴办书院,那些自南宋起就存在的家塾,为元代的书院奠定了基础。元代的书院,既是国家教育机构的组成部分,也是南北方汉族士人——以及非汉族士人——通过坚持儒家教育传统而保持地位的手段。     

A multivariate von mises distribution with applications to bioinformatics

Motivated by problems of modelling torsional angles in molecules, Singh, Hnizdo & Demchuk (2002) proposed a bivariate circular model which is a natural torus analogue of the bivariate normal distribution and a natural extension of the univariate von Mises distribution to the bivariate case. The authors present here a multivariate extension of the bivariate model of Singh, Hnizdo & Demchuk (2002). They study the conditional distributions and investigate the shapes of marginal distributions for a special case. The methods of moments and pseudo‐likelihood are considered for the estimation of parameters of the new distribution. The authors investigate the efficiency of the pseudo‐likelihood approach in three dimensions. They illustrate their methods with protein data of conformational angles     

A marginal regression model for multivariate failure time data with a surviving fraction

A marginal regression approach for correlated censored survival data has become a widely used statistical method. Examples of this approach in survival analysis include from the early work by Wei et al. (J Am Stat Assoc 84:1065–1073, 1989) to more recent work by Spiekerman and Lin (J Am Stat Assoc 93:1164–1175, 1998). This approach is particularly useful if a covariate’s population average effect is of primary interest and the correlation structure is not of interest or cannot be appropriately specified due to lack of sufficient information. In this paper, we consider a semiparametric marginal proportional hazard mixture cure model for clustered survival data with a surviving or “cure” fraction. Unlike the clustered data in previous work, the latent binary cure statuses of patients in one cluster tend to be correlated in addition to the possible correlated failure times among the patients in the cluster who are not cured. The complexity of specifying appropriate correlation structures for the data becomes even worse if the potential correlation between cure statuses and the failure times in the cluster has to be considered, and thus a marginal regression approach is particularly attractive. We formulate a semiparametric marginal proportional hazards mixture cure model. Estimates are obtained using an EM algorithm and expressions for the variance–covariance are derived using sandwich estimators. Simulation studies are conducted to assess finite sample properties of the proposed model. The marginal model is applied to a multi-institutional study of local recurrences of tonsil cancer patients who received radiation therapy. It reveals new findings that are not available from previous analyses of this study that ignored the potential correlation between patients within the same institution.     

Narrative skills predict peer adjustment across elementary school years

The importance of peer adjustment in middle childhood coincides with developing social cognitive and discursive skills that include the ability to make personal narrative accounts. Authoring personal stories promotes attention to the sequence of events, the causal connections between events, the moral significance of what has happened, and the motives that drive human action: these skills may be critical for the establishment and maintenance of satisfying peer relationships during elementary school. This study extended previous research by considering whether narrative skills in written stories about peer interactions predicted peer adjustment. As part of an ongoing longitudinal study, 92 children wrote narratives about peer experiences and completed surveys on measures of peer adjustment for two school years. Cross‐lagged panel models indicated that chronological and thematic coherence and reports of moral concerns in narratives in the first year of the study contributed to lower peer disliking in the subsequent academic year. Reports of motives in Year 1 narratives contributed to lower levels of loneliness and peer victimization in Year 2. Writing personal narratives that are coherent and attentive to moral concerns and motives may be especially beneficial for children who have difficulty connecting with peers. We discuss implications for classroom practices.     

Rapid growth or stagnation: An economic policy choice

Why has the American economy performed so poorly in the past decade, especially in comparison with the two prior decades? This paper makes the theoretical and empirical case that a series of economic policy decisions provides the most satisfactory explanation and that policy reform will restore good economic performance. The paper also considers alternative explanations including the idea of a new secular stagnation unrelated to policy and the view that the deep financial crisis inevitably delayed recovery from the recession.     

The Influence of Simulated Home and Neighbourhood Densification on Perceived Liveability

This study experimentally manipulated neighbourhood density and home location to reveal the effect of these changes on perceived liveability. Two hypothetical scenarios were provided to 106 households using a Computer-Aided Personal Interview (CAPI). The first scenario examined a densification of the participant’s current property, and the second scenario examined a change to the location of the participant’s home. Current home location, key destinations and alternative locations were recorded using an integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) interface. The findings show that people do optimise their location based on factors such as accessibility and transport distances to key locations. When given the choice to relocate to a range of different neighbourhoods, people trade closer travel distances in order to maintain a friendly, safe, clean neighbourhood environment. Home-owners are loss-averse when it comes to densification, but older home owners and those with larger homes have relatively fewer barriers to land area reduction.