Knowledge about hepatitis B and predictors of hepatitis B vaccination among Vietnamese American college students.

Asian American college students are at high risk for hepatitis B virus (HBV). PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: Vietnamese American students completed a questionnaire assessing HBV knowledge and attitudes. The authors performed statistical analyses to examine the relationship between HBV knowledge and participant characteristics. They also performed logistic regression to identify predictors of vaccination. Participants' mean age was 22.2 years, and almost 50% were born in the United States. RESULTS: Only 29.9% knew that Asian Americans are at high risk for HBV. Participants who had undergone screening or vaccination or had a family member with HBV or liver disease had significantly higher levels of HBV knowledge. Less acculturated students were less likely to have received vaccination. Those with higher levels of knowledge were more likely to have received the vaccine. CONCLUSIONS: HBV educational programs targeting young Asian American individuals are needed, with emphasis on reaching less acculturated individuals. Institutions of higher education are important locales to coordinate HBV efforts for young Asian Americans.     

Pooling designs for clone library screening in?the?inhibitor complex model

In this paper we introduce inhibitors into the complex model and we give a lower bound and an upper bound of tests in a nonadaptive pooling design for some inhibitor complex model. We propose a very efficient pooling design for the general inhibitor complex model and extend it to the error-tolerant case.     

The Meaning of a Livable Community for Older Adults in the United States and Korea

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the meaning of livability from the perspectives of policymakers and practitioners engaged in creating livable communities for older adults. In a comparison of two regions, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, and Yangcheon-gu, Seoul, Korea, 4 themes emerged—affordability, safety, accessibility, and active engagement. In both regions, the research participants recognized that the core of creating a livable community was a consumer-driven approach and collaborations with various community partners. Although the themes were similar, the interpretation and emphasis were different in the two regions.     

THE EFFECTS OF COMMUNITY STRUCTURE ON OPPORTUNITIES FOR INTERRACIAL CONTACT:

Blau's (1977) macrostructural theory builds on the assumption that social structure affects intergroup relations. This relationship depends upon the opportunity for intergroup contact. Previous tests of Blau's theory, however, treat opportunity as an unmeasured construct. P *, as a measure of opportunity for intergroup contact, not only enables a test of that assumption, but also merges general sociological principles with specific middle-range ones like those urban sociology develops.
Findings here modestly support Blau's opportunity for contact assumption. Serendipitously, the analysis demonstrates that heterogeneity asymmetrically influences opportunities for intergroup contact between groups of varying size. Because increasing heterogeneity presupposes an increase in the minority proportion and a decrease in the majority, it enhances majority and suppresses minority opportunities for intergroup contact. This suggests that Blau's hete ogeneity theorem, which assumes a symmetrical effect on contact, needs some qualification.     

How to Approximate a Histogram by a Normal Density

Which normal density curve best approximates the sample histogram? The answer suggested here is the normal curve that minimizes the integrated squared deviation between the histogram and the normal curve. A simple computational procedure is described to produce this best-fitting normal density. A few examples are presented to illustrate that this normal curve does indeed provide a visually satisfying fit, one that is better than the traditional , s answer. Some further aspects of this procedure are investigated. In particular it is shown that there is a satisfactory answer that is independent of the bar width of the histogram. It is also noted that this graphical procedure provides highly robust estimates of the sample mean and standard deviation. We demonstrate our technique by using data including Newcomb's data of passage time of light and Fisher's iris data.     

A Modification on the Friedman Test Statistic

A modification on the well-known, nonparametric Friedman test statistic is suggested in this article. Probability distributions of the suggested test statistic under the null hypothesis are tabulated for some small sample cases. In addition to an example, simulation results for various sample sizes are presented. The simulation indicates that the modified test statistic performs better than the Friedman test in detecting treatment effects of small differences especially when the sample size is small.     

Bayesian Nonlinear Regression for the Air Pollution Effects on Daily Clinic Visits in Small Areas of Taiwan

We consider the complete clinic visit records and environmental monitoring data at 50 townships and city districts where ambient air monitoring stations of Taiwan Air Quality Monitoring Stations are located. A Bayesian analysis is carried out using regression spline model on principal components obtained from several pollutant covariables. The appropriate model is selected using Bayesian model averaging. A brief account of our results is provided for the elderly patients group.     

Who mentors? Contextual prosocial motivation and willingness to be a mentor

This study provides insights for theory and practice into employee willingness to mentor. This is especially important in passing knowledge from one generation of employees to another at a time when ageing populations are seen in many parts of the world. The study examines the relationship of contextual prosocial motivation with willingness to be a mentor while simultaneously considering various individual level influences on contextual prosocial motivation. Hypotheses were evaluated through a structural equation model. Results showed a positive relationship between contextual prosocial motivation and willingness to be a mentor. Additionally, organization-based self-esteem was positively related to contextual prosocial motivation, while proximity to retirement was negatively related to contextual prosocial motivation. Implications of the findings for human resource development are discussed with suggestions offered to strengthen contextual prosocial motivation of employees.     

Rising earnings inequality and the role of education revisited

Numerous studies have found a strong positive association between the level of education and economic returns (i.e., earnings). This relationship, however, has received less examination in the context of institutional or temporal variability. Drawing on the experience of South Korea in the decade after the 1997 Asian financial crisis, this study examines the role of education in rising earnings inequality under a radically changing institutional environment. Based on data from the Korean Labor Income Panel Study and Theil index decomposition, this study finds that despite the robust association between education and earnings inequality in post-crisis South Korea, a substantial amount of the rise in overall inequality is primarily attributable to rapid increase in within-education-group inequality rather than between-group inequality. This demands renewed attention to the role of education in earnings inequality to fully account for the changing dynamics of inequality in the twenty first century.     

Improved set estimators for the coefficients of a linear model when the error distribution is spherically symmetric with unknown variances

The usual confidence set for p (p ≥ 3) coefficients of a linear model is known to be dominated by the James-Stein confidence sets under the assumption of spherical symmetric errors with known variance (Hwang and Chen 1986). For the same confidence-set problem but for the unknown-variance case, naturally one replaces the unknown variance by an estimator. For the normal case, many previous studies have shown numerically that the resultant James-Stein confidence sets dominate the resultant usual confidence sets, i.e., the F confidence sets. In this paper we provide a further asymptotic justification, and we discover the same advantage of the James-Stein confidence sets for normal error as well as spherically symmetric error.