A parametric multistate model for the analysis of carcinogenicity experiments

A fully parametric multistate model is explored for the analysis of animal carcinogenicity experiments in which the time of tumour onset is not known. This model does not require assumptions about tumour lethality or cause of death judgements and can be fitted in the absence of sacrifice data. The model is constructed as a three-state model with simple parametric forms for the transition rates. Maximum likelihood methods are used to estimate the transition rates and different treatment groups are compared using likelihood ratio tests. Selection of an appropriate model and methods to assess the fit of the model are illustrated with data from animal experiments. Comparisons with standard methods are made.     

Child Sexual Abuse and Adult Mental Health,Sexual Risk Behaviors,and Drinking Patterns Among Latino Men Who Have Sex With Men

One in five Latino men who have sex with men has experienced child sexual abuse. Although concerning in itself, child sexual abuse may increase an individuals’ likelihood of depression and risk-taking in adult life, including engagement in HIV risk behaviors and alcohol and substance use. It is therefore urgent that researchers and practitioners better understand the long-term effects of child sexual abuse. We utilized logistic and linear regression to assess associations between child sexual abuse (operationalized as forced or coerced sexual activity before age 17) and depression, sexual behaviors, and drinking patterns in a sample of 176 adult Latino men who have sex with men from New York City. Over one-fifth (22%) of participants reported child sexual abuse. In multivariable models, participants with histories of child sexual abuse were significantly more likely than participants without such histories to screen for clinically significant depressive symptoms and heavy drinking and reported more anal sex acts, male sexual partners, and incidents of condomless anal intercourse in the previous three months. These findings confirm a high prevalence of child sexual abuse among Latino men who have sex with men and associations between child sexual abuse and adulthood depressive symptoms, high-risk alcohol consumption, and sexual risk behaviors. We recommend that providers who serve Latino men who have sex with men incorporate child sexual abuse screenings into mental health, HIV prevention, and substance use treatment programs, utilizing approaches that are inclusive of resilience.     

Variability propagation in the production planning and control mechanism of construction projects

One explanation for the often-problematic performance of projects is poor execution of the production planning and control function. This function’s supply, an arrangement of managerial processes, plays a key role in driving a project’s construction operations and the variability propagation across them. However, the variability propagation across the function’s supply structure has not been considered. This research addresses this gap by exploring the behaviour of outcomes over the function’s supply. To do so, this paper studies the existence of variability propagation in the function supply during the construction stage of five infrastructure projects that used the Last Planner® System as a tool. A plausible propagation pattern was found. The pattern expresses the complex behaviour of the function’s supply. Further work is required to address the impact of the pattern on the performance of the function supply and the pattern’s implications for improving the function supply.     

The Productive Aging Concept and Social Work Students’ Perceptions Toward an Older Population

Social work curriculum that offers an optimistic perspective on aging has the potential to help social work students go on to practice in a nondiscriminatory way with older adults. This study introduces social work students to the productive aging concept, an optimistic view to social potential in later life, in lecture format and assesses postlecture changes in their perceptions of older adults. Seventy-two students (16 BSW; 56 MSW) were recruited from a large university in the southeast United States to participate in a lecture on productive aging. A one-group pretest–posttest design was used, and a paired samples t test (n = 72) was used to analyze changes in social work students’ perceptions toward older adults. Negative attitudes toward older adults decreased and positive attitudes toward older adults increased among students following their participation in the lecture on productive aging. This finding suggests the productive aging concept may favorably influence student perceptions of older adults. Future research should aim to investigate ways in which these changes in perception at the college level can translate and self-sustain in social work practice for social work students postgraduation.     

Family Psychoeducation for Hepatitis C Patients and Their Families: Recommendation for Clinicians

PsychoEducation Responsive to Families for Persons coping with Hepatitis C (HCV-PERF) is a multifamily psychoeducation group model designed to help patients with hepatitis C virus infection (HCV) and their families navigate the illness and improve their readiness for treatment. The purpose of this article is to provide information and recommendations for clinicians interested in using the HCV-PERF model. The article provides details of the intervention model and presents thematic categories that evolved from analysis of interviews with clinicians with experience conducting and facilitating HCV-PERF groups. Based on these findings, recommendations were developed to inform and guide the use of HCV-PERF.     

China and the Different Regional Approaches in Africa

African countries have a tiny share in the international economy and are not able to play more than a small role in the International Relations arena. Nevertheless, major players are looking at Africa with a renewed interest and, among them, China seems to have the most dynamic approach in order to catch-up with other nations and upgrade relations with African countries. However, the EU is also carrying on its new strategy toward parts of Africa. In these world powers strategies, multiple approaches related to subregions exist, instead of a single regional approach. The objective of this paper is to have a closer look and to analyze how the different regions and major nations of Africa Western Africa, Egypt, Eastern Africa and South Africa) are dealing with their economic and political development path and their interconnection with other areas of the World, with an important focus on China-Africa relations.

Omnivorousness as the bridging of cultural holes: A measurement strategy

Recent research and theory at the intersection of cultural sociology and network analysis have converged around the notion of cultural holes: patterns of cultural choice that position the person as a bridge not between other persons but between cultural worlds. This is an approach that promises to open up new vistas in our conceptualization of the relationship between social position and cultural taste, but that so far lacks operational grounding. In this article, I draw on Breiger’s (1974) formalization of the idea of the duality of persons and groups along with classical formalizations of brokerage for sociometric networks (Burt 1992) to suggest that the “cultural ego network” of a typical survey respondent can be reconstructed from patterns of audience overlap among the cultural items that are chosen by each respondent. This leads to a formalization of the notion of omnivorousness as relatively low levels of clustering in the cultural network: namely, omnivorousness as cultural network efficiency. I show how this metric overcomes the difficulties that have plagued previous attempts to produce ordinal indicators of omnivorousness from simple counts of the number of cultural choices, while providing novel substantive (and sometime counter-intuitive) insights into the relationship between socio-demographic status markers and patterns of cultural choice in the contemporary United States.     

A Dominance-Based Rough Set Approach for an Enhanced Assessment of Seasonal Influenza Risk

Accounting for about 290,000–650,000 deaths across the globe, seasonal influenza is estimated by the World Health Organization to be a major cause of mortality. Hence, there is a need for a reliable and robust epidemiological surveillance decision-making system to understand and combat this epidemic disease. In a previous study, the authors proposed a decision support system to fight against seasonal influenza. This system is composed of three subsystems: (i) modeling and simulation, (ii) data warehousing, and (iii) analysis. The analysis subsystem relies on spatial online analytical processing (S-OLAP) technology. Although the S-OLAP technology is useful in analyzing multidimensional spatial data sets, it cannot take into account the inherent multicriteria nature of seasonal influenza risk assessment by itself. Therefore, the objective of this article is to extend the existing decision support system by adding advanced multicriteria analysis capabilities for enhanced seasonal influenza risk assessment and monitoring. Bearing in mind the characteristics of the decision problem considered in this article, a well-known multicriteria classification method, the dominance-based rough set approach (DRSA), was selected to boost the existing decision support system. Combining the S-OLAP technology and the multicriteria classification method DRSA in the same decision support system will largely improve and extend the scope of analysis capabilities. The extended decision support system has been validated by its application to assess seasonal influenza risk in the northwest region of Algeria.