Skills of novices early trained or traditionaly trained versus experienced drivers confronted to simulated urban accidents' scenarios

In order to prevent the over-representation of young drivers in car crashes, France instated an early driver training from the age of 16, but the positive effects of this opportunity have not yet been proven. Three groups of male drivers (12 subjects each) were confronted with some prototypical accident scenarios introduced in a simulated urban circuit. The first and second groups were composed of young drivers having less than one month of driving licence; twelve have had a traditional learning course, and twelve had followed, in addition to the initial course, an early driver training under the supervision of an adult. The third group was composed of experienced drivers. Strategies of the three groups were analyzed through their response time, speed and maneuvers. No difference appeared across groups regarding obstacle detection. But traditionally-trained drivers' position control was more conservative than the two others groups, which were more likely to involve efficient evasive action. The exposure gained during early training could thus increase the development of visuo-motor coordination and involve better skills in case of difficult situations. Others accidents' scenarios could be used to confront young drivers with difficult situations not commonly encountered in natural driving.     

怀智兴教:对中国大陆教师培养中一些问题的探索

笔者旨在探讨本科师范教育在中国大陆的一些重大发展性问题.讨论的中心将围绕本科师范院校所处的学术与行政环境、师范教育课程改革等问题展开.文章将会关注有关师范教育的三方面问题:(1)师范教育在高等教育中的角色;(2)师范教育的课程改革及其重点;(3)师范教育的管理.通过分析相关师范教育改革措施,认为改革一方面要考虑到师范院校在高等教育机构中所面临的困境,另一方面也要注意到其自身从课程设置到计划管理中产生的种种问题.     

A Slippery Road to Equality: Hong Kong's experience of unplanned integrated education

This article examines the issue of children with a disability who are 'informally integrated' into mainstream school. Its main purpose is to reflect the views and experiences of parents, and to identify the major difficulties that arise and their suggestions for ameliorating the situation. The data is based on a series of interviews and focus groups of parents. In order to provide a balanced perspective, responses of schools to a questionnaire were also included. Teachers were asked to express their views about integrated education. These responses were then categorised. It was found that lack of resources and training predominated.     

Employment among married female college graduates

This paper investigates the effect of attitudinal factors on the employment of white married female college graduates with and without children. A model of the employment status of these women 3 and 7 years after graduation is estimated using data from the NORC longitudinal study of 1961 college graduates. Taste for housework was found to affect the employment of nonmothers only, whereas “child care ideology” affected the employment of mothers. Husband's income had a negative effect on the wife's working both in 1964 and in 1968. Age of youngest child in 1964 had a positive, and number of children a negative, impact on a mother's working in 1964. The negative effect on employment status in 1968 of the birth of a child between 1964 and 1968 was much greater for those women for whom it was a first birth than for those who already had children.     

Flexible mixture modeling via the multivariate t distribution with?the?Box-Cox transformation: an?alternative to?the?skew-t distribution

Cluster analysis is the automated search for groups of homogeneous observations in a data set. A popular modeling approach for clustering is based on finite normal mixture models, which assume that each cluster is modeled as a multivariate normal distribution. However, the normality assumption that each component is symmetric is often unrealistic. Furthermore, normal mixture models are not robust against outliers; they often require extra components for modeling outliers and/or give a poor representation of the data. To address these issues, we propose a new class of distributions, multivariate t distributions with the Box-Cox transformation, for mixture modeling. This class of distributions generalizes the normal distribution with the more heavy-tailed t distribution, and introduces skewness via the Box-Cox transformation. As a result, this provides a unified framework to simultaneously handle outlier identification and data transformation, two interrelated issues. We describe an Expectation-Maximization algorithm for parameter estimation along with transformation selection. We demonstrate the proposed methodology with three real data sets and simulation studies. Compared with a wealth of approaches including the skew-t mixture model, the proposed t mixture model with the Box-Cox transformation performs favorably in terms of accuracy in the assignment of observations, robustness against model misspecification, and selection of the number of components.     

The Impact of Complementary Agglomeration and Multi‐unit Systems on New Product Introduction

This study explores the relationship between organizational agglomeration and new product introduction. It proposes that product‐complementary agglomeration increases the likelihood of new product introduction, but that the effect on new product introduction is non‐linear. In addition, the influence of agglomeration on new product introduction is contingent on organizational form (i.e. multi‐unit form or independent form). Using longitudinal data for the hospital industry in Taiwan from 1997 to 2002, we found that the relationship between product‐complementary agglomeration and new product introduction is an upward trending hooked curve. As the degree of complementary agglomeration increases, the likelihood of introducing new products also increases, but the rate of increase diminishes with the degree of complementary agglomeration. In addition, we also found that the positive effect of product‐complementary agglomeration on new product introduction is stronger for independent firms than for multi‐unit firms.