Valuation of childhood risk reduction: the importance of age, risk preferences, and perspective.

This article explores two problems analysts face in determining how to estimate values for children's health and safety risk reductions. The first addresses the question: Do willingness‐to‐pay estimates for health risk changes differ across children and adults and, if so, how? To answer this question, the article first examines the potential effects of age and risk preferences on willingness to pay. A summary of the literature reporting empirical evidence of differences between willingness to pay for adult health and safety risk reductions and willingness to pay for health and safety risk reductions in children is also provided. The second dimension of the problem is a more fundamental issue: Whose perspective is relevant when valuing children's health effects—society's, children's, adults‐as‐children, or parents'? Each perspective is considered, followed ultimately by the conclusion that adopting a parental perspective through an intrahousehold allocation model seems closest to meeting the needs of the estimation problem at hand. A policy example in which the choice of perspective affects the outcome of a regulatory benefit‐cost analysis rounds out the article and emphasizes the importance of perspective.     

二级教学管理中几个问题的研究

该文结合北京林业大学信息学院本科教学管理的实际情况,就教学管理体制和二级教学管理中所面临的教学管理体制、教务规范化管理、研究生助教(TA)等问题进行了探讨。指出教学管理中的学校(教务处)、学院、系(专业)三级要明确责权利,相互配合完成专业人才培养工作。在教学资源紧张时期,实施TA制和教务管理规范化与信息化,是提高教学质量的有效途径。     

WHOSE GAY COMMUNITY? SOCIAL CLASS,SEXUAL SELF‐EXPRESSION,AND GAY COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT

The visible and political gay community has been characterized as an increasingly middle-class, white institution. It is hypothesized that this middle-class nature requires economic and psychosocial resources that are not available to the working class and, thus, may limit the expression of sexual orientation for the working class. An analysis of data from the multicity Urban Men's Health Study supports this hypothesis. Nine of 14 hypothesized effects are statistically significant and indicate that working-class men who are homosexually active are less likely to describe themselves as gay, are more likely to have heterosexual experience, and are less likely to be involved in the gay community. Thus, it is important to incorporate class differences when addressing the social and the political dynamics of sexual orientation.     

Improving flexibility and efficiency by adding parallelism to genetic algorithms

In this paper we develop a study on several types of parallel genetic algorithms (PGAs). Our motivation is to bring some uniformity to the proposal, comparison, and knowledge exchange among the traditionally opposite kinds of serial and parallel GAs. We comparatively analyze the properties of steady-state, generational, and cellular genetic algorithms. Afterwards, this study is extended to consider a distributed model consisting in a ring of GA islands. The analyzed features are the time complexity, selection pressure, schema processing rates, efficacy in finding an optimum, efficiency, speedup, and resistance to scalability. Besides that, we briefly discuss how the migration policy affects the search. Also, some of the search properties of cellular GAs are investigated. The selected benchmark is a representative subset of problems containing real world difficulties. We often conclude that parallel GAs are numerically better and faster than equivalent sequential GAs. Our aim is to shed some light on the advantages and drawbacks of various sequential and parallel GAs to help researchers using them in the very diverse application fields of the evolutionary computation.     

解码理论在日语听力理解中的运用

在日语学习中,因受语言环境和学习方法的限制,听力被认为是提高日语水平和成绩的一大难关。作者遵循听觉系统中听力的解码理论,以一年一度的国际日本语能力测试题为例,提出并具体分析了提高日语听力的三种模式———预测法、捕捉法和贯穿法,并指出运用这些技巧时应注意的几个问题。期望学习者能克服心理障碍,讲究科学的方法,把这些模式积极运用到平时的训练和测试中去,以此来提高日语听力水平和成绩。     

Evaluating DISCOVER's Effectiveness in Enhancing College Students' Social Cognitive Career Development

College students (20 women, 14 men) seeking career counseling services at a university career center participated in this exploratory investigation. A 2 (DISCOVER treatment) × 2 (counseling treatment) research design was used to evaluate the individual and combined effects of DISCOVER (ACT, 1998) and counseling on participants' career decision‐making self‐efficacy and career decision‐making attributional style. Findings revealed a significant effect of the use of DISCOVER on participants' career decision‐making self‐efficacy and their sense of control over the career decision‐making process. Results are discussed regarding the implications for career counseling and ideas for further research in this domain.     

Residual analysis for spatial point processes (with discussion)

Summary.  We define residuals for point process models fitted to spatial point pattern data, and we propose diagnostic plots based on them. The residuals apply to any point process model that has a conditional intensity; the model may exhibit spatial heterogeneity, interpoint interaction and dependence on spatial covariates. Some existing ad hoc methods for model checking (quadrat counts, scan statistic, kernel smoothed intensity and Berman's diagnostic) are recovered as special cases. Diagnostic tools are developed systematically, by using an analogy between our spatial residuals and the usual residuals for (non-spatial) generalized linear models. The conditional intensity λ plays the role of the mean response. This makes it possible to adapt existing knowledge about model validation for generalized linear models to the spatial point process context, giving recommendations for diagnostic plots. A plot of smoothed residuals against spatial location, or against a spatial covariate, is effective in diagnosing spatial trend or co-variate effects. Q – Q -plots of the residuals are effective in diagnosing interpoint interaction.     

Benchmark Analysis: Shopping with Proper Confidence

We discuss the issue of using benchmark doses for quantifying (excess) risk associated with exposure to environmental hazards. The paradigm of low-dose risk estimation in dose-response modeling is used as the primary application scenario. Emphasis is placed on making simultaneous inferences on benchmark doses when data are in the form of proportions, although the concepts translate easily to other forms of outcome data.     

Four‐Month Attentional Regulation and Its Prediction of Three‐Year Compliance

The extent to which 4‐month attentional regulation during an infant‐mother still‐face situation and 12‐month attachment security during the Strange Situation predicted rates of compliance and noncompliance during a cleanup task at 36 months was examined longitudinally in 70 infant‐mother dyads. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses indicated that infants who showed more attentional regulation during the still‐face situation with mothers later showed a higher rate of committed compliance and a lower rate of situational compliance during cleanup with mothers. Furthermore, lower levels of attentional regulation were later associated with higher rates of assertive behavior, but only for infants in an insecure attachment relationship.     

Feminism,militarism, and attitudes toward the role of women in the military

Attitudes toward the role of women in the military require the reconciliation of two often conflicting beliefs: those toward the roles and rights of women and those toward the military. This article explores the relationships between positive attitudes toward women’s roles throughout society, or feminism, and positive attitudes toward defense spending, or militarism, both with each other and with attitudes toward gender integration in the military. Results of this analysis show there to be a negative relationship between feminism and militarism, a positive relationship between feminism and gender integration, and a negative relationship between militarism and gender integration. The results of multiple regression analysis show that feminism is the strongest predictor of attitudes toward gender integration, while militarism is weak in its predictive ability. The author argues that the issue of women in the military is more one of women’s equality than of national defense and that policy discussions should be structured accordingly. She is currently conducting research which examines how women in the United States military employ strategies to manage gender and sexuality. This research provides evidence for the claim that gender is not simply a role or an attribute, but that gender is created and recreated through our interactions with others.