Women on boards of nonprofits: What difference do they make?

In this article, the authors explore the impact of women on nonprofit boards. From a sociological perspective, they look at the actual proportion of women on boards and, from a more psychological perspective, at the sex of the chief executive officers in order to examine the impact of these variables on board effectiveness, structure, and process. The study results, based on data from a cross section of Canadian nonprofits, indicate that as the percentage of women on a board increases, the dynamics of the board are significantly affected.     

Exploring the Meaning of Rural Through Cognitive Maps1

Rural often is viewed as a setting for study rather than an object of study. Often a priori definitions of rural are used; these definitions may bear little resemblance to residents' understanding of the concept. A cognitive mapping experiment to explore the meaning of rural is undertaken in this paper. Results indicate that urban residents could readily identify rural areas on a blank map of Pennsylvania. Their responses to the question varied, however, with some respondents indicating urban areas or writing images on the map. A discussion of these thought processes and implications from these varying responses are presented. Then, the cognitive maps are compared to three commonly accepted definitions of rural. Population density was found to best approximate the areas that urban residents perceived as rural. The paper concludes by discussing policy implications of the findings.     

Bayesian compartmental model for an infectious disease with dynamic states of infection

Population-level proportions of individuals that fall at different points in the spectrum [of disease severity], from asymptomatic infection to severe disease, are often difficult to observe, but estimating these quantities can provide information about the nature and severity of the disease in a particular population. Logistic and multinomial regression techniques are often applied to infectious disease modeling of large populations and are suited to identifying variables associated with a particular disease or disease state. However, they are less appropriate for estimating infection state prevalence over time because they do not naturally accommodate known disease dynamics like duration of time an individual is infectious, heterogeneity in the risk of acquiring infection, and patterns of seasonality. We propose a Bayesian compartmental model to estimate latent infection state prevalence over time that easily incorporates known disease dynamics. We demonstrate how and why a stochastic compartmental model is a better approach for determining infection state proportions than multinomial regression is by using a novel method for estimating Bayes factors for models with high-dimensional parameter spaces. We provide an example using visceral leishmaniasis in Brazil and present an empirically-adjusted reproductive number for the infection.     

A Resilience-Based Approach to Risk Assessments—Building Resilient Organizations under Arctic Conditions

Reliability and higher levels of safety are thought to be achieved by using systematic approaches to managing risks. The assessment of risks has produced a range of different approaches to assessing these uncertainties, presenting models for how risks affect individuals or organizations. Contemporary risk assessment tools based on this approach have proven difficult for practitioners to use as tools for tactical and operational decision making. This article presents an alternative to these assessments by utilizing a resilience perspective, arguing that complex systems are inclined to variety and uncertainty regarding the results they produce and are therefore prone to systemic failures. A continuous improvement approach is a source of reliability when managing complex systems and is necessary to manage varieties and uncertainties. For an organization to understand how risk events occur, it is necessary to define what is believed to be the equilibrium of the system in time and space. By applying a resilience engineering (RE) perspective to risk assessment, it is possible to manage this complexity by assessing the ability to respond, monitor, learn, and anticipate risks, and in so doing to move away from the flawed frequency and consequences approach. Using a research station network in the Arctic as an example illustrates how an RE approach qualifies assessments by bridging risk assessments with value-creation processes. The article concludes by arguing that a resilience-based risk assessment can improve on current practice, including for organizations located outside the Arctic region.     

When Political Freedom Does Not Offer Travel Freedom: The Varying Determinants of Visa-Free Travel Opportunities

The ease with which a person can travel abroad may greatly impact the possibilities of what they can achieve in life. Previous scholars have found that as a country politically liberalizes and becomes wealthier its nationals can travel to more countries without a visa. After analysing data from Henley and Partners, the World Bank, and Freedom House for 154 countries, I find that this is only true for nationals from countries with above-average incomes. Among the bottom half of countries in the income distribution and the most unequal societies, nationals in politically free countries do not have greater visa-free mobility than nationals in less politically free countries. The higher a country's income per capita, the more travel opportunities its citizens lose because their society is not completely politically free. My findings have implications for how policymakers evaluate the costs of both migration policies and policies that politically and economically liberalize societies.     

书写与口头文化之间的工艺知识——夹江造纸中的知识关系探讨

现代欧洲早期,精英学者的文字世界与手工工匠默会世界间的互动促成了工艺知识的传播.对于中国的相关研究,学者们也从文本中寻找工艺知识的细节,却很少注意到这些记载在多大程度上反映和影响了现实的技术实践.本文通过考察夹江手工造纸的生产工艺及其传承,论述这样一种现象,即工艺知识的再生产内嵌于特殊的自然、社会和象征环境,很难并且没有必要转化为书写知识,记载工艺知识的文本更关注道德价值的宣传而非技术传递.     

Patterns of nonresident father contact

We used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort (NLSY79) from 1979 to 2002 and the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (CNLSY) from 1986 to 2002 to describe the number, shape, and population frequencies of U.S. nonresident father contact trajectories over a 14-year period using growth mixture models. The resulting four-category classification indicated that nonresident father involvement is not adequately characterized by a single population with a monotonic pattern of declining contact over time. Contrary to expectations, about two-thirds of fathers were consistently either highly involved or rarely involved in their children’s lives. Only one group, constituting approximately 23% of fathers, exhibited a clear pattern of declining contact. In addition, a small group of fathers (8%) displayed a pattern of increasing contact. A variety ofvariables differentiated between these groups, including the child’s age at father-child separation, whether the child was born within marriage, the mother’s education, the mother’s age at birth, whether the father pays child support regularly, and the geographical distance between fathers and children.