Health Disorder of Climate Migrants in Khulna City: An Urban Slum Perspective

As the most vulnerable climatic region in the country, Khulna City is increasingly experiencing climate‐change‐induced urban problems. For instance, occupancy by climate migrants (delete the term “illegal migrant”), drainage congestion, water logging and reduced fresh water availability are all increasing problems. In the last decade, the population in the city increased by more than 20 per cent due to migration from nearby climate vulnerable districts. This study explores the health disorders of climate migrants occupying the urban slums and squats of the Khulna City area. This study found that these climate migrants settled in the urban slums and squats and, as such, they do not have access to urban amenities such as clean drinking water, hygiene services, and health facilities. This study noted that these displaced people are at increased risk of health issues from unhygienic and overcrowded living conditions and from water and sanitation problems. They often suffer from different waterborne diseases, under‐nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies. This study suggests that there is a need for better planning, preparation and training in Bangladesh to which migrants move, including better training in health and related services on how to recognize and respond to health problems that may be slow to manifest. Education and training also need to be provided for the migrants themselves, to help them adapt culturally and to enhance their skills and potential for employment.     

Evaluating the Quality of Social Work Supervision in UK Children’s Services: Comparing Self-Report and Independent Observations

Understanding how different forms of supervision support good social work practice and improve outcomes for people who use services is nearly impossible without reliable and valid evaluative measures. Yet the question of how best to evaluate the quality of supervision in different contexts is a complicated and as-yet-unsolved challenge. In this study, we observed 12 social work supervisors in a simulated supervision session offering support and guidance to an actor playing the part of an inexperienced social worker facing a casework-related crisis. A team of researchers analyzed these sessions using a customized skills-based coding framework. In addition, 19 social workers completed a questionnaire about their supervision experiences as provided by the same 12 supervisors. According to the coding framework, the supervisors demonstrated relatively modest skill levels, and we found low correlations among different skills. In contrast, according to the questionnaire data, supervisors had relatively high skill levels, and we found high correlations among different skills. The findings imply that although self-report remains the simplest way to evaluate supervision quality, other approaches are possible and may provide a different perspective. However, developing a reliable independent measure of supervision quality remains a noteworthy challenge.     

Early stopping in seamless phase I/II clinical trials

In recent years, seamless phase I/II clinical trials have drawn much attention, as they consider both toxicity and efficacy endpoints in finding an optimal dose (OD). Engaging an appropriate number of patients in a trial is a challenging task. This paper attempts a dynamic stopping rule to save resources in phase I/II trials. That is, the stopping rule aims to save patients from unnecessary toxic or subtherapeutic doses. We allow a trial to stop early when widths of the confidence intervals for the dose-response parameters become narrower or when the sample size is equal to a predefined size, whichever comes first. The simulation study of dose-response scenarios in various settings demonstrates that the proposed stopping rule can engage an appropriate number of patients. Therefore, we suggest its use in clinical trials.     

Adolescents’ perceptions of the ‘substance use-violence nexus’: a South African perspective

The aim of the study was to explore adolescents’ perceptions of substance use as a contributing factor to community violence by employing a conceptual framework proposed by Goldstein. Data were collected from a sample of adolescents between the ages of 15 and 16 years by means of focus group interviews. Theoretical thematic analysis was used to analyse and interpret the findings. The participants’ perceptions indicated that substance use and withdrawal symptoms induce physiological and behavioural modifications resulting in aggression and violence. The findings also suggest that participants believed that substance users frequently commit property and violent interpersonal crimes such as theft, robbery, assault and murder to procure their substances. Further, the adolescents’ perceived violence to be rooted within gang culture as well as the involvement in shared markets for illicit substance trading.     

Does Remittance Outflow Stimulate or Retard Economic Growth?

This article evaluates the association between remittance outflow (RMO) and economic growth in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. The results of this evaluation indicate that RMO Granger creates gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in three countries, namely, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia. Similarly, the results for causality from GDP per capita to RMO are significant for four countries, namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The findings differ from those of the household consumption model, stating that higher RMO will decrease economic activity. GDP per capita is the main determinant of RMO, suggesting that economic growth promises and encourages continuous RMO and vice versa. The adverse impact of RMO can be minimized by encouraging the local population to be productive in the private sector, as local productivity will reduce the huge influx of foreign workers and provide valuable local investment opportunities to lessen the amount being remitted.     

The Subpoena of Ethnographic Data

This essay outlines the author's experience of having his ethnographic data subpoenaed. It outlines the challenges of subpoena's to research, and suggests four solutions: (1) Apply for and utilize the National Institutes of Health certificate of confidentiality by asking health‐related questions over the course of one's research; (2) Establish a task force that articulates clear ethical guidelines for ethnographic research, with attention to the conditions wherein ethnographers can break confidentiality (and might also comply with subpoenas). These ethical guidelines should then be made clear to research subjects as a part of informed consent processes; (3) Demand that institutions (institutional review boards) that require confidentiality as a condition of research be required to defend that confidentiality through the office of the general counsel; (4) Socialize the cost of subpoenas, wherein scholars can be part of an insurance pool that will defend them in the event of a subpoena and thereby defend the general enterprise of ethnographic research.     

Global Governance,neoliberalism and national responses: The case of Bangladesh’s ready‐made garment (RMG) sector

This article on the ready‐made garment (RMG) sector of Bangladesh shows how over‐reliance on foreign capital for development financing and deregulated investment—a hallmark of neoliberal economic arrangements—undermines the incorporation of SDGs’ and INGOs’ equity principles, contributing to biased policy responses yielding unequal outcomes. The article cautions that while countries prioritize economic growth over social and environmental nourishment and continue to adopt neoliberal economic policies to promote economic growth, inequity is unavoidable, if not inevitable. Thus, the way forward may be to shift the focus of ‘development’ from the economy to society, to building ‘good societies’ where institutions and strategies, including those that contribute to economic growth, are organized such that these complement not compromise the evolution of such societies.     

Family Economy,Rural School Choice,and Flexischooling Children with Disabilities

Most homeschooled students would be more accurately described as “flexischooled,” partly homeschooled and partly enrolled in school. The popularity of these two alternatives to public or private school enrollment has increased over the past several decades to the extent that, by 2012 over 2 million students, 4 percent of the population, were either flexischooled or homeschooled in the United States. To understand why parents have pursued these options over enrollment, we employed a family economy perspective, arguing that family, child, and locational considerations shaped parents' motivations for homeschooling or flexischooling over enrollment. For example, parents' decisions were partially shaped by the interaction between children's disability status and rural location. Using data from the National Household Education Survey 2012, this article first describes the prevalence of flexischooling and full‐time homeschooling. Then, it demonstrates how various family, child, and locational factors shape the odds of flexischooling and homeschooling, and then examines the interaction between location and children's disability status in detail. We discuss the implications of our findings for family economy theoretical perspectives, flexischooling, and rural education research.     

Variable selection for survival data with a class of adaptive elastic net techniques

The accelerated failure time (AFT) models have proved useful in many contexts, though heavy censoring (as for example in cancer survival) and high dimensionality (as for example in microarray data) cause difficulties for model fitting and model selection. We propose new approaches to variable selection for censored data, based on AFT models optimized using regularized weighted least squares. The regularized technique uses a mixture of \(\ell _1\) and \(\ell _2\) norm penalties under two proposed elastic net type approaches. One is the adaptive elastic net and the other is weighted elastic net. The approaches extend the original approaches proposed by Ghosh (Adaptive elastic net: an improvement of elastic net to achieve oracle properties, Technical Reports 2007) and Hong and Zhang (Math Model Nat Phenom 5(3):115–133 2010), respectively. We also extend the two proposed approaches by adding censoring observations as constraints into their model optimization frameworks. The approaches are evaluated on microarray and by simulation. We compare the performance of these approaches with six other variable selection techniques-three are generally used for censored data and the other three are correlation-based greedy methods used for high-dimensional data.