A central limit theorem for the sample autocorrelations of a Lévy driven continuous time moving average process

In this article we consider Lévy driven continuous time moving average processes observed on a lattice, which are stationary time series. We show asymptotic normality of the sample mean, the sample autocovariances and the sample autocorrelations. A comparison with the classical setting of discrete moving average time series shows that in the last case a correction term should be added to the classical Bartlett formula that yields the asymptotic variance. An application to the asymptotic normality of the estimator of the Hurst exponent of fractional Lévy processes is also deduced from these results.     

E-leadership: Re-examining transformations in leadership source and transmission

At the turn of the century, the first integrative review and conceptualization of the work on e-leadership was published in The Leadership Quarterly. During the late 1990's, with the rapid rise in advanced information technology (AIT) such as the Internet, e-mail, video conferencing, virtual teams, and groupware systems (GDSS), there were a number of authors beginning to examine how AIT would transform how organizations organize their work and the implications for leadership in those organizations. Much of this discussion fell under the broad label of “virtual” with authors at that time speculating how such technology might impact how leadership was practiced and investigated. Now, over a decade later, we re-examine how the theory, research, and practice domains have evolved with respect to the work on e-leadership and its implications for the way leadership functions. In this review, we have broadened the notion of what constitutes e-leadership, considering how AIT affects the leadership dynamic, how the leadership dynamic affects the faithful or unfaithful appropriation of AIT, how AIT can and is being used to develop leadership, and ultimately how each will shape how organizations function well into the future. In sum, we examine what we've learned about e-leadership, what needs to be learned, and what might constitute emerging topics that could drive the e-leadership agenda over the next decade and beyond.     

The Psychological and Health Consequences of Caring for a Spouse With Dementia: A Critical Comparison of Husbands and Wives

Caring for someone with dementia can be demanding, particularly for spouses living with the care recipient. The main goal of this study was to clarify differences in the experience of caregivers who were husbands and wives with respect to burden, health, healthy behaviors, presence of difficult care recipient behaviors, social supports, and the quality of the premorbid relationship. The results of this study support research demonstrating a difference between the caregiving experiences of women and men. It is becoming increasingly apparent that female gender is a marker that places them at increased risk of high burden and less support.     

Exploring the Transferability of Competency-Based Education Model to Social Work Education in Vietnam

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam (hereafter Vietnam) has made extraordinary strides in terms of economic progress during the past two decades. Such rapid economic change has also created many social problems such as poverty, family abuse, substance abuse, HIV/AIDS, and mental health problems. Vietnam has taken steps to develop workforce capacity to ameliorate such challenges by investing in social work educational programs, including participation in an international collaborative initiative, the Social Work Education Enhancement Program (SWEEP). This article describes the procedures and process of the initial stage of the development of a competency-based social work curriculum in Vietnam through SWEEP. More specifically, this paper presents the following collaborative strategies between partners in Vietnam and the SWEEP team in the United States: conducting a needs assessment; providing trainings on competency-based education (CBE) to the partners in Vietnam; and receiving feedback from the partners to grasp the challenges at the early stage of development of CBE in Vietnam. While this article focuses on Vietnam, the SWEEP project can be a reference from which to develop social work education in other countries in regard to global collaboration for development of social work curriculum based on the CBE model.     

Binary Mixtures of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons Display Nonadditive Mixture Interactions in an In Vitro Liver Cell Model

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) have been labeled contaminants of concern due to their carcinogenic potential, insufficient toxicological data, environmental ubiquity, and inconsistencies in the composition of environmental mixtures. The Environmental Protection Agency is reevaluating current methods for assessing the toxicity of PAHs, including the assumption of toxic additivity in mixtures. This study was aimed at testing mixture interactions through in vitro cell culture experimentation, and modeling the toxicity using quantitative structure‐activity relationships (QSAR). Clone‐9 rat liver cells were used to analyze cellular proliferation, viability, and genotoxicity of 15 PAHs in single doses and binary mixtures. Tests revealed that many mixtures have nonadditive toxicity, but display varying mixture effects depending on the mixture composition. Many mixtures displayed antagonism, similar to other published studies. QSARs were then developed using the genetic function approximation algorithm to predict toxic activity both in single PAH congeners and in binary mixtures. Effective concentrations inhibiting 50% of the cell populations were modeled, with R² = 0.90, 0.99, and 0.84, respectively. The QSAR mixture algorithms were then adjusted to account for the observed mixture interactions as well as the mixture composition (ratios) to assess the feasibility of QSARs for mixtures. Based on these results, toxic addition is improbable and therefore environmental PAH mixtures are likely to see nonadditive responses when complex interactions occur between components. Furthermore, QSAR may be a useful tool to help bridge these data gaps surrounding the assessment of human health risks that are associated with PAH exposures.     

The Australian child support reforms: a critical evaluation

The Australian Child Support Scheme aims to ensure that children continue to be supported financially should their parents separate or never live together. Sweeping changes to the Australian Child Support Scheme were introduced between 2006 and 2008, featuring a dramatically different system for the calculation of child support and a more rigorous enforcement regime. The reforms were intended to respond to ongoing concerns about equity, and to changes in social expectations and practices in gender, work, and parenting. In this article we summarise key findings from a large cross‐sequential study of the child support reforms. Although the new formula initially led to lower child support payments, and an increase in the proportion of separated mothers experiencing income disadvantage, payments two years later had increased slightly. More broadly, the new scheme appears to have resulted in little change in separated parents' policy knowledge, parenting arrangements, perceptions of fairness, and child support compliance. Taken together, these findings suggest that Australia may not have made as much progress as it would have liked in this thorny area of social policy – especially in relation to compliance and perceptions of fairness.     

Chemical Scoring by a Rapid Screening of Hazard (RASH) Method

A rapid screening of hazard method (RASH) is presented for deriving relative potency estimates for hazardous substances. The method utilizes data from any available toxicological database such as the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS) or EPA's GENE-TOX database on genetic activity profiles. The method has been applied to derive relative potency values and permissible environmental concentrations for 278 chemicals. The derived values have been compared with recommendations of expert committees where possible, and substantial agreement is found.     

Qualitative sociology in Israel—A brief survey

Conclusion Despite the proliferation of quantitative studies in Israeli sociology, qualitative approaches remain vigorously pursued by a large number of academic sociologists, who address a wide variety of problems by a heterogeneous mix of theoretical approaches, methodologies, and research techniques. While these studies yielded a rich harvest of respectable publications, the majority are not conducted in terms of theories and methodologies which are presently at the forefront of qualitative research in the United States and Europe. This is true even for the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is still the leading exponent of QS in Israel. It is difficult to decide whether some of the currently fashionable approaches, such as French neostructuralism and American ethnomethodology, propose viable programs which will have a major impact on sociology or are just passing fashions. Nevertheless, Israeli sociologistsshould pay more attention to these and similar current developments on the international scene and examine critically the usefulness of these developments for their own research interests and projects.The same is true in the field of application of the new computer technologies to qualitative data. Very few Israeli sociologists have made any serious efforts in the development or application of such technologies in their studies. It is in these areas that greater attention and a possible partial reorientation of QS in Israel will be necessary in the future, if Israeli qualitative sociologists are to keep the place which they currently occupy in the international professional community.