Block designs with block size two

Algorithms are given for the construction of binary block designs with replications and concurrences differing by at most one. The designs are resolvable and/or connected wherever the parameters permit.     

Family Grief and Mental Health: A Systemic,Contextual and Compassionate Analysis

Although not always named, grief is central to the experience of mental illness — for people diagnosed, their families and their friends. Yet grief is almost absent from the literature and practice of mainstream psychiatry. This curious fact led to the writing of this article by two workers and a carer, with editorial and political advice from a consumer, as a small step in the direction of integrating perspectives of workers, carers and consumers. It examines the nature of grief associated with mental illness, its impact on family members, and why mainstream mental health services do not directly address it, with suggestions for some therapeutic ways to conceptualise and work with it.     

Organizational capacity building: addressing a research and practice gap

The purpose of this article is to address the gap between evaluation research, and the practice of capacity building with nonprofits. This study describes a 5-year capacity building initiative with grassroots organizations including a longitudinal evaluation of the implementation and outcomes achieved. Formative processes yielded many lessons that were used to improve the capacity building model of services. The results show that the majority of groups met a priori expectations for participation success. Organizational staff valued technology, consultants, and program funding the most. Increases were found in board membership and perceptions of visibility of the organization were enhanced. Executive directors reported greater awareness of needs and improved management knowledge. These small organizations fill many unmet needs and more capacity building evaluation studies are needed to understand the mechanisms that support their efforts and the impact on their sustainability.     

Crisis in leadership or failure to plan?

During the past ten years, succession planning and managing executive transitions have emerged as important issues in the nonprofit sector. Demographers and economists have speculated for years about the potential effects of the retirement of baby boomers. The time has finally arrived: the oldest of the baby boomers are now eligible for retirement. The question that remains is how this trend will affect the nonprofit sector and the communities they serve. This study examines the issues of turnover and succession planning at the executive level, along with career development among young nonprofit professionals in Charlotte, North Carolina. Not only do the findings suggest that the community may very well see a crisis in leadership, but they also illustrate a growing disconnect between executive leaders and young professionals in nonprofit organizations. In addition to struggling with the realities of working in the nonprofit sector (limited benefits, challenging workloads), most young professionals reported that they felt undervalued by older managers and staff, and very few aspire to the position of executive director. Taken together, these findings have important implications for the local community and the broader nonprofit sector.     

Risk, Mental Disorder and Social Work Practice: A Gendered Landscape

Whilst the importance of gender for social work practice, riskand mental health has been recognized theoretically for sometime, few attempts have been made to explore this area empirically.This paper presents findings from a mixed-methods study of socialwork practice in relation to mental health service users perceivedto be ‘high-risk’. Findings suggest, first, thatthe concept ‘high-risk’ was gendered because theprimary focus in social work practice was on the risks posedby male service users to others. Second, female social workersin the present study were found to have more female serviceusers from their caseloads who had been defined as ‘high-risk’compared with their male counterparts. The paper goes on toexplore this apparent congruence between female social workersand female service users and highlights how the management ofrisk could be considered gendered because it reflects a worker’s(perceived) capacity in cultural terms to ‘decode’the nature of the risks that their clients face as genderedsubjects. The paper demonstrates how the intersections betweenrisk, mental disorder and social work practice can thereforebe understood as a gendered landscape. It concludes by highlightingthe implications of these findings for social work practiceand research.     

Finite Mixture Distributions,Sequential Likelihood and the EM Algorithm

A popular way to account for unobserved heterogeneity is to assume that the data are drawn from a finite mixture distribution. A barrier to using finite mixture models is that parameters that could previously be estimated in stages must now be estimated jointly: using mixture distributions destroys any additive separability of the log‐likelihood function. We show, however, that an extension of the EM algorithm reintroduces additive separability, thus allowing one to estimate parameters sequentially during each maximization step. In establishing this result, we develop a broad class of estimators for mixture models. Returning to the likelihood problem, we show that, relative to full information maximum likelihood, our sequential estimator can generate large computational savings with little loss of efficiency.     

Early weight loss predicts the reduction of obesity in men with erectile dysfunction and hypogonadism undergoing long-term testosterone replacement therapy

We and others have previously shown that testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) results in sustained weight loss in the majority of middle-aged hypogonadal men. Previously, however, a small proportion failed to lose at least 5% of their baseline weight. The reason for this is not yet understood. In the present study, we sought to identify early indicators that may predict successful long-term weight loss, defined as a reduction of at least 5% of total body weight relative to baseline weight (T0), in men with hypogonadism undergoing TRT. Eight parameters measured were assessed as potential predictors of sustained weight loss: loss of 3% or more of baseline weight after 1 year of TU treatment, severe hypogonadism, BMI, waist circumference, International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS), glycated hemoglobin (HbA_1C), age and use of vardenafil. Among the eight measured parameters, three factors were significantly associated with sustained weight loss over the entire period of TU treatment: (1) a loss of 3% of the baseline body weight after 1 year of TRT; (2) baseline BMI over 30; and (3) a waist circumference >102?cm. Age was not a predictor of weight loss.