Walking: A Gender Issue?

Gender has been neglected in models of the social determinants of health. We use walking as a case study to demonstrate how gender might be incorporated into multilevel social determinants of health frameworks to investigate health behaviours. We found that while men and women had some similar individual (e.g. confidence in doing regular physical activity) and environmental (e.g. presence of destinations) predictors of walking there were also gender differences in the associations found at both of these levels. For example, low levels of education were only associated with men's walking time while having people in the household who made walking easy or hard was only associated with women's walking time. Likewise, having a variety of places to walk to was important for women's walking but not men's. These results indicate that both universal and gender‐specific approaches to health education, health promotion and planning might be needed to improve walking levels.     

An adaptive empirical Bayesian thresholding procedure for analysing microarray experiments with replication

Summary.  A typical microarray experiment attempts to ascertain which genes display differential expression in different samples. We model the data by using a two-component mixture model and develop an empirical Bayesian thresholding procedure, which was originally introduced for thresholding wavelet coefficients, as an alternative to the existing methods for determining differential expression across thousands of genes. The method is built on sound theoretical properties and has easy computer implementation in the R statistical package. Furthermore, we consider improvements to the standard empirical Bayesian procedure when replication is present, to increase the robustness and reliability of the method. We provide an introduction to microarrays for those who are unfamilar with the field and the proposed procedure is demonstrated with applications to two-channel complementary DNA microarray experiments.     

A meta-analytic review of leadership impact research: Experimental and quasi-experimental studies

In this study we set out to conduct a comprehensive quantitative research analysis of literature reporting results on the causal impact of leadership by focusing on examining what we refer to as ‘leadership interventions.’ We defined leadership interventions as those studies where the researcher overtly manipulated leadership as the independent variable through training, assignment, scenario or other means. Our focus included both examining experimental and quasi-experimental as well as lab and field studies conducted in public and private organizations. Our goal was to address a simple question: do leadership interventions have the intended impact and if so to what degree? We conducted a comprehensive review of the published and unpublished literature and uncovered 200 lab and field studies that met our criterion as leadership intervention studies. We report here the findings of a series of meta-analyzed effects comparing the relative impact of leadership interventions across intervention types, leadership theories, and several common dependent variables. Overall, leadership interventions produced a 66% probability of achieving a positive outcome versus a 50–50 random effect for treatment participants, but this effect varied significantly when assessing moderators such as type of leadership theory.     

Ecological Risk Assessment Framework for Low-Altitude Aircraft Overflights: I. Planning the Analysis and Estimating Exposure

An ecological risk assessment framework for low-altitude aircraft overflights was developed, with special emphasis on military applications. The problem formulation and exposure analysis phases are presented in this article; an analysis of effects and risk characterization is presented in a companion article. The intent of this article is threefold: (1) to illustrate the development of a generic framework for the ecological risk assessment of an activity, (2) to show how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ecological risk assessment paradigm can be applied to an activity other than the release of a chemical, and (3) to provide guidance for the assessment of ecological risks from low-altitude aircraft overflights. The key stressor for low-altitude aircraft overflights is usually sound, although visual and physical (collision) stressors may also be significant. Susceptible and regulated wildlife populations are the major assessment endpoint entities, although plant communities may be impacted by takeoffs and landings. The exposure analysis utilizes measurements of wildlife locations, measurements of sound levels at the wildlife locations, measurements of slant distances from aircraft to wildlife, models that extrapolate sound from the source aircraft to the ground, and bird-strike probability models. Some of the challenges to conducting a risk assessment for aircraft overflights include prioritizing potential stressors and endpoints, choosing exposure metrics that relate to wildlife responses, obtaining good estimates of sound or distance, and estimating wildlife locations.     

Gender Inequality and Economic Growth in Rural China

This article joins the debate over the effect of market-driven economic development on women's work opportunities and household gender inequalities. It assesses women's opportunities for off-farm employment, the relative contributions of female off-farm workers to household income, and the distribution of power in families whose male members have left for off-farm jobs, leaving women behind in agricultural work. We find that women are not uniformly excluded from opportunities for off-farm employment and that economic development does not uniformly increase gender inequalities within Chinese households. Although men are more likely than women to obtain off-farm employment in China, women's opportunities for off-farm work improve significantly when the coexistence of local and regional marketization creates a shortage of male workers and compels employers to hire women. The relative size of contributions to household income for male and female nonfarm workers also narrows incrementally with increased marketization. In addition, women who are left in agricultural work are more likely to become heads of household, a position which brings greater household decision-making power to female family members.     

Regenerating the Inner City: Lessons from the UK's City Challenge Experience

This paper uses the findings of the evaluation of Stratford City Challenge (SCC) to critically examine the effectiveness of the City Challenge policy and to question the extent to which it was an innovation in urban policy, with lessons which have been incorporated into subsequent policies. It examines the particular characteristics of the policy which contributed to its innovative status, many of which have been incorporated into policies such as New Deal and the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB). What local evaluations such as the one which has been carried out in Stratford suggest is that many of these distinctive characteristics actually constrained the capacity of local programmes to be effective and achieve their aims, as to some extent they dictated the types of projects most likely to succeed. The author suggests that there are lessons which could be drawn from the City Challenge experience, but that many of these were overlooked or not fully considered by policy makers when they introduced subsequent policies such as the SRB and New Deal. Thus these policies may encounter similar problems in achieving their aims, and an opportunity to learn from these evaluations and build on past experiences has not been fully maximized. This paper uses SCC as a case study to draw out some of the wider implications of the experience for national policy.     

Making the Perfect Queen: The Cultural Production of Identities in Beauty Pageants

Beauty queens are symbolic representations of collective cultural indentities and beauty pageants are fields of active 'cultural production'. This article surveys the growing literature on beauty pageants to better understand how culture is produced within the contexts of pageants. To do so, the article examines how beauty pageants operate as sites of commodification and consumption in a world increasingly influenced by global markets and media institutions. It also illustrates how culture is produced in beauty pageants by examining beauty pageants as sites of oppression, sites to articulate cultural agency, and sites of ethnic, gender, cultural, and sexual identity production.