Early warning CUSUM plans for surveillance of negative binomial daily disease counts

Automated public health surveillance of disease counts for rapid outbreak, epidemic or bioterrorism detection using conventional control chart methods can be hampered by over-dispersion and background (‘in-control’) mean counts that vary over time. An adaptive cumulative sum (CUSUM) plan is developed for signalling unusually high incidence in prospectively monitored time series of over-dispersed daily disease counts with a non-homogeneous mean. Negative binomial transitional regression is used to prospectively model background counts and provide ‘one-step-ahead’ forecasts of the next day's count. A CUSUM plan then accumulates departures of observed counts from an offset (reference value) that is dynamically updated using the modelled forecasts. The CUSUM signals whenever the accumulated departures exceed a threshold. The amount of memory of past observations retained by the CUSUM plan is determined by the offset value; a smaller offset retains more memory and is efficient at detecting smaller shifts. Our approach optimises early outbreak detection by dynamically adjusting the offset value. We demonstrate the practical application of the ‘optimal’ CUSUM plans to daily counts of laboratory-notified influenza and Ross River virus diagnoses, with particular emphasis on the steady-state situation (i.e. changes that occur after the CUSUM statistic has run through several in-control counts).     

Practitioners' Documentation of Assessment and Care Planning in Social Care: The Opportunities for Organizational Learning

This paper analyses practitioners’ documentation of socialcare assessments and care plans for disabled adults of workingage. The data were collected in the course of an innovativeproject that introduced new outcome-focused documentation intoroutine social care assessment, care management and review processes.The project aimed to encourage practitioners to focus duringthese processes on the full range of outcomes that individualdisabled adults might seek to achieve; and identify the appropriateservices for realizing those outcomes. Analysis of the new documentationprovides insights into the diverse range of priorities and outcomesthat service users aspire to achieve as a result of receivingservices, and the service inputs that were agreed between practitionersand service users. However, despite the new documentation, themajority of both outcomes and services that were recorded tendedto cluster around a fairly narrow range of conventional socialcare service functions. Moreover, the emphasis of both outcomesand service inputs differed between different groups of socialcare professionals. In the context of current policies to makesocial care services more individualized and outcome-focused,each of these findings has major organizational implications.The opportunities for using routine practitioner documentationto identify areas of organizational and professional changeand learning are discussed.     

Everyday incivility: towards a benchmark

Commonplace incivility is a topic of longstanding interest within social theory, perhaps best exemplified by Goffman's studies of the interaction order. Nevertheless we know very little about its distribution and expression in everyday life. Current empirical work is dominated by criminological agendas. These tend to focus on more serious and illegal activities rather than minor deviant acts that are simply inconsiderate or rude. The paper reports findings from a focus group study conducted in Melbourne, Australia that set out to benchmark everyday incivilities. The results suggest that perpetrators of incivility have a surprisingly broad social distribution as does the range of locales that might be characterised as ‘high risk’. Turning to the work of Putnam and Wolfe, we call for a research focus on low‐level incivilities as key symptoms of the state of civic virtue and the strength of moral ties within civil society. Drawing on Virilio, Bauman and Durkheim, it is suggested that the experience of incivility is underpinned by the growth of freedom and movement in contemporary urban settings, and has ambivalent implications that not only invoke boundary maintenance and retreatism, but also offer the possibility for boundary expansion and tolerance of difference.     

Control variates and importance sampling for efficient bootstrap simulations

Importance sampling and control variates have been used as variance reduction techniques for estimating bootstrap tail quantiles and moments, respectively. We adapt each method to apply to both quantiles and moments, and combine the methods to obtain variance reductions by factors from 4 to 30 in simulation examples.We use two innovations in control variates—interpreting control variates as a re-weighting method, and the implementation of control variates using the saddlepoint; the combination requires only the linear saddlepoint but applies to general statistics, and produces estimates with accuracy of order n ^-1/2 B ^-1, where n is the sample size and B is the bootstrap sample size.We discuss two modifications to classical importance sampling—a weighted average estimate and a mixture design distribution. These modifications make importance sampling robust and allow moments to be estimated from the same bootstrap simulation used to estimate quantiles.     

Choosing Buddhism in Australia: towards a traditional style of reflexive spiritual engagement

There has been little dedicated sociological research on the appeal Buddhism holds for many individuals in the West. It is suggested that this absence reflects a current tendency within the discipline to highlight a new age approach to spiritual involvement and to overlook other optional styles of engagement. Such a pattern of study is concerning because the propensity to privilege the new age style would seem to be less an outcome of a coherent research agenda than a result of the currency that the idea of postmodern religion has come to assume in theoretical accounts of spiritual transformation in contemporary societies. Using data from a modest quantitative survey, the study investigates spiritual style among a sample of Australians who have developed an interest in Buddhist practice and belief. The results point to the prevalence of a traditional approach to involvement, whereby the individual decides to engage solely with Buddhism for the long duration. Given its possession of these qualities, the research goes on to examine the social patterning of spiritual commitment. The findings suggest that comprehending the social restrictions to any kind of involvement is a more pressing sociological question than explaining social divergences among the engaged.     

The Royal Commission,ATSIC and Self-Determination: A Review of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

The National Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, in recommending fundamental reforms of government policy, proposed a primarily political and administrative notion of Aboriginal empowerment or ‘self-determination’. That is, the Commissioner argued the fundamental importance of publicly-funded Aboriginal organisations and urged governments to relax financial accountability requirements imposed on them. The paper quotes extensively from the National Report to argue that this, rather than ‘land rights’ or ‘economic independence’ is what the Commissioner meant by ‘self-determination’. But what is the place of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) in such a view of Aboriginal and Islander political development? The paper demonstrates the Commissioner's ambivalence about ATSIC, and his failure consistently to project ATSIC's role when making his recommendations about health, alcohol and housing policies. It concludes by citing Commonwealth responses which indicate that ATSIC is likely to emerge as an obstacle in the Commissioner's scenario of Aboriginal and Islander political development.     

A Study of French-English Relations in an Ontario Community: Towards a Conflict Model for the Analysis of Ethnic Relations*

En s'appuyant sur les écrits de Ralf Dahrendorf et de Lewis Coser, l'auteur voudrait créer un modèle analytique du conflit qui serait applicable à l'étude des relations ethniques. Le modèle en question s'établit à partir de données dont la cueillette se poursuit dans une commune ontarienne qui compte des Canadiens d'expression française et d'expression anglaise. L'auteur considère le conflit comme une composante structurelle, un résultat inévitable, de la division du pouvoir et du statut II propose des hypothéses au sujet des variations des manifestations conflictuell. es. II suggère son modéle comme une alternative à l'approche de l'étude des relations ethniques d'après la théorie dite cyclique des relations raciales.