Social work and sustainable rural development: The practice of social economy in China

The impact of globalisation on local agriculture and food systems has brought issues such as food security and rural sustainability to the forefront of policy‐making in developing countries. In China, the restructuring of domestic agriculture and liberalisation of trade following accession to the World Trade Organization have led to the growing reliance on imported food and raised concerns for food self‐sufficiency and safety. Inspired by the concept of social economy, social workers in China have explored alternative pathways towards sustainable food production and consumption through local initiatives. Based on participatory action research in a Chinese village, this study examines the potential contribution of social work intervention in responding to China’s agrarian challenges. It is shown that by linking rural cooperatives with the local food system and allowing farmers to sell directly to urban consumers at fairer prices, social economy initiatives provide a viable pathway for sustainable transformation by empowering rural producers while giving urban consumers access to sustainably produced food.     

He,she, it: gender bias in teacher–student interaction at university

Starting from an intercultural education framework, this paper examines whether students at two Zagreb universities perceive interactions with their teachers to be gender influenced. In the first part of the paper, we outline the context of the research and the two theoretical constructs which correspond to traditionally male and female teachers’ performances at university. In the second part of the paper, we present the results of the survey we conducted. The results show that the students recognized some aspects of gender bias in interaction with their teachers and that gendered cultures reflected in the dominantly female or male teachers’ performances were indeed present at the universities included in the survey.     

论环境友好型社会视域下的生态政治及其优化

分析了当前我国生态环境问题的现状及面临的压力;提出了生态政治是解决生态危机和促进环境友好的必然选择,是优化生态政治及建构环境友好型社会的根本途径。     

Unique decomposition of low-order time series

ABSTRACT

We give necessary and sufficient conditions on the parameters of processes ARMA(1, 1) and ARMA(2, 1) for representation of each as unique sums of independent simpler ARMA processes, including deduction from the sum process of the innovation variances of these summands. This work on inversion is motivated by examples in the article of Granger and Morris (1976 Granger, C.W.J., Morris, M.J. (1976). Time series modelling and interpretation. J. Roy. Statist. Soc., Ser. A 139:246–257.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and by our earlier article (Ku and Seneta, 1998 Ku, S., Seneta, E. (1998). Practical estimation from the sum of AR(1) processes. Commun. Statist. Simul. Computat. 27:981–998.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), to which the present article is a self-contained sequel. The theory is illustrated by the analysis of tree ring data.     

Optimal progressive group censoring scheme under cost considerations for pareto distribution

In this article, optimal design under the restriction of pre-determined budget of experiment is developed for the Pareto distribution when the life test is progressively group censored. We use the maximum-likelihood method to obtain the point estimator of the Pareto parameter. We propose two approaches to decide the number of test units, the number of inspections, and the length of inspection interval under limited budget such that the asymptotic variance of estimator of Pareto parameter is minimum. A numerical example is given to illustrate the proposed method. Some sensitivity analysis is also studied.