Predictors of placement stability at the state level: the use of logistic regression to inform practice

Placement instability is often associated with a number of negative outcomes for children. To gain state level contextual knowledge of factors associated with placement stability/ instability, logistic regression was applied to selected variables from the New Mexico Adoption and Foster Care Administrative Reporting System dataset. Predictors identified in the model are consistent with previous research, reliable across time periods, and informative to the understanding of potential risk/protective factors of placement stability/instability specific to the New Mexico child welfare agency.     

Conflicted medical journals and the failure of trust

Journals are failing in their obligation to ensure that research is fairly represented to their readers, and must act decisively to retract fraudulent publications. Recent case reports have exposed how marketing objectives usurped scientific testing and compromised the credibility of academic medicine. But scant attention has been given to the role that journals play in this process, especially when evidence of research fraud fails to elicit corrective measures. Our experience with The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (JAACAP) illustrates the nature of the problem. The now-infamous Study 329 of paroxetine in adolescent depression was negative for efficacy on all eight protocol-specified outcomes and positive for harm, but JAACAP published a report of this study that concluded that "paroxetine is generally well tolerated and effective for major depression in adolescents." The journal's editors not only failed to exercise critical judgment in accepting the article, but when shown evidence that the article misrepresented the science, refused either to convey this information to the medical community or to retract the article.     

Towards Next-Generation Urban Resilience in Planning Practice: From Securitization to Integrated Place Making

Resilience is a concept incorporating a vast range of contemporary risks and over recent years has become increasingly important to our understanding of contemporary planning policy and practice. This paper examines the changing nature of resilience strategies since 2000 and highlights how planners increasingly are asked to contribute to this agenda. Drawing on the emerging theories of urban resilience, this paper charts the emergence of different ‘styles’ of resilience over the last decade in the UK, with an emphasis on a range of policies associated with designing safer spaces. Emerging lessons are then deployed to highlight how a new generation of urban resilience practice is now emerging associated with embedding resiliency into local place-making activities. This paper concludes by reflecting upon the multiple uses of resilience in planning practice.     

Bootstrapping: as easy as 1-2-3

The bootstrap is a powerful non-parametric statistical technique for making probability-based inferences about a population parameter. Through a Monte-Carlo resampling simulation, bootstrapping empirically generates a statistic's entire distribution. From this simulated distribution, inferences can be made about a population parameter. Assumptions about normality are not required. In general, despite its power, bootstrapping has been used relatively infrequently in social science research, and this is particularly true for business research. This under-utilization is likely due to a combination of a general lack of understanding of the bootstrap technique and the difficulty with which it has traditionally been implemented. Researchers in the various fields of business should be familiar with this powerful statistical technique. The purpose of this paper is to explain how this technique works using Lotus 1-2-3, a software package with which business people are very familiar.     

Sex Differences in Mortality at the Local Level: An Analysis of Belgian Municipalities

Explanations for the consistentfemale mortality advantage have ranged from thebiological, through the behavioural to thesocial, but we are still far from asatisfactory explanation. The current mortalityadvantage, which women enjoy in almost allsocieties and age groups, is not a historicaluniversal. Indeed, it may even be a uniquedevelopment of the 20th century. Even ifthis is the case, however, this does not makeit a necessary corollary of low mortality.Human mortality reflects the pattern of socialrelationships, standards of living, livingarrangements, and patterns of power andinequality in the society, and althoughmortality levels are similar for men and forwomen, they nonetheless display importantdifferences. These differences, in their turn,reflect the pattern of relationships betweenmen and women in the society. The presentanalysis looks at mortality levels anddifferences between men and women in Belgium.We focus on aggregate effects at themunicipality level (the smallest level oflocal government), and show that mortality isnegatively associated with high standards ofliving; familial solidarity; immigrantconcentration and a stable, locally born,population. It is positively associated with ahigh tendency to cohabitation. Male mortalityis more sensitive to social conditions than isfemale mortality so that as conditions improvethe female mortality advantage declines. Wealso show that net of these conditions thereremains a mortality disadvantage inWallonia, and this can only partly be explainedin terms of social differences between the twomajor regions of the country.     

Comparison of Temperament and Character Between Early- and Late-Onset Korean Male Pathological Gamblers

Purposes  

We investigated differences in temperament and character between early and late onset Korean pathological gamblers to identify whether the age of onset of pathological gambling (PG) could discriminate PG subtypes, like in alcoholism.     

A method for checking regression models in survival analysis based on the risk score

We propose to perform model check for the Cox and Aalen regression models using martingale residual processes grouped after the risk score. Asymptotic distributions of the grouped martingale residual processes are deduced, so both formal and graphical model check can be performed. The method is validated by stochastic simulation. A data example with patients with primary biliary cirrhosis of the liver is discussed.