Using the lessons learned from US and English law to create a regulatory framework for charities in evolving democracies

The evolving democracies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR republics are keenly interested in establishing charities. They have little law on this issue because their former governments did not encourage the development of charities. This article compares US and English regulation of charities and proposes a regulatory framework based on what the authors believe are the best attributes of both. Although the framework is based on the common law system, it can be adapted to the civil law systems of the Eastern European nations and the former USSR republics. The article includes such issues as developing a body of law, tax relief and creating a regulatory agency.Mr Hopkins is a lawyer with Powers, Pyles & Sutter, 1275 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20007, and author ofThe Law of Tax-Exempt Organizations (1992a).Ms Moore is also a lawyer, 5908 N. 35th St., Arlington, Virginia 22207.The authors would like to thank Mssrs Kersi Shroff and Stephen F. Clarke, Senior Legal Specialists, American-British Law Division, Library of Congress, and Mr. William H. Morris, an attorney at Steptoe & Johnson, Washington, D.C., for their kind assistance during the researching of this article.     

Policy and practice for response to foster families when child abuse or neglect is reported.

For reasons discussed in this article, it is in the nature of family foster care that allegations of abuse and/or neglect in foster homes will arise. How an agency acts before, during, and after these eventualities has long-lasting implications for the well-being of foster children and of foster parents and their own children, as well as for foster home recruitment.     

Community involvement in land regularization for informal settlements in Tanzania: A strategy for enhancing security of tenure in residential neighborhoods

This paper documents and analyzes how landholders managed to uplift status of their neighborhood from hazard land as designated by the 1978 master plan to a regularized residential settlement through land regularization in Dar es Salaam city. Specifically, explores policy framework governing land regularization and how the local community explored the opportunities it offers. Documents the local community planning and land regularization processes undertaken focusing on land use planning, drainage construction, and cadastral survey and discuses how financial resources were raised, trust was built as well as factors which sustained community involvement towards meeting their interests of securing tenure. The paper also, draws challenges facing land regularization policy and recommends areas for further interventions commensurate with the human dimension challenges in securing tenure.Underlying community involvement, those aspects of community, which have been connected to the idea of social capital namely existence of committed leadership in land development matters, embracing mechanism for participatory decision making process and educational background to local leaders were particularly important in determining success for the case. Others include economic ability to contribute, high proportion of landholder settlers, land conflict task force formulation, local consensus to solve commonly felt problems, existence of strong community organization, and unwritten norms put in place to regulate individual behavior in building construction. Weak legal recognition of informal settlement, lengthy and bureaucratic procedures in planning and approval of regularization plans, weak knowledge on land management matters, short-term title deeds with low financial betterments, political popularity are identified critical challenges.Some of recommendations put forward include formalization of the grass-roots role in decision-making, decentralizing some of land development control functions to sub-ward leaders and training the same in basic land management matters. Others include definition of norms; by-laws and government facilitation of informal land parceling. Besides community support should be sought so as to create partnership in the promotion of security of tenure in informal areas. The study concludes that, unless land development activities ongoing in informal settlements are closely monitored and regulated as the settlement grow, it will be too costly socially and economically to retrofit once the settlement have identified.     

Determinants and Consequences of Social Trust*

This article provides an overview of social trust, examining its various aspects and components. Trust is best understood in a sociological sense by focusing on its important relational characteristic. Following this lead, the article discusses briefly how social trust relates to social capital and examines factors that shape the development of social trust, along with outcomes related to variations in trust, classifying them by analytical level (i.e., individual, community, group, organizational, and societal). The article concludes by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing research and by identifying some important questions that have not yet been adequately addressed.     

Low dose risk estimation via simultaneous statistical inferences

Summary.  The paper develops and studies simultaneous confidence bounds that are useful for making low dose inferences in quantitative risk analysis. Application is intended for risk assessment studies where human, animal or ecological data are used to set safe low dose levels of a toxic agent, but where study information is limited to high dose levels of the agent. Methods are derived for estimating simultaneous, one-sided, upper confidence limits on risk for end points measured on a continuous scale. From the simultaneous confidence bounds, lower confidence limits on the dose that is associated with a particular risk (often referred to as a bench-mark dose ) are calculated. An important feature of the simultaneous construction is that any inferences that are based on inverting the simultaneous confidence bounds apply automatically to inverse bounds on the bench-mark dose.     

The current state of the labor queue: National and regional Evidence

We employ vector autoregressive techniques to determine the current state of the labor queue. Unemployment rate differentials have narrowed in recent years, potentially due to a change in the queue ordering, though a tight labor market and a stable queue would yield similar results. We find no evidence that the queue ordering has changed, which brings into question the resiliency of gains made by minority groups. We employ the same techniques to reveal the state of the queue across geographic regions and find that substantial differences exist across regions, implying variation in the relative labor force status of demographic groups.     

土木工程类复合型执业人才培养的研究与实践

根据复合型执业人才培养模式的要求,对土木工程专业理论课程教学内容进行合并、增删、优化组合;在实践教学环节方面,安排大四学生在施工现场实践近1年,由项目经理、工程监理和发包方驻地工程师进行综合指导。理论与实践紧密结合的复合型执业人才培养的改革实践获得了极好的效果。     

Generalized additive models for location, scale and shape

Summary.  A general class of statistical models for a univariate response variable is presented which we call the generalized additive model for location, scale and shape (GAMLSS). The model assumes independent observations of the response variable y given the parameters, the explanatory variables and the values of the random effects. The distribution for the response variable in the GAMLSS can be selected from a very general family of distributions including highly skew or kurtotic continuous and discrete distributions. The systematic part of the model is expanded to allow modelling not only of the mean (or location) but also of the other parameters of the distribution of y , as parametric and/or additive nonparametric (smooth) functions of explanatory variables and/or random-effects terms. Maximum (penalized) likelihood estimation is used to fit the (non)parametric models. A Newton–Raphson or Fisher scoring algorithm is used to maximize the (penalized) likelihood. The additive terms in the model are fitted by using a backfitting algorithm. Censored data are easily incorporated into the framework. Five data sets from different fields of application are analysed to emphasize the generality of the GAMLSS class of models.