Does CERN procurement result in innovation?

Innovation is stated to be one of the most powerful engines for economic growth in firms, markets and nations today. It is therefore not surprising that policy-makers would like to see innovations as a benefit of publicly spent money; making innovations an additional aim of public procurement (public procurement for innovation). The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of a science organization's procurement practices on innovation. The intention is also to show how different and contradicting goals and expectations regarding public procurement are described and acted upon by the science organization and its suppliers, and to what extent the outcome of public procurement is innovation. Empirically, the study addresses how the European Organization for Nuclear Research, i.e. CERN, works with procurement; and how their procurement in turn affects CERN's suppliers. Based on a large case study in which more than 100 interviews were conducted over a time period of 8 years, the study contributes to the understanding of the limitations CERN’s procurement rules put on interaction and on innovation. The understanding of the implications of restricting interaction, but also the understanding of the reasons why these rules are put into place, and the dilemmas that follow, are all important contributions.     

人口外流对韶关经济发展的影响

改革开放后,韶关的经济发展与全省尤其是珠三角的差距逐渐扩大,由此带动韶关山20世纪90年代初的人口净流入地区转变为21世纪初的人口净流出地区。本文利用“五普”资料,深入分析了韶关人口外流的现状特点成因、发展趋势及对经济发展的影响,并就政府应如何合理组织好人口流动,特别是如何制定行之有效的政策措施留住人才提出了对策建议。     

Educational attainments of former child welfare clients – a Swedish national cohort study

We used national register data for nearly 800,000 Swedish-born young people in eight national birth cohorts to examine educational attainments of former child welfare clients. A total of 31,355 former child welfare clients were compared with 744,425 majority population peers. Logistic regression models were used to estimate risks of having only a basic education at time of follow-up, and of chances of having a post-secondary education. Odds ratios for core results were recalculated into relative risks.
Compared with majority population peers with low educated mothers, children who experienced interventions before ado-lescence, or had been in long-term stable foster care, had a two- to threefold elevated relative risk of entering adult life with only a compulsory education. Youths who experienced intervention during adolescence had approximately a fourfold risk of having only basic education at the time of follow-up. Majority population peers with low educated mothers were between two and six times more likely to have a post-secondary degree when compared with former child welfare clients.     

Uniformity of Node Level Conflict Measures in Bayesian Hierarchical Models Based on Directed Acyclic Graphs

Hierarchical models defined by means of directed, acyclic graphs are a powerful and widely used tool for Bayesian analysis of problems of varying degrees of complexity. A simulation‐based method for model criticism in such models has been suggested by O'Hagan in the form of a conflict measure based on contrasting separate local information sources about each node in the graph. This measure is however not well calibrated. In order to rectify this, alternative mutually similar tail probability‐based measures have been proposed independently and have been proved to be uniformly distributed under the assumed model in quite general normal models with known covariance matrices. In the present paper, we extend this result to a variety of models. An advantage of this is that computationally costly pre‐calibration schemes needed for some other suggested methods can be avoided. Another advantage is that non‐informative prior distributions can be used when performing model criticism.     

Thinking critically about cross-cultural implementation—Swedish social workers’ experiences of testing the Kids’ Club method for helping child and mother victims of intimate partner violence

There are calls for evidence-based methods for helping children to deal with experiences of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in many countries. Therefore, it has been commonplace to implement such methods from outside of their home country. The aim of this study is to examine Swedish social workers’ experiences of testing the American Kids’ Club method for child and mother victims of IPV. After having tested leading Kids’ Club groups, seventeen social workers at four different locations were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. The results indicate that the social workers generally accepted the method. This was related both to some general features of the method and to their perceiving it as somewhat flexible. According to the social workers, the method needs some cultural adaptation to better suit the Swedish social services setting, otherwise it cannot be fully accepted. Finally, they thought that successful implementation depended on an organizational structure that enabled enough children to be referred to the programme as well as either high personal commitment or an organization that prioritized the method. Based on these results, we conclude that importing an American evidence-based group method to help children exposed to IPV to Sweden demands attention to issues of cultural adaption.     

Simultaneous Credible Bands for Latent Gaussian Models

Abstract. Deterministic Bayesian inference for latent Gaussian models has recently become available using integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA). Applying the INLA‐methodology, marginal estimates for elements of the latent field can be computed efficiently, providing relevant summary statistics like posterior means, variances and pointwise credible intervals. In this article, we extend the use of INLA to joint inference and present an algorithm to derive analytical simultaneous credible bands for subsets of the latent field. The algorithm is based on approximating the joint distribution of the subsets by multivariate Gaussian mixtures. Additionally, we present a saddlepoint approximation to compute Bayesian contour probabilities, representing the posterior support of fixed parameter vectors of interest. We perform a simulation study and apply the given methods to two real examples.     

反思型教师与教师教育运动初探

80年代以来发轫于北美大陆的反思型教师与教师教育运动 ,可以看作是对技术型教师观和胜任为本的教师教育模式的一种反动。思想渊源于杜威的反思型教师与教师教育运动 ,之所以能够在 80年代兴起于北美大陆并迅速扩展到世界 ,与教育改革广泛而深入的展开、教师专业化运动的演进、认知心理学的勃兴和教师思维研究运动的兴起与发展 ,以及行动研究运动的前期工作等都有很大的关系。反思型教师与教师教育符合世界教师教育发展的潮流 ,符合我们培养创新人才的要求 ,有助于解决教育研究与教育实践脱节的老大难问题 ,因而值得我们进行研究     

The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings: Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project

Modern society has been called “a society of organizations,” and meetings are considered indispensable. However, a recurring cultural theme in contemporary working life is complaints about excessive and time-consuming meetings. The present article analyzes a contrasting case concerning a Swedish youth care project that employed a set of “coordinators” to maintain close contact with young people and their parents. Over time, these coordinators adopted an exceedingly administrative approach in which meetings with other professionals became more and more central. This article explores how an expanding meeting culture with strong social commitments can be generated from within interorganizational contexts, such as “projects,” and successfully competes with other concerns. Thus, the administrative orientation represents an example of the type of social interaction process that Simmel discerned as Eigendynamik or autonomous processes of social interaction.     

How critical is the event? Multicultural Norway after 22 July 2011

It is commonly assumed that insecurity experienced by citizens in the wake of a terror attack gives rise to public demands for strong countermeasures, which political leaders must respond to. This article asks how Norwegian society was affected by the 22 July 2011 attacks against the government office complex in Oslo and Labour Party youth camp on Utøya. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses political impact, examining post-22 July public debates and related policymaking. A dataset of newspaper op-eds and commentaries was created to determine the significance of key issues debated in the print media after the attacks, and changes over time in the intensity of debates. Key issues were then followed up in a qualitative analysis of policy implications. The study further investigated the discursive framing of the attacks, and the problems and possible solutions evoked in the debates. Was this a ‘critical event’ as Veena Das has theorised, bringing about new sorts of action through the reworking of traditional categories, codes or meanings? Public security emerges as the key frame within which the 22 July attacks have been debated. Arguments over police reforms and alleged inaction by authorities stand out as the most lasting debate.     

Case history discourse: a rhetoric of troublesome youngsters and faceless treatment

In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a centre for juvenile delinquents in Sweden, we analyse three discursive techniques that accomplish this documentary reality: (1) trouble zooming, (2) mood notes and (3) deflecting staff agency. We also reflect on the social conditions for the recurrent rhetoric.