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.     

Breakdown of teenage placements in Danish out‐of‐home care

This study deals with the problem of breakdown in out‐of‐home placements for Danish teenagers. How often are these placements prematurely terminated against the requests and intentions of the child welfare authorities? Which factors seem to increase and decrease placement breakdown? The sample consists of 225 youths and 367 placements during the years 2004–2008. Among the 225 youths, 44% experienced a breakdown, and 33% of the 367 placements ended with a breakdown. A large proportion of the placement breakdowns (20%) occurred before 4 months, and within the first year, 62% of the placement breakdowns had taken place. Replacements took place in 61% of all placement breakdowns. The analysis showed that type of placement and number of youth at the same placement had significant association to placement breakdown, but variables based on the social worker's clinical assessment showed no association to breakdown. However, while the logistic regression model was significant, it explained only 6% of the variance. Earlier studies have indicated that breakdown is a substantial problem of child welfare in several other western countries, Denmark is no exception. These corresponding breakdown rates point out that no child welfare system yet have found a method to reduce breakdown substantially.     

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.     

Are transformational and laissez-faire leadership related to state anxiety among subordinates? A two-wave prospective study of forward and reverse associations

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to determine the direction of associations between perceived leadership styles of an immediate leader and state anxiety among subordinates using time-lagged data from a large and heterogeneous probability sample of Norwegian employees. It was hypothesised that high levels of transformational leadership would be associated with a decrease, whereas high levels of laissez-faire leadership would be associated with an increase, in subsequent levels of anxiety. Reciprocal associations were also expected in that higher levels of anxiety were hypothesised to be related to subsequent increase in reports of laissez-faire, and decrease in reported exposure to transformational leadership. The sample comprised 1149 Norwegian employees. The design was a two-wave full panel study with a six-month time interval between the baseline and follow-up assessments. Contrary to hypotheses, neither transformational nor laissez-faire leadership were significantly related to subsequent levels of state anxiety. In support of hypotheses, baseline low levels of state anxiety were associated with reporting the immediate leader as less transformational and more laissez-faire six months later. In conclusion, the findings challenge theoretical models that explain leadership as a one-way superior–subordinate influence process.     

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.     

Bootstrap Confidence Intervals for Large-scale Multivariate Monotonic Regression Problems

Recently, the methods used to estimate monotonic regression (MR) models have been substantially improved, and some algorithms can now produce high-accuracy monotonic fits to multivariate datasets containing over a million observations. Nevertheless, the computational burden can be prohibitively large for resampling techniques in which numerous datasets are processed independently of each other. Here, we present efficient algorithms for estimation of confidence limits in large-scale settings that take into account the similarity of the bootstrap or jackknifed datasets to which MR models are fitted. In addition, we introduce modifications that substantially improve the accuracy of MR solutions for binary response variables. The performance of our algorithms is illustrated using data on death in coronary heart disease for a large population. This example also illustrates that MR can be a valuable complement to logistic regression.     

Asymptotic Inference for Waiting Times and Patiences in Queues with Abandonment

Motivated by applications in call center management, we propose a framework based on empirical process techniques for inference about waiting time and patience distributions in multiserver queues with abandonment. The framework rigorises heuristics based on survival analysis of independent and identically distributed observations by allowing correlated waiting times. Assuming a regenerative structure of offered waiting times, we establish asymptotic properties of estimators of limiting distribution functions and derived functionals. We discuss construction of bootstrap confidence intervals and statistical tests, including a simple bootstrap two-sample test for comparing patience distributions. A small simulation study and a real data example are presented.     

Quantification of symmetry for functional data with application to equine lameness classification

This paper presents a study on symmetry of repeated bi-phased data signals, in particular, on quantification of the deviation between the two parts of the signal. Three symmetry scores are defined using functional data techniques such as smoothing and registration. One score is related to the L ₂-distance between the two parts of the signal, whereas the other two are constructed to specifically measure differences in amplitude and phase. Moreover, symmetry scores based on functional principal component analysis (PCA) are examined. The scores are applied to acceleration signals from a study on equine gait. The scores turn out to be highly associated with lameness, and their applicability for lameness quantification and detection is investigated. Four classification approaches turn out to give similar results. The scores describing amplitude and phase variation turn out to outperform the PCA scores when it comes to the classification of lameness.