The representation of future generations in newspaper coverage of climate change: A study of the UK press

Climate change will rob future generations—today's children and those yet to be born—of the stable climate that previous generations have enjoyed. The article explores how future generations are represented in climate change coverage in the UK national press. We examine the ‘popular’ (Mail, Mirror) and ‘quality’ (Guardian, Telegraph) press from 2010 to March 2019. We found that little attention was given to future generations; young people rarely spoke and, along with those yet to be born, were represented in ways that obscured the temporal and social inequalities that are built into climate change.     

Nudge or nuzzle? Improving decisions about active citizenship

In recent years ‘nudge’ has come into fashion as a form of policy intervention, under the inspiration of behavioural economics. It has encouraged policy analysts to move away from models of the ‘rational actor’ and instead to start from consumers, clients and citizens as they actually are. Nevertheless, nudge raises larger questions about public policy and the relationship between government and the citizen. This paper takes critical stock of nudge, offers an alternative in terms of ‘nuzzle’ and lays out the very different standpoint on policy to which this points. In doing so, it also puts in question the disciplinary paradigms which underpin ‘nudge’ in the scientific literature, and their underplaying of the social and institutional context of individual behaviour. It offers a perspective on public policy as providing security and supporting creativity: with government under critical scrutiny by citizens, rather than vice versa.     

Distribution-Free Exceedance CUSUM Control Charts for Location

Distribution-free (nonparametric) control charts can be useful to the quality practitioner when the underlying distribution is not known. A Phase II nonparametric cumulative sum (CUSUM) chart based on the exceedance statistics, called the exceedance CUSUM chart, is proposed here for detecting a shift in the unknown location parameter of a continuous distribution. The exceedance statistics can be more efficient than rank-based methods when the underlying distribution is heavy-tailed and/or right-skewed, which may be the case in some applications, particularly with certain lifetime data. Moreover, exceedance statistics can save testing time and resources as they can be applied as soon as a certain order statistic of the reference sample is available. Guidelines and recommendations are provided for the chart's design parameters along with an illustrative example. The in- and out-of-control performances of the chart are studied through extensive simulations on the basis of the average run-length (ARL), the standard deviation of run-length (SDRL), the median run-length (MDRL), and some percentiles of run-length. Further, a comparison with a number of existing control charts, including the parametric CUSUM chart and a recent nonparametric CUSUM chart based on the Wilcoxon rank-sum statistic, called the rank-sum CUSUM chart, is made. It is seen that the exceedance CUSUM chart performs well in many cases and thus can be a useful alternative chart in practice. A summary and some concluding remarks are given.     

A Phase I nonparametric Shewhart-type control chart based on the median

A nonparametric Shewhart-type control chart is proposed for monitoring the location of a continuous variable in a Phase I process control setting. The chart is based on the pooled median of the available Phase I samples and the charting statistics are the counts (number of observations) in each sample that are less than the pooled median. An exact expression for the false alarm probability (FAP) is given in terms of the multivariate hypergeometric distribution and this is used to provide tables for the control limits for a specified nominal FAP value (of 0.01, 0.05 and 0.10, respectively) and for some values of the sample size (n) and the number of Phase I samples (m). Some approximations are discussed in terms of the univariate hypergeometric and the normal distributions. A simulation study shows that the proposed chart performs as well as, and in some cases better than, an existing Shewhart-type chart based on the normal distribution. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the implementation of the new chart.     

The SDR Aid Link: It's Now or Never

The international community, in the form of the United Nations and, more recently, the G20, has committed itself to the Millennium Development Goals. The global financial crisis of 2008/9 served to increase the economic problems faced by low‐income countries, making it much less likely that the goals will be attained. At the same time, the decision has been made to reactivate the SDR scheme by making a new allocation of SDRs in order to create additional international liquidity. This article explores the idea of linking SDR creation with the provision of development assistance. Although the idea of a link is not original, contemporary global economic and political circumstances may generate an environment particularly conducive to the acceptance of the proposal.     

Intensive training in youth sport: an example of unequal opportunity

The social composition of an unselected sample of 282 English children and adolescents aged eight to 16 years involved in intensive training in four sports, football, swimming, tennis and gymnastics, was investigated. Working class children and children from lone parent families were under-represented in all sports. The costs of participation in intensive training were determined, and it was concluded that financial considerations as well as difficulties of access to training facilities were major deterrents to participation by disadvantaged children. Over a period of a two year follow up, working class children were more likely to withdraw from intensive training than middle class children. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Maintaining the Gains: What Worked in the Year after Brief Family Therapy

Brief family therapy, including single session therapy, is widely used to provide a timely and responsive service for children with emotional and behavioural problems. However, there is surprisingly little information about how these children and families fare in the longer term. The brief family therapy program described here was directed toward children with problems of moderate severity. Child Behaviour Checklists (CBCL) were completed by parents before, three months after, and twelve months after therapy; 110 parents also participated in semi‐structured telephone interviews twelve months after therapy. Parents' CBCL ratings showed a significant decrease in children's problems after therapy, which were maintained over the subsequent year, although some children continued to experience difficulties. Parents generally found brief therapy a helpful experience. Ways to strengthen the preventive possibilities of brief therapy work will be identified at both a practical and conceptual level.