“Better safe than sorry”—Reasons for consulting care due to decreased fetal movements

Background

Experience of reduced fetal movements is a common reason for consulting health care in late pregnancy. There is an association between reduced fetal movements and stillbirth.

The suicide of the social sciences: causes and effects

The social sciences have undergone profound changes. The causes of these changes are many, and in this article we discuss the most important ones. First, we discuss the shift to a situation where the American tradition is the norm and European and national traditions are vanishing. Secondly, we discuss the shift from a focus on the empirical context to a pure internal research focus. These and other changes cause dramatic effects for the social sciences. In our article we analyze these effects on the topics, results, methods and values of the social sciences. We especially focus on the career system and the PhD education. Our conclusion is that changes implemented to gain higher quality have instead caused decreasing quality to a point where the social sciences as a whole are at risk.     

Pension design and gender: Analyses of developed and developing countries

In this article the authors examine different ways of organizing and financing pension systems in China, France, Ghana, Jordan, Mexico, Poland, and Sweden. They explore the advantages and disadvantages of the combinations of different features with special reference to gender differences. Men and women have different patterns of work history, with women usually having a lower participation rate in the formal labor market, including interrupted career in response to child rearing, as well as lower wages in general. Women have a longer life expectancy than men and are more likely to become widows than men are to become widowers. These differences influence the financial resources available to women in old age, depending on how a pension system is designed.     

In search of the glass ceiling: gender and recruitment to management in Norway's state bureaucracy1

There are still fewer female than male managers in Norway's state bureaucracy. This article asks if there are organizational barriers which prevent women from entering these positions. Is there really a glass ceiling, or must one look outside the organizational environment to find an explanation? Is it rather the case that the scarcity of female managers is caused by women's own preferences or their life situations outside work? Or do both contribute to the situation? The study shows that female managers are treated just as well as male managers in central parts of the state bureaucracy. Employers give equal shares of respect and attention to both genders. Female managers are encouraged to apply for the same number of jobs as men and are offered an equal number of jobs as men when they apply; in fact, women are offered more jobs than men, when one controls for the number of job applications. This indicates that organizational barriers are not the problem. The study also shows that there are no differences in work orientation between male and female managers. Female managers are just as ambitious as male managers. Nor do female managers find it more difficult than male managers to combine work and family life. So, how can one explain the low number of female managers? The study shows that one reason can be that female managers apply for management jobs less often than their male colleagues. The cause of this seems to be anticipated discrimination rather than lack of ambition or self‐confidence. However, this slows down women's movement into higher management positions in the state bureaucracy.     

Subsidizing “Stayers”? Effects of a Norwegian Child Care Reform on Marital Stability

Since January 1999, all parents in Norway with children aged 1 to 3 years who do not attend publicly subsidized day care are eligible for “cash‐for‐care” (CFC). One important purpose of the reform is to enable parents to spend more time with their children. We analyze whether the CFC reform has affected marital stability, using individual register data covering information on 130,265 observations of married couples. The results from both a natural experiment approach and from a matching procedure indicate that the CFC reform has reduced the likelihood of marital dissolution in the short run.     

From disorganized capitalism to transnational fine tuning?: recent trends in wage development,industrial relations,and ‘work’ as a sociological category

The disorganization thesis concentrates upon globalization and market dynamics, which are believed to trigger the breakdown of any kind of institutional structures. The diversity of capitalism approach, by contrast, places much emphasis on the persistence of distinct paths of national economies. Referring to comparative data from the OECD and other sources it is shown that some variables indicate a robustness of national styles of capitalism. Others hint at resemblance: e.g. there is a striking synchronization of the overall and sectoral wage development, there is a significant decrease in industrial disputes, and the class composition tends to become more similar. A move beyond the disorganization thesis and diversity of capitalism approach is suggested. Special attention should be paid to the profound impacts of transnational institutions and knowledge carriers in the form of experts and guidelines.     

Challenges in Development and Implementation of Health‐Risk‐Based Soil Quality Guidelines: Turkey's Experience

Management of contaminated sites is a critical environmental issue around the world due to the human health risk involved for many sites and scarcity of funding. Moreover, clean‐up costs of all contaminated sites to their background levels with existing engineering technologies may be financially infeasible and demand extended periods of operation time. Given these constraints, to achieve optimal utilization of available funds and prioritization of contaminated sites that need immediate attention, health‐risk‐based soil quality guidelines should be preferred over the traditional soil quality standards. For these reasons, traditional soil quality standards are being replaced by health‐risk‐based ones in many countries and in Turkey as well. The need for health‐risk‐based guidelines is clear, but developing these guidelines and implementation of them in contaminated site management is not a straightforward process. The goal of this study is to highlight the problems that are encountered at various stages of the development process of risk‐based soil quality guidelines for Turkey and how they are dealt with. Utilization of different definitions and methodologies at different countries, existence of inconsistent risk assessment tools, difficulties in accessing relevant documents and reports, and lack of specific data required for Turkey are among these problems. We believe that Turkey's experience may help other countries that are planning to develop health‐risk‐based guidelines achieve their goals in a more efficient manner.     

关于美国马里兰学院大学课程开发模式的思考

马里兰学院大学是全美范围内第一所实现网上教学的院校,正是基于网上教学,马里兰学院大学积累了丰富的课程开发经验,并经过多年的探索形成了一套独具特色的工作模式。本文在对马里兰学院大学的课程开发模式介绍的基础上,提出我们对远程课程建设相关问题的思考。