Estimating carbon storage in urban forests of New York City

Urban Ecosystems - Forests play an important role in mitigating many of the negative effects of climate change. One of the ways trees mitigate impacts of climate change is by absorbing carbon...     

Properties of a class of inequality measures: A proposal for a resistant version

Summary This note explores the robustness properties of a general class of ineqyality measures which includes the Bonferroni and the Gini indexes as special cases and proposes some modifications in order to make them outlier resistant.     

Impact of legislation requiring moped and motorbike riders to wear helmets

In 1992, a package of measures was adopted by the city of Barcelona to obligate riders of motorcycles with a power capacity inferior to 125 cc to use helmets, until then only compulsory for larger motorcycles. Interrupted time series analyses with the use of a control group is used to investigate the effect of these measures on the number of serious injuries and number of deaths. The results indicate a significant decrease in the number of serious cases in the treated group—smaller motorcycles and mopeds—a decrease which does not occur in the control group —larger motorcycles. The impact of the adopted measures is abrupt and permanent but the change in riders helmet wearing habits has not been influenced so much by the media campaign as by the coming into force of the legislation with the potential application of sanctions.     

An improved comorbidity summary score for measuring disease burden and predicting mortality with applications to two national cohorts

Abstract

Research involving administrative healthcare data to study patient outcomes requires the investigator to account for the patient’s disease burden in order to reduce the potential for biased results. Here we develop a comorbidity summary score based on variable importance measures derived from several statistical and machine learning methods and show it has superior predictive performance to the Elixhauser and Charlson indices when used to predict 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year mortality. We used two large Veterans Administration cohorts to develop and validate the summary score and compared predictive performance using the area under ROC curve (AUC) and the Brier score.     

Social-ecological research in urban natural areas: an emergent process for integration

Urban Ecosystems - Understanding the structure and function of urban landscapes requires integrating social and ecological research. Here, we integrate parallel social and ecological assessments of...     

Increasing Child Serving Professionals’ Awareness and Understanding of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children

ABSTRACT

Child serving professionals need increased understanding of the identification and therapeutic needs of child victims of commercial sexual exploitation. This study evaluated the effectiveness of a training program aimed to increase awareness of commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC) among professionals likely to encounter victims in their work. Professionals’ (N = 227) knowledge level was examined prior to the training, immediately thereafter, and in a 6–12 month follow-up. Despite professional position or years of experience, participants had similar levels of CSEC knowledge before the training and all showed a significant improvement in their knowledge after the training. However, follow-up testing on a smaller subsample demonstrated that knowledge gains were not maintained. The analysis of the participants’ responses to how their behavior would change subsequent to the training revealed important themes including: (1) greater ability to identify/assess or recognize CSEC victims, (2) greater understanding and knowledge of CSEC, (3) increased ability to communicate, interact, and engage with CSEC victims, and (4) heightened desire to educate others and raise awareness about CSEC. Results also indicated that participants were very satisfied with the training and found it highly relevant to their work.     

Women in the Construction Professions: Achieving Critical Mass

This article addresses the question of whether an increased number of women entering the construction professions is resulting in the build‐up of critical mass, with associated changes in the culture of the construction industry, and thus in its organization and conditions of employment. It was found, from recent research, that little such change has occurred so far. Indeed the construction industry seemed to be so self‐contained and separate from wider social changes, that it was helpful to visualize it as constituting ‘Planet Construction’ upon which live a series of male‐dominated professional tribes, each with its own culture and world view. This article discusses the factors and forces limiting change, and then identifies likely change agents. These comprise top‐down agents such as governmental regulatory bodies, and bottom‐up agents such as minority groups and community organizations. The most effective bottom‐up groups are likely to be those that have a foothold within the professional bodies such as the women‐led Equal Opportunities in Construction Taskforce, which has produced and is promoting guidelines for equal opportunities in the industry. But there is still a long way to go before major changes are likely to occur in the employment status, pay and conditions, as women in construction have hardly reached ‘first base’ in terms of being accepted within the industry. This is reflected in high job turnover among women in construction, occupational isolation, and limited promotion prospects, all factors which work against the build‐up of critical mass and culture change.     

Questioning the professionalization of recovery: a collaborative exploration of a recovery process

While the recovery concept strongly resonates in clinical mental health care today, it first arose in service user-led contexts. A major risk of this professionalization shift is that recovery primarily becomes defined by treatment providers. This study aims to keep the debate on recovery alive through a collaborative exploration of Pete’s recovery process by means of a bricolage approach. This resulted in an idiographic portrait of Pete’s experiences of recovery and treatment, clustered around four themes: life rebuilding, identity, continuity of care and the role of drugs. His experiences illustrate a number of contradictions in the operationalization of the recovery ethos in today’s mental health care; whilst recovery appears as a hopeful vision of empowerment, it also risks being reduced to a tokenistic model that fails to address the social realities of people in recovery and in which the assumption that mental illness is chronic is still latently present.     

The construction of intellectual disability by parents and teachers

This study examines how disability is constructed by significant adults in the lives of young people with intellectual disability. Specifically, we are examined how parents of those affected by intellectual disability and teachers in special schools construct intellectual disability in talk. Using focus group interviews, we examined whether stigma might be recreated or sustained within the family and school settings of those affected by intellectual disability. Parents and school staff constructed disability as negative, articulating difference from ‘the norm’, which was claimed to drive social isolation for affected young people. There was also evidence that parents and teachers attributed less agency to young people affected by intellectual disability. Discussion orients to how parents and teachers, see themselves as advocates for those with intellectual disability highlight, whilst at the same time recreating pervasive and subtle distinctions between children with and without intellectual disability.