Playing by the rules: Restricted endowment assets in colleges and universities

Endowments serve as financial buffers and safety nets for post‐secondary institutions in uncertain financial times. Donor‐restricted gifts and bequests often complicate the management and deployment of endowment assets. Public policy concerns, the Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Acts, and related case law are changing approaches used by states to alter the donors' “dead hand” when time and circumstances make carrying out conditions of restricted bequests unworkable.     

Young Women's Use of a Vaginal Microbicide Surrogate: The Role of Individual and Contextual Factors in Acceptability and Sexual Pleasure

Currently in clinical trials, microbicides have historically been promoted as a woman-controlled (although more recently woman initiated) method of sexually transmitted infection (STI) prevention. The contradicition that exists in this rationale is that women's bodies, specifically the genitals, have been constructed as a negotiated space within sexual interactions. This study qualitatively explored the factors influencing 40 young women's use of a vaginal moisturizer (VM), utilized as a microbicide surrogate. The results indicated that use of the VM was dependent upon product characteristics (i.e., the lubricating qualities affect on sexual pleasure, timing of insertion), individual factors (i.e., reproductive health goals, experiences with side effects of existing contraceptive methods), and contextual factors (i.e., social norms). An understanding of these bodily and social issues may be beneficial in designing targeted educational campaigns and effective instructional materials as well as in facilitating positive dialogue around women's bodies and their sexuality.     

The ‘recidivist tongue’: embracing an embodied language of trauma

This article analyses selected excerpts from the writing of Antjie Krog and Yvonne Vera in order to theorise strategies for overcoming the disjuncture between the mind and the body that tends to result from violence. Both authors repeatedly return to the bodies of their characters and they insist that psychic and physical pain and trauma reside in the bodies of survivors as much as in their psyches. Acknowledging this corporeal reality of violence circumvents any opportunity to deny the totality of the impact that violence has on the lives of survivors. This has implications for survivors as well as for those who read or hear about violence. By developing an embodied language of violence and trauma, these authors offer new and more comprehensive ways of dealing with traumatic violations. When survivors reclaim their bodies, they are also able to utilise their bodies’ capacity for healing and comfort. When readers, and society at large, are unable to deny the harm that violence does to bodies, they are compelled to recognise the reality of survivors’ suffering. The article illustrates that the body can speak and that we ignore its voice at our peril.     

Achieving Collaborative Competence through Interprofessional Education. Lessons Learned from Joint Training in Learning Disability Nursing and Social Work

The ability to work interprofessionally is widely regarded as essential to professional education and training for social work. The changing contexts of social work practice and the requirement for integrated working are regular reminders of the need for social work students to develop collaborative competence. Guidance preceding the development of the social work degree emphasised that social work students should undertake specific learning and assessment in partnership working and information sharing. This suggests that aspects of interprofessional education are relevant to the teaching and development of social work students if graduates are to successfully engage in complex practice.

This paper seeks to identify the competencies needed for successful collaboration. It then draws on evaluative research of joint training programmes in learning disability nursing and social work in England to discuss the unique experiences and perspectives of graduates whose social work training was exceptionally interprofessional. The paper will discuss how some of the findings from this research can indicate lessons for promoting collaborative competence in singly trained social work students. It will argue that interprofessional learning opportunities are one of the key ingredients for the development of critical practice.     

Evaluation of a Seven State Criminal History Screening Pilot Program for Long-Term Care Workers

This article summarizes results from an evaluation of a federally sponsored criminal history screening (CHS) pilot program to improve screening for workers in long-term care settings. The evaluation addressed eight key issues specified through enabling legislation, including efficiency, costs, and outcomes of screening procedures. Of the 204,339 completed screenings, 3.7% were disqualified due to criminal history, and 18.8% were withdrawn prior to completion for reasons that may include relevant criminal history. Lessons learned from the pilot program experiences may inform a new national background check demonstration program.     

Young people's perspectives of being parented in critical situations: teenage non‐offenders and desisters speak out

This paper considers young people's perspectives of being parented and draws on a study that comprised secondary analysis of 112 qualitative interviews with teenagers who had either never offended or who had ceased to offend for at least a year. Young people's offending behaviour has traditionally been linked to parenting styles, but it is parenting practices that proved central to parental responses to revelations about their offspring's offending. During the interviews, desisters gave accounts of their upbringing and, in particular, the parenting they experienced in one critical situation, namely when their offending came to light. At this point, parents of desisters were reported to be more punitive, more emotional and less measured than they were customarily, and non‐offenders anticipated similar reactions from their parents if they were to offend in the future. The relevance of the findings for professional interventions, especially parenting programmes, and for social workers in child protection is discussed, and suggestions for further research is made.     

Sequential sampling in the search for new shared species

In microbial sciences, as well as other disciplines, it is often valuable to sample communities in a sequential or group sequential manner, in order to determine their structure or their similarity. We develop sequential sampling procedures to accomplish this by first assuming that one observation is drawn with replacement from each population at a time. Suppose that the sampling is terminated after n pairs of observations and k shared species were discovered, and assume that we receive payoff h(k)−cn, where h(k) is non-decreasing and the sampling cost c is non-negative. Similar to Rasmussen and Starr (1979), we show that an optimal stopping rule exists if h(k+1)−h(k) is non-increasing. An analogous result holds for group sequential sampling. This leads to using an estimate of the probability of discovering new shared species as a stopping indicator for comparing two populations with respect to the similarity index. We show by simulation and real examples that this is a feasible approach which can help to reduce the sample size.     

Dynamic Bayesian forecasting of AFL match results using the Skellam distribution

The scoring and defensive abilities of Australian Rules Football teams change over time as a result of evolving player rosters, tactics and other management factors. We develop a dynamic model based on the Poisson difference (Skellam) distribution which simultaneously models the two different point scoring mechanisms in Australian Rules Football, the motivation for which comes from work on predicting outcomes in soccer matches. Our model is developed in a Bayesian framework and is fitted using the Stan modelling language. Model validation is performed on the 2015 Australian Football league (AFL) home and away season.