Gambling: The shaping of an opinion

Examining historical and contemporary writings, the authors show that many of the negative arguments about gambling spring from selfish interests in the business and political sectors. The stigma associated with gambling turns out to be a method of preventing competition from gambling, and leads to misguided social policies.The authors are, respectively, associate professor of economics at the Business School of the University of Montreal (HEC), and professor of economics in the department of economics of the University of Montreal. The paper draws on our recently published bookGambling and Speculation (Cambridge University Press, 1990), as well as on events that took place since we finished writing it. We thank Loto-Québec for its financial support.     

Big Business in a Thin Market: Understanding the Privatization of Residential Care for Children and Youth in Sweden

This article analyzes the transformation of Swedish residential care for children from a regionally coordinated, public social service system into a thin, but highly profitable, national spot market in which large corporations have a growing presence. Marketization and privatization are theorized as complex processes, through which the institutional structure and logics of this small, but significant, social policy field changed profoundly. Using official documents, register data, media reports and existing research, three consecutive phases in the development of the children's home market are identified since the early 1980s. Change was driven on one hand by policies inspired by New Public Management, which shifted public authority horizontally to the private sector, and vertically to local authorities (funding) and to the state (regulation). On the other hand were the responses of local authorities and private actors to the changing incentives that policy shifts entailed. During the first two phases, both the proportion and size of for‐profit providers increased, and the model of family‐like care was replaced by a professional model. Cutting across the trend of privatization in the third phase was establishment of a parallel system of homes for unaccompanied refugee children – mostly in public ownership. Similarities with privatization in the English system of children's care homes are noted. By showing how the Swedish market for residential care has been created by policy and by actors’ responses to those reforms, the article provides a foundation for thinking through how the predictable, significant and well‐documented problems of such care markets might be addressed.     

Confidence Intervals for Difference Between Two Poisson Rates

In this article, we develop four explicit asymptotic two-sided confidence intervals for the difference between two Poisson rates via a hybrid method. The basic idea of the proposed method is to estimate or recover the variances of the two Poisson rate estimates, which are required for constructing the confidence interval for the rate difference, from the confidence limits for the two individual Poisson rates. The basic building blocks of the approach are reliable confidence limits for the two individual Poisson rates. Four confidence interval estimators that have explicit solutions and good coverage levels are employed: the first normal with continuity correction, Rao score, Freeman and Tukey, and Jeffreys confidence intervals. Using simulation studies, we examine the performance of the four hybrid confidence intervals and compare them with three existing confidence intervals: the non-informative prior Bayes confidence interval, the t confidence interval based on Satterthwait's degrees of freedom, and the Bayes confidence interval based on Student's t confidence coefficient. Simulation results show that the proposed hybrid Freeman and Tukey, and the hybrid Jeffreys confidence intervals can be highly recommended because they outperform the others in terms of coverage probabilities and widths. The other methods tend to be too conservative and produce wider confidence intervals. The application of these confidence intervals are illustrated with three real data sets.     

Latent variable models with ordinal categorical covariates

We propose a general latent variable model for multivariate ordinal categorical variables, in which both the responses and the covariates are ordinal, to assess the effect of the covariates on the responses and to model the covariance structure of the response variables. A?fully Bayesian approach is employed to analyze the model. The Gibbs sampler is used to simulate the joint posterior distribution of the latent variables and the parameters, and the parameter expansion and reparameterization techniques are used to speed up the convergence procedure. The proposed model and method are demonstrated by simulation studies and a real data example.     

Understanding Very Old Age: Looking Back and Thinking Forward

ABSTRACT

Understanding human development among the oldest old is a sequential building process taking into account building-block data, theories, and models from childhood, adulthood, and old age toward a new territory of oldest-old survivors who have lived way beyond the average life-span. A central question is whether the oldest-old survivors have developed specific survival techniques and/or protective environments that nurture survival. Or are the oldest old statistical outliers who by happenstance continue to survive further into old age? This commentary provides a historical framework on the papers in this series that describe challenges confronted by the oldest-old survivors in order to advance our understanding of survival of the oldest old. A clear understanding of the contributors to longevity could guide public policies toward well-being and life satisfaction among our oldest-old citizens.     

The Challenge of the Care Workforce: Recent Trends and Emerging problems

This paper examines the paid care workforce in community services in Australia. Focusing on people employed in direct service delivery roles, I use unpublished data from the Censuses of 1996 and 2001 to document some important characteristics of the care workforce in community services, in which a large minority of care workers are employed in this country. International research has established that paid care workers suffer considerable labour market disadvantage. The paper presents evidence of deinstitutionalisation, deprofessionalisation, functional underemployment, and relatively poor pay for care workers in community service industries, which suggests that problems identified in other English‐speaking countries are also evident in Australia. I conclude by discussing the policy implications of these trends, and by raising some questions for workforce planning.     

As California burns: the psychology of wildfire- and wildfire smoke-related migration intentions

Population and Environment - Climate change impacts and rapid development in the wildland-urban interface are increasing population exposure and vulnerability to the harmful effects of wildfire and...     

Implementing an RFID-based manufacturing process management system: Lessons learned and success factors

A growing number of organisations are using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to improve their manufacturing processes. A case study approach is used to explore the development of an RFID-based manufacturing process management system in a garment factory in China. The results indicate that both technology push and need pull factors influence the garment factory's intention to adopt RFID technology. The technology push factors include relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, extendibility and the cost of the technology, whereas the need pull factors include competitor and customer pressure. We identify eight factors for the successful implementation of an RFID-based manufacturing process management system, namely, vendor selection, organisational motivation, cost/benefit evaluation, top management support, user involvement, the extent of progress supervision, staff competence and training, and policy, structure and operating process compatibility. This in-depth case study details the organisation's experience and identifies the challenges it faces and important issues in the development and implementation of the system. Implications for academics and practitioners are discussed.