What Happens When Nonprofits Use Quality Models for Self‐Assessment?

Two tools to assist organizational self‐assessment have recently become popular in the U.K. nonprofit sector, providing the opportunity for a comparative study of how such tools are used in practice. Because both spring from the quality movement in management, the study also provided a chance to observe how quality ideas evolve as they are applied in nonprofit contexts. The study found that self‐assessment can indeed enable constructive review processes in a wide range of contexts. However, when the models “work” it is in rather different ways than is suggested by the terms in which they are promoted.     

英国高等教育未来的管理创新

经过20多年的发展扩大,英国高等教育的未来已经成为全国性辩论(讨论)的主题.     

Source Attribution of Food-Borne Zoonoses in New Zealand: A Modified Hald Model

A Bayesian approach was developed by Hald et al .^{( 1 )} to estimate the contribution of different food sources to the burden of human salmonellosis in Denmark. This article describes the development of several modifications that can be used to adapt the model to different countries and pathogens. Our modified Hald model has several advantages over the original approach, which include the introduction of uncertainty in the estimates of source prevalence and an improved strategy for identifiability. We have applied our modified model to the two major food-borne zoonoses in New Zealand, namely, campylobacteriosis and salmonellosis. Major challenges were the data quality for salmonellosis and the inclusion of environmental sources of campylobacteriosis. We conclude that by modifying the Hald model we have improved its identifiability, made it more applicable to countries with less intensive surveillance, and feasible for other pathogens, in particular with respect to the inclusion of nonfood sources. The wider application and better understanding of this approach is of particular importance due to the value of the model for decision making and risk management.     

A Critical Response to the Keys Young Report: Ending Domestic Violence? Programs for Perpetrators

This paper questions some of the continuing effects of the dominant theoretical construction of domestic violence in the light of the recent Keys Young report to National Crime Prevention. A re‐examination is made of patriarchy as the dominant theoretical underpinning and some of the consequences for service delivery and policy development are explored. Is it necessarily the case that we have now got our understanding and subsequent intervention strategies right and that all that is needed is a consolidation of the ideas and the tightening of funding arrangements?     

Radiocarbon dating with temporal order constraints

Bayesian methods are now widely used for analysing radiocarbon dates. We find that the non-informative priors in use in the literature generate a bias towards wider date ranges which does not in general reflect substantial prior knowledge. We recommend using a prior in which the distribution of the difference between the earliest and latest dates has a uniform distribution. We show how such priors are derived from a simple physical model of the deposition and observation process. We illustrate this in a case-study, examining the effect that various priors have on the reconstructed dates. Bayes factors are used to help to decide model choice problems.     

Re-counting 'illiteracy': literacy skills in the sociology of social inequality

Recent media reports have repeated claims that there are very large numbers of illiterate people in Britain, seven million adults being the most common figure. The moral panic this engendered has helped to justify educational initiatives and greater public spending on basic skills. However, a closer investigation of definitions and measurements of illiteracy in major national studies reveals the peculiarity of this social construction of illiteracy. Not least, it is argued that the numbers actually suffering significant literacy deficits are much lower than reported. Partly because British sociology has given literacy little attention (despite the advent of the 'New Literacy Studies'), official accounts of illiteracy remain unduly 'normative', seriously under-estimating cultural differences like gender, ethnicity and class. A new classification of low literacy skills is proposed, with the intention of demonstrating connections with structural accounts of social inequality and sociological theory. Low levels of literacy skill remain important because they are related to other forms of social inequality, even when the number of people disadvantaged in this way is much smaller than previously claimed.