Facilities and HIV prevention in bathhouse and sex club environments

This project evaluated the extent to which businesses with a primary purpose of providing opportunities for sexual encounters between men (e.g., bathhouses and sex clubs) have implemented strategies that target their customers with important HIV and STD prevention messages. Between October 1996 and February 1997, we conducted structured telephone interviews with 63 businesses throughout the United States in order to describe their facilities and their HIV education and prevention efforts. Types of facilities offered were related to what businesses called themselves and the kinds of sex space they provided. All of the businesses reported that they provided condoms and lubricant on site; 95% provided educational materials such as posters and flyers about HIV/AIDS; and 40% provided HIV testing on site, with half of these also providing some type of STD testing. Although some level of HIV prevention and educational efforts by these businesses are described, further investigation into their efficacy is required.     

Impact of the National Minimum Wage on Disabled People

The survey reported here found disparities in the impact of the introduction of the National Minimum Wage on disabled people. These were associated with age, gender, impairment and type of employment setting. The main determinant of whether individuals gained from the NMW was their status as claimants of welfare benefits. We also found evidence that paid hours had been reduced to implement the NMW with no net increase in earnings, possibly to enable people to retain benefits entitlements. We make recommendations about how the anomalies can be tackled. It may be unrealistic to expect the Act to have been implemented fully so soon after it became law and some of the anomalies found may eventually disappear. However, many of the inequalities uncovered by this survey are not addressed by the NMW, specifically those inequalities associated with impairment and gender.     

Transnational political practices and the receiving state: Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands

This article examines how the social and political contexts in receiving countries affect the transnational political practices of migrants and refugees, such as their mobilization around political events in their homeland. The case study explores the political participation of Turks and Kurds in Germany and the Netherlands in its full complexity, that is in both the immigration country and in homeland politics. The findings suggest that transnational political practices should not be reduced to a function of the political opportunity structures of particular receiving countries for two main reasons: (a) more inclusive political structures, which provide for more participation and co‐operation on immigrant political issues, may at the same time, and for that very reason, serve to exclude dialogue on homeland politics; (b) homeland political movements may draw on a different range of resources than their immigrant political counterparts, including those outside the local political institutional context.     

Asymptotic Theory of Outlier Detection Algorithms for Linear Time Series Regression Models

Outlier detection algorithms are intimately connected with robust statistics that down‐weight some observations to zero. We define a number of outlier detection algorithms related to the Huber‐skip and least trimmed squares estimators, including the one‐step Huber‐skip estimator and the forward search. Next, we review a recently developed asymptotic theory of these. Finally, we analyse the gauge, the fraction of wrongly detected outliers, for a number of outlier detection algorithms and establish an asymptotic normal and a Poisson theory for the gauge.     

Interacting Socially With Human Hands at 24 Months of Age

This experiment explored whether or not 2‐year‐olds would engage in synchronic imitation with human hands. Sixty‐four 24‐month‐old infants participated. In a test of synchronic imitation, infants were given a toy while a model simultaneously performed novel actions on an identical toy. Infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 model conditions: a familiar person, an unfamiliar person, disembodied human hands, and disembodied robotic pincers. Infants were as likely to synchronically imitate disembodied hands as a person. Imitation of the pincers was significantly lower. This pattern suggests that 2‐year‐olds will engage socially with human hands in the absence of the rest of the body.     

The role,power and influence of company chairs

This paper develops an analytical framework to depict the heterogeneity that characterises the role of board chair and demonstrate the potential variability in how chairs operate boards and exercise power and influence on strategy, control and resource related tasks at board level. Theories of power and influence, as applied to top management teams and boards of directors, are explicated within the context of contemporary governance practices that are establishing the role of the board chair as distinct to that of the chief executive officer. Specifically, the paper maps sources of power and varying contemporary chair practices, including chair nomenclature (i.e. executive vs. non-executive chairs), chair origin (insider vs. outsider) and chair time (full-time vs. part-time). A number of theoretical chair-power models emerge from this analysis and are subject to empirical analysis using data collected from 160 chairs of 500 FTSE-listed companies. Theoretically and empirically, the paper complements structural approaches to studying boards with attention to behaviour on boards. By linking board structure, board process and the exercise of influence, the study reveals both differences amongst chairs in how they run the board, but also that chairs’ differ in the influence they exert on board-related tasks. Full-time executive chairs exert their greatest influence in strategy and resource dependence tasks whereas part-time, non-executive chairs seem to exert more influence over monitoring and control tasks.     

Probabilistic Reliability Modeling for Oil Exploration & Production (E&P) Facilities in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve

The aging domestic oil production infrastructure represents a high risk to the environment because of the type of fluids being handled (oil and brine) and the potential for accidental release of these fluids into sensitive ecosystems. Currently, there is not a quantitative risk model directly applicable to onshore oil exploration and production (E&P) facilities. We report on a probabilistic reliability model created for onshore exploration and production (E&P) facilities. Reliability theory, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and event trees were used to develop the model estimates of the failure probability of typical oil production equipment. Monte Carlo simulation was used to translate uncertainty in input parameter values to uncertainty in the model output. The predicted failure rates were calibrated to available failure rate information by adjusting probability density function parameters used as random variates in the Monte Carlo simulations. The mean and standard deviation of normal variate distributions from which the Weibull distribution characteristic life was chosen were used as adjustable parameters in the model calibration. The model was applied to oil production leases in the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Oklahoma. We present the estimated failure probability due to the combination of the most significant failure modes associated with each type of equipment (pumps, tanks, and pipes). The results show that the estimated probability of failure for tanks is about the same as that for pipes, but that pumps have much lower failure probability. The model can provide necessary equipment reliability information for proactive risk management at the lease level by providing quantitative information to base allocation of maintenance resources to high-risk equipment that will minimize both lost production and ecosystem damage.     

On the Distribution of Likelihood Ratio Test Statistics for Cointegration Rank

This paper analyses the likelihood ratio test for the hypothesis of reduced cointegration rank in a Gaussian vector autoregressive model. The usual asymptotic distribution typically gives rather large size distortions. This is explained by the fact that the asymptotic distribution of the likelihood ratio test statistic varies across the parameter space. A much improved distribution approximation can be obtained using local asymptotic theory. The idea is discussed for some low dimensional examples.     

Government,Culture and Sustainability in Greenland: A Microstate with a Hinterland

In population terms Greenland is one of the world's smallest states, but it occupies one of the world's largest land masses. It also brings together two very different cultures, those of the indigenous Inuit hunter society and those of the Danish colonial administration. There is now a substantial measure of self-government, building on what this article sees as a surprising measure of common ground between the cultures. Today economics and technology present significant challenges, and the article suggests that the cause of social sustainability will not be well served by giving in to contemporary global pressures.