Vocational aspects of life care planning for people with spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury (SCI) is a catastrophic event with profound, long-term consequences in all aspects of an individual's life, including employment. The life care plan (LCP) is a methodology that is used to document the continuum of care needs that an individual with SCI will have across his or her life span. The LCP also highlights the critical stages of development necessary to maximize the person's functional potential and productivity. This article provides a brief overview, with a case study example, of how the LCP can be used in addressing an individual's post-injury employability needs.     

PEER EFFECTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: DOES THE FIELD OF STUDY MATTER?

Does the peer effect vary with the field of study? Using data from a middle‐sized public university located in southern Italy and exploiting the random assignment of first‐year students to college accommodation, we find that roommate peer effects for freshmen enrolled in the hard sciences are positive and significantly larger than for freshmen enrolled in the humanities and social sciences. We present a simple theoretical model which suggests that the uncovered differences between fields in the size of the peer effect could plausibly be generated by between‐field variation in labor market returns, which affect optimal student effort. (JEL I21, Z13, J24)     

INEQUALITY AND TRUST: NEW EVIDENCE FROM PANEL DATA

We estimate the causal link from income inequality to generalized trust by reconsidering the country‐level evidence on this issue. First, we exploit the panel dimension of the data, thus controlling for any country unobservable time‐invariant variables, and find a negative relationship between the two variables that holds only for developed countries. Second, we focus on these advanced economies and provide instrumental variable estimates using the predicted exposure to technological change as an exogenous driver of inequality. According to our findings, the negative causal effect of inequality on trust is even larger than that coming from ordinary least squares estimation. We also provide new insights on the effects of different dimensions of inequality, exploiting measures of both static inequality—such as the Gini index and top income shares—and dynamic inequality—proxied by intergenerational income mobility. (JEL D31, O15, Z13)     

博洛尼亚进程中的意大利大学改革

对于欧洲大学而言,“博洛尼亚进程”是近年来居于首位的大事件。作为最早的倡导国和参与国之一,意大利积极融入博洛尼亚进程,并以此为契机改革弊端日益呈现的大学体制。改革既有历史的原因,也是社会经济发展的必然结果。1 861年意大利统一以来,意大利大学呈现出从精英到大众, 从分权到集权的特征。20世纪80年代以来的改革主要围绕“赋予大学更多自主权”和“提升大学质量”展开。1 999年《捷其诺条例》的颁布对意大利大学改革具有里程碑的意义。之后,意大利大学进行了大刀阔斧的改革 :建立基于“欧洲学分互认体系”的学分制,重置本科课程,引入“3+2”学位体系,引入“Y”体系,颁发文凭补充文件等。这些改革对意大利大学体制产生了深远的影响。     

Does Religiosity Influence Retention Strategies in Nonprofit Organizations?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Despite the rise of interest in nonprofit organizations’ (NPOs) retention strategies and organizational behaviour...     

Application of TOC/OPT rules in a medium sized shop

Abstract

Abstract. Theory of constraints (TOC) and optimized production technology (OPT) are frequently presented as the better options for production control systems. Despite this enthusiasm, there is very little literature on how these principles can be implemented in practice without having to resort to the expensive proprietary software. In this paper we present a case study in which the OPT/TOC ideas were implemented without using the software. Management's major concern was reduction of work in process and increased delivery performance. It was decided to test whether the ideas of OPT/TOC were applicable in this environment and more importantly to which extent these two performance measures could be improved. The paper reports on the methodology used to test the OPT/TOC ideas in this shop and presents some early results of improvement, as well as some new problems which arose due to the new approach.     

Why Care about Scientific Controversies?

Since Kuhn claimed that scientific controversies are not always settled by means of rational evaluations of the intrinsic merits of competing theories, the view that the history of science should be recounted by examining the background of scientific controversies and how these controversies came to be settled has become a real heuristic maxim for the historian of science. We take issue with this view by arguing that controversies are not relevant by themselves but only insofar as one can make something out of them. Two important questions then arise: what did one come to learn from a given controversy and what came out of this apprenticeships. We compare Pauline Mazumdar's and Alfred Tauber's approaches to the history of immunology and argue that only the latter addressed these questions. In so doing, he was able to show the extension in which modern immunology is an outcome of Metchnikoff's success in correcting Haeckel's “fundamental biogenetic law”.     

Estimation for High‐Dimensional Linear Mixed‐Effects Models Using ℓ1‐Penalization

Abstract. We propose an ?₁‐penalized estimation procedure for high‐dimensional linear mixed‐effects models. The models are useful whenever there is a grouping structure among high‐dimensional observations, that is, for clustered data. We prove a consistency and an oracle optimality result and we develop an algorithm with provable numerical convergence. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of the method on simulated and a real high‐dimensional data set.