The Informal European Parliamentary Working Group on Risk—History,Remit, and Future Plans: A Personal View

On September 5, 2012 the inaugural meeting of the European Parliamentary Working Group on Risk (WGR) took place in the European Parliament in Brussels. It is chaired by Mrs. Julie Girling (U.K. Conservative), Member of the European Parliament (MEP), and involves some 10–12 other MEPs representing a wide array of European political parties from across the EU member state countries, including Sweden, the Netherlands, and Hungary. The WGR is supported by a small secretariat reporting directly to Julie Girling MEP. In this background article of WGR, I discuss the background to why WGR was set up, the remit of the committee, and some of its possible future plans. I do this very much in a personal capacity, having suggested the formation of the committee in the first place and persuaded Mrs. Girling to chair it.     

Release of maintenance jobs in a decentralized multi-stage production/maintenance system with continuous condition monitoring

Condition-based maintenance is analyzed for multi-stage production with a separate maintenance department. It is assumed that the conditions of the machines deteriorate as a function of multiple production parameters and that the task of maintenance is to keep up predefined operational availabilities of the individual machines. In this context the problem of determining the optimal machine condition that triggers the release of a preventive maintenance job and the problem of scheduling maintenance jobs at the maintenance department arise. Existing approaches to solve these problems either assume a monolithic production/maintenance system or concentrate on a decentralized system in which the information flow and resource transfer do not cause delays. With our paper we aim at (1) deriving a triggering mechanism that is able to cope with relaxed assumptions and at (2) developing specific priority rules for scheduling maintenance jobs. Therefore, in this paper a specific continuous condition monitoring and a suitable information exchange protocol are developed, factors determining the release situation are operationalized, impacts of choosing the triggering conditions are identified and the components of specific priority rules for scheduling maintenance jobs are clearly elaborated. Finally the performance of the resulting solution approach is analyzed by simulations. Thereby, relevant characteristics of the production/maintenance system, the maintenance task and relevant priority rules are varied systematically. This research contributes answers to the questions on how the exchange of local information can be structured, the parameters of condition-based maintenance can be set and on what maintenance-specific priority rules can be applied in case of incomplete information about deterioration in a decentralized multistage production/maintenance system.     

Emotional school engagement among minority youth: the relevance of cultural identity,perceived discrimination,and perceived support

ABSTRACT

Minority student school dropout represents a challenging issue for educational systems in many countries. Notwithstanding minority families' overall high academic aspirations, there is a stable achievement gap between majority and minority students. Minority students who are emotionally engaged with their school tend to be psychologically and socioculturally better adapted to their country of residence and, as a result, report higher academic success. Therefore, emotional school engagement represents a relevant factor for integration into the host society. The goal of this paper is to investigate the interrelation between ethnic and national identity, perceived discrimination, and perceived support from parents, peers, and teachers with emotional school engagement. Results indicate that cultural capital within the family, cultural self-identification, and perceived support from peers and teachers play an important role for students’ emotional school engagement.     

How to compare interpretatively different models for the conditional variance function

This study considers regression-type models with heteroscedastic Gaussian errors. The conditional variance is assumed to depend on the explanatory variables via a parametric or non-parametric variance function. The variance function has usually been selected on the basis of the log-likelihoods of fitted models. However, log-likelihood is a difficult quantity to interpret – the practical importance of differences in log-likelihoods has been difficult to assess. This study overcomes these difficulties by transforming the difference in log-likelihood to easily interpretative difference in the error of predicted deviation. In addition, methods for testing the statistical significance of the observed difference in test data log-likelihood are proposed.     

Was ist beim Frauencoaching zu bedenken?

What the coach has to reflect with female coachees — some theses The author focuses on coaching with women. In most cases women today have to realize a double planning of life: work and family. But the combination of the two mostly is difficult. Women are confronted with a variety of complex questions. These are central issues also in coaching sessions.     

Explaining religiosity: towards a unified theoretical model1

The article presents a unified theoretical model, explaining differences in Christian and ‘alternative’ religiosity at individual and collective levels. The model reconstructs and integrates the most important theories explaining religiosity (deprivation, regulation, socialization, cultural production, and ethnicity) as complementary causal mechanisms in a rational‐action based framework. It is maintained that the mechanisms of the various theories are not exclusive, but complementary, and that integration into the general model is both theoretically and empirically beneficial. The model is tested on representative data from Switzerland. Substantively, I find for the Swiss case that Christian religiosity can be best explained by a religious socialization mechanism. The most important mechanisms accounting for alternative religiosity involve deprivation, gender, and age.     

Was heißt „systemisch“ in Supervision und Coaching?

The author discusses a book of Stefan Kühl about supervision and coaching, who presents a system theoretical background for the analysis of supervision and coaching. He defines them as “person oriented counselling” and he postulates that there hardly exist a difference between these counselling formats. The author relates to the writings of Niklas Luhmann about organisational phenomena. Following Kühl, the main concern of supervision and coaching are conflicts with different severity. He discusses different settings, the problems of evaluation and of charlatanism, the paradoxicality in the self presentation of counsellors and the specific effects of person oriented counselling.     

Wood Nymphs and Patriots: Depictions of Samoans in The National Geographic Magazine

This paper examines the pictures used to illustrate articles about Samoa published in National Geographic Magazine in 1898, 1899, 1919, 1941, 1962, and 1985, and discovers a consistency of subject and approach which underscores the Geographic's unchanging role as a vehicle for capitalist and imperialist ideology. The paper analyses photographs of women, landscape and aspects of Samoan culture in the contexts of their accompanying captions and texts, as well as the specific political and economic circumstances surrounding the making and marketing of the pictures.