Effects of variations in water quantity and quality in the structure and functions of invertebrates’ community of a Mediterranean urban stream

Urban Ecosystems - Urban streams provide important ecosystem services to cities’ population, from the maintenance of urban biodiversity, temperature, humidity and air quality to improving...     

制约县域经济发展的因素分析与对策建议

以县级行政区划为单位的县域经济是我国国民经济的基础,是建设小康社会的主战场。我国目前县域经济发展缓慢,已成为宏观经济可持续发展的瓶颈。虽然制约县域经济发展的障碍因素较多,本文仅从经济体制、行政体制、财政体制、金融体制、相关政策制度等方面进行分析,提出改革和完善体制、推行"一主三化"发展战略和制订各县域特色经济总体规划的对策建议。     

Inter‐country wage differences in the European Union

This article investigates the determinants of wage gaps between European Union countries along the wage distribution, applying the methodology proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux (2009) and Fortin, Lemieux and Firpo (2011). The authors conclude that both wage structure and composition effects contribute to explaining wage differentials, but that the wage structure effect is more important. This latter effect would appear to derive from differences between unknown factors, while the composition effect can largely be explained by differences in the following areas: education, proportion of workers with supervisory responsibilities, occupational structure, and, to a lesser extent, industrial structure.     

‘This is Not Just About History…’ Addressing the Disconnect in Historic (Non‐Recent) Child Abuse Investigations

• Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors.
• Such investigations include those undertaken by the police and by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
• Victim and survivor accounts need to be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly in order for victims/survivors not to feel let down by, and disconnected from, criminal justice and IICSA processes.

‘Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors’

In response to the then chancellor George Osborne's announcement in 2014 that the UK government would set up an independent inquiry into the handling of historic child abuse cases, then shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement that highlighted:

‘This is not just about history, this is about the need for proper strong systems of child protection for the future, so that we get both justice for victims in the past but also a system that is strong enough to protect young people going forward.’ (The Guardian, 2014 )

The government held good to its promise and set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) ( https://www.iicsa.org.uk ) in 2014, announced by then home secretary Theresa May. Its objectives would not only be to investigate claims of a cover‐up of an alleged paedophile ring said to have operated in Westminster in the 1980s, but also to investigate broader institutional failures. Today, the IICSA aims to ‘examine the extent to which institutions and organisations in England and Wales have taken seriously their responsibility to protect children’, and to examine allegations of child sexual abuse involving ‘well known people’, that is, those in the media, politics and other areas of public life (see https:// www.iicsa.org.uk ). Its remit also includes collating testimonies from child abuse victims and survivors through its Truth Project (via private interviews and in writing) (IICSA, 2017 ). But for the victims/survivors of abuse, it is at this intersection – between holding to account both public and private institutions over child abuse, and listening to and believing victims – where a disconnect occurs, that is, between past and present; between the abuse itself and the reporting process; and between expectation and outcomes of the investigative process.

‘For the victims/survivors of abuse… a disconnect occurs… between the abuse itself and the reporting process’

This short report considers progress to date on the IICSA drawing on evidence from the inquiry itself, from press reports and from the author's personal experience of reporting historic abuse to the police and to the IICSA's Truth Project.

‘Considers progress to date on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)’

A ‘Legacy’ of Failures

In August 2016, after Theresa May launched the ‘new‐look’ inquiry in 2015 with new statutory powers, its chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, resigned. In her resignation statement, Goddard cited family reasons for going but perhaps more tellingly, the fact that the inquiry was ‘not an easy task, let alone one of the magnitude of this’, she added, ‘Compounding the many difficulties was its legacy of failure which has been very hard to shake off’ (BBC News, 2016a ). And it is some legacy. In its first year, the IICSA saw two of its chairs, Baroness Butler‐Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf, step down over questions about their links to key establishment figures prominent in the 1980s. Since 2014, a number of lawyers supporting the inquiry have also either resigned or been dismissed. Historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate since allegations against TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile emerged in 2011. This led to the setting up of Operation Yewtree in 2012 (and, down the line, to the IICSA), now just one of many separate similar operations currently being run by police forces across the country. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that there is now a central hub – Operation Hydrant – to oversee all of these separate police investigations.

‘[Since Savile] historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate’

Without a doubt, some of these have been successful in bringing to justice well known figures and ‘celebrities’ such as Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter). But other investigations have failed to establish the extent of child abuse allegations said to have been committed and subsequently covered up at Westminster, at Dolphin Square in Pimlico (Operation Midland), Elm Guest House in London (Operation Athabasca) and others, some of which have closed and others still being investigated by the police, a number of them linked to prominent public and political figures. At the same time, the police themselves are also under scrutiny as part of the IICSA and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is currently investigating 187 claims of police and establishment cover‐ups involving 18 forces (The Independent, 2016 ).     

Neoliberalism as a real utopia? Karl Polanyi and the theoretical practice of F. A. Hayek

ABSTRACT

This article interprets Hayek’s theoretical practice with the help of Polanyi’s framework. Hayek aimed at renewing liberalism after the interwar period, thus helping transforming it into neoliberalism, a real utopia instrumentally concerned with the political and moral economies underpinning markets. The distance between neoliberal theory and practice is less pronounced than it is sometimes assumed. The strength of neoliberalism partially stems from a capacity to articulate an effort to think about real-world mechanisms with an effort to demolish, reconfigure or transform existing structures. Despite his failure to anticipate neoliberalism, Polanyi gives ample intellectual resources to critically interpret the tasks that neoliberals would collectively have to face at the theoretical level, in an epoch of ideological marginality, before their triumphal political deployment at the global level.     

(Sub) Optimality and (non) optimal satisficing in risky decision experiments

We implement a risky choice experiment based on one-dimensional choice variables and risk neutrality induced via binary lottery incentives. Each participant confronts many parameter constellations with varying optimal payoffs. We assess (sub)optimality, as well as (non)optimal satisficing by eliciting aspirations in addition to choices. Treatments differ in the probability that a binary random event, which are payoff—but not optimal choice—relevant is experimentally induced and whether participants choose portfolios directly or via satisficing, i.e., by forming aspirations and checking for satisficing before making their choice. By incentivizing aspiration formation, we can test satisficing, and in cases of satisficing, determine whether it is optimal.     

Testing homogeneity in semiparametric mixture case–control models

Parametric and semiparametric mixture models have been widely used in applications from many areas, and it is often of interest to test the homogeneity in these models. However, hypothesis testing is non standard due to the fact that several regularity conditions do not hold under the null hypothesis. We consider a semiparametric mixture case–control model, in the sense that the density ratio of two distributions is assumed to be of an exponential form, while the baseline density is unspecified. This model was first considered by Qin and Liang (2011 Qin, J., Liang, K.Y. (2011). Hypothesis testing in a mixture case–control model. Biometrics 67(1):182–198.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], biometrics), and they proposed a modified score statistic for testing homogeneity. In this article, we consider alternative testing procedures based on supremum statistics, which could improve power against certain types of alternatives. We demonstrate the connection and comparison among the proposed and existing approaches. In addition, we provide a unified theoretical justification of the supremum test and other existing test statistics from an empirical likelihood perspective. The finite-sample performance of the supremum test statistics was evaluated in simulation studies.