The mixture of left–right truncated normal distributions

This paper introduces the mixture of left–right truncated normal distributions, from the spreads between bid and ask prices, as a statistical model for handle non-normality of asset price returns. It has been proved that there is only one maximum for the likelihood function of the new model.     

Commentary on Treatment of Infertile Couples Using Reproductive Technologies: A Complex Matrix

The impact of the reproductive technologies upon infertile couples who require them is both ubiquitous and profound. There is a confluence of issues that co-exist for women and men who use reproductive technologies which creates a complex matrix for both the analytically informed social work clinician and those seeking infertility treatment. The unique merger of life stage issues, identity issues, cultural pressures, and responses to the physical and emotional demands of the necessary technologies, serves to amplify the intensity of encounters in this analytic triad. Consideration of attachment theory while utilizing intersubjective systems theory provides a system of treatment which offers comfort and a place to mourn the multiple losses of repetitive failures of attempts to conceive.

Projecting Long-Term Care Expenditure in Four European Union Member States: The Influence of Demographic Scenarios

This study examines the sensitivity of future long-term care demand and expenditure estimates to official demographic projections in four selected European countries: Germany, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. It uses standardised methodology in the form of a macro-simulation exercise and finds evidence for significant differences in assumptions about demographic change and its effect on the demand for long-term care, and on relative and absolute long-term care expenditure. It concludes that mortality-rate assumptions can have a considerable influence on welfare policy planning. Relative dispersion between country-specific and Eurostat official estimates was found to be higher for the United Kingdom and Germany than for Italy and Spain, suggesting that demographic projections had a greater influence in those countries.

Gender and Sexuality in Discourses of Managerial Control: The Case of Women Miners

Mining scholarship has focused chiefly on capital developments, labour relations, changing technology, and global markets, ignoring the equally critical aspects of gendered organizations and their role in shaping the subjectivities of workers and managers. This article probes how gender and sexuality organize a mine site through organizational design and productivity management. It looks behind the rhetoric of equal opportunity, glamour mining and human resource techniques to explore the sexual politics of employing women as miners. In particular it scrutinizes the discourses of masculinity that produce ‘the woman miner’ in a context where the barriers between work and personal life are particularly mobile and highly contested. Equally crucially, it recounts some of the ways in which women have mobilized against systemic male dominance and privilege. The workplace in question is the world’s largest gem mine of its kind, a state–of–the–art computerized operation set in the remote Australian outback.     

High school after school: creating pathways to the future for adolescents

This article proposes a strategy for the use of out-of-school time for adolescents, illustrates this strategy in action in Chicago, and discusses the challenges it faces.     

Intimacy boundaries: between mental health nurses & psychiatric patients

This was the first research study in Canada to explore intimacy boundary violations and sexual misconduct between nurses (both RNs and registered psychiatric nurses) and patients. Using a researcher-generated survey, a total of 923 mental health nurses commented on their sexual attraction to patients, and dating and sexual intercourse patterns with patients. The findings indicated that very few nurses had dated or engaged in sexual intercourse with discharged patients, and the few nurses who had done so tended to be younger men prepared at the registered psychiatric nursing diploma level. A small number of nurses believed it was permissible to have a sexual relationship with a patient while the patient was hospitalized, but none reported having a current relationship. Given the severity of this intimacy boundary violation, nurses need to be educated regarding the serious and dangerous psychiatric effects that can result for patients from engaging in a sexual relationship with nurses. The Code of Ethics of the Canadian Nurses Association and nurses' obligation to follow it needs to be reinforced. Nurses engaging in intimacy boundary violations are vulnerable to patient-initiated lawsuits.     

The Public Policy of Motherhood

Parents seeking to balance their work lives with family responsibilities often find the challenge made more difficult by outdated images of the ideal worker, the good mother, and the good father. Social and legal constraints on mothers' choices exacerbate the problem. While other countries have implemented national work/family policies, the climate in the United States seems unreceptive to federal government mandates for meaningful changes in employees' work hours, schedules, and paid leave, or for sweeping new child care subsidies. As a viable interim measure, we propose a statute forbidding discrimination based on family responsibilities, which would tap deeply-felt values about the importance of family caregiving, serve as an important symbolic statement, and be useful to courts.     

Comprehensive model for child services: Parent education follow through program

One program which provides comprehensive child and family services is the Parent Education Follow Through Program. Developed at the University of Florida in 1968 by Dr. Ira J. Gordon and moved to the University of North Carolina in 1977, this program is currently implemented in ten diverse communities across the nation, both rural and urban. Using a theoretical ecological framework, the program focuses on the relationship between the home and the school with attention also given to other systems present in the community as well as at the state and national levels. The major features of the program include the following: (1) comprehensive services (social, psychological, and medical); (2) weekly home visitations by paid paraprofessionals during which home learning activities stressing specific parental teaching behaviors are delivered; and (3) parental participation of various kinds including volunteer, employee and decision-maker. The data that have been collected to measure these program areas have shown that the model has had a positive impact upon children's achievement as well as upon their families, the school, and the community.     

Autonomy and Monitoring on Hospital Wards

This paper describes the systems of relationships and manner of operation of several hospital wards. Data from these settings suggest three concepts of understanding the behavior of the participants. One is elastic autonomy: the autonomy of an actor is not fixed, but expands and contracts according to others' assessments of his professional competence. The second is accountability: an actor is held to be accountable or responsible for his decisions and actions. Third is monitoring: the process by which actors keep track of each other's performance. Contingencies affecting autonomy are discussed, as are the relationships between these concepts and those of bureaucratic theory.