Empirical Prediction Intervals for County Population Forecasts

Population forecasts entail a significant amount of uncertainty, especially for long-range horizons and for places with small or rapidly changing populations. This uncertainty can be dealt with by presenting a range of projections or by developing statistical prediction intervals. The latter can be based on models that incorporate the stochastic nature of the forecasting process, on empirical analyses of past forecast errors, or on a combination of the two. In this article, we develop and test prediction intervals based on empirical analyses of past forecast errors for counties in the United States. Using decennial census data from 1900 to 2000, we apply trend extrapolation techniques to develop a set of county population forecasts; calculate forecast errors by comparing forecasts to subsequent census counts; and use the distribution of errors to construct empirical prediction intervals. We find that empirically-based prediction intervals provide reasonably accurate predictions of the precision of population forecasts, but provide little guidance regarding their tendency to be too high or too low. We believe the construction of empirically-based prediction intervals will help users of small-area population forecasts measure and evaluate the uncertainty inherent in population forecasts and plan more effectively for the future.     

Quality_Family Deployment: A New Perspective in Determining Priority Importance for Improving Work Performance in Organization

Determining priority importance is a matter of concerns among the organization to improve their performance. One of the important aspects that should be considered by the organization is management of human resources, comprising of members who have their own family life. In this paper, we deliver a new perspective for organization to provide priority importance for their members with respect to family matters in order to inculcate the sense of belonging in the organization. To be effective in considering family matters in the organizational policy making, closer look of family characteristics are required. The idea of translating several family characteristics as quality variables and applying the quality function deployment (QFD) method to these variables could present a new way of improving the decision making in the organization by considering the process of decision in the family. Quality function deployment for family (QFDF) produces a friendly interpretation of a highly complex and intangible matters around family life; thus, making the assessment of a family easier. QFD is applied on the data gathered from a questionnaire survey based on 1,213 families in West Malaysia, Malaysia. Twelve variables are identified as voice of family, where seven of them are found to have the highest priority of importance. These variables could also be translated into quality variables in the context of organization, the strategy of improvement for the family could be interpreted as strategy for improvement in the organization. Furthermore, the results of this study provide suggestion to improve actions for managing human resource. In the discussion, three most high ranked variables from both perspectives of family and organization are considered.     

复活的记忆——却西德哇传统村运会的应用人类学研究

"阿米嘉顶之韵——却西德哇传统村运会"是由人类学者发起的一项旨在复活当地传统体育游戏、歌舞和其他古老传统的应用人类学项目。本文描述了面对传统文化的衰落,人类学者在青藏高原东北部一个名为却西德哇的藏族村落与村民对话和共同行动的过程。此外,本文还就本次实践在非物质文化遗产保护方面取得的经验做了讨论。     

The evidence base for social support interventions in child and family practice: Emerging issues for research and practice

This paper examines the evidence base for interventions which seek to enhance social support resources for families with children at risk of adverse developmental outcomes. Substantive and methodological issues related to the implementation of social support interventions are discussed and a research agenda for the development, testing and evaluation of such interventions is presented.     

Understanding How Case Managers Use ‘Sabotage’ as a Frame for Clinically Difficult Situations

Case managers are among the direct service providers responsible for engaging people with severe mental illnesses. Understanding how they interpret and respond to clinically difficult situations can inform ways to intervene and reduce service disengagement. This qualitative study explored clinically difficult situations when case managers invoked the term ??sabotage??. Interviews were conducted with 21 case managers and analyzed by co-coders focusing on how case managers used the term sabotage to describe service user behavior. Themes that emerged were attributing sabotage to; fear of success, fear of attaining what you desire, avoidance of responsibility and change, and a lack of structured support. Drawing on the concepts of clinical case management and mental health recovery, we consider implications for the training and supervision of case managers and how services are structured.     

Total and forcing total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of a graph

For a connected graph \(G = \left( V,E\right) \), a set \(S\subseteq E(G)\) is called a total edge-to-vertex monophonic set of a connected graph G if the subgraph induced by S has no isolated edges. The total edge-to-vertex monophonic number \(m_{tev}(G)\) of G is the minimum cardinality of its total edge-to-vertex monophonic set of G. The total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of certain classes of graphs is determined and some of its general properties are studied. Connected graphs of size \(q \ge 3 \) with total edge-to-vertex monophonic number q is characterized. It is shown that for positive integers \(r_{m},d_{m}\) and \(l\ge 4\) with \(r_{m}< d_{m} \le 2 r_{m}\), there exists a connected graph G with \(\textit{rad}_ {m} G = r_{m}\), \(\textit{diam}_ {m} G = d_{m}\) and \(m_{tev}(G) = l\) and also shown that for every integers a and b with \(2 \le a \le b\), there exists a connected graph G such that \( m_{ev}\left( G\right) = b\) and \(m_{tev}(G) = a + b\). A forcing subset for S of minimum cardinality is a minimum forcing subset of S. The forcing total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of S, denoted by \(f_{tev}(S)\) is the cardinality of a minimum forcing subset of S. The forcing total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of G, denoted by \(f_{tev}(G) = \textit{min}\{f_{tev}(S)\}\), where the minimum is taken over all total edge-to-vertex monophonic set S in G. The forcing total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of certain classes of graphs are determined and some of its general properties are studied. It is shown that for every integers a and b with \(0 \le a \le b\) and \(b \ge 2\), there exists a connected graph G such that \(f_{tev}(G) = a\) and \( m _{tev}(G) = b\), where \( f _{tev}(G)\) is the forcing total edge-to-vertex monophonic number of G.     

ENTERTAINING MALTHUS: BREAD,CIRCUSES, AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

Motivated by the basic adage that man does not live by bread alone, we offer a theory of historical economic growth and population dynamics where human beings need food to survive, but enjoy other things, too. Our model imposes a Malthusian constraint on food, but introduces a second good to the analysis that affects living standards without affecting population growth. We show that technological change does a good job explaining historical consumption patterns and population dynamics, including the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Divergence. Our theory stands in contrast to models that assume a single composite good and a Malthusian constraint. These models generate negligible growth prior to the Industrial Revolution. However, recent revisions to historical data show that historical living standards—though obviously much lower than today's—varied over time and space much more than previously thought. These revisions include updates to Maddison's dataset, which served as the basis for many papers taking long‐run stagnation as a point of departure. This new evidence suggests that the assumption of long‐run stagnation is problematic. Our model shows that when we give theoretical accounting of these new observations the Industrial Revolution is much less puzzling. (JEL B10, I31, J1, N1, O30)     

Die Finanzialisierung von Unternehmen

Since the 1990s the financialization of the enterprise is an increasingly important aspect of capitalist development also in Germany. However, more recently a growing number of scholars point at a problematic conceptual stretching of financialization. The term has been defined too differently and ambiguously and has not been distinguished sufficiently from seemingly similar concepts. Financialization has been prematurely identified with a set of fixed effects often condensed to stagist concepts of capitalist development. When analyzing effects financialization has been regarded in isolation without considering interaction effects with other structurations of fields and hence the multi-referentiality of the enterprise. In order to overcome these shortcomings the article proposes a concept for the analysis of firm level financialization which draws on a more general sociological concept of field structuration and dynamics in which the “multi-referential enterprise” operates. Based on this concept the article analyses episodes of financialization in Germany showing its dynamics and limits. Financialization of enterprises proves to be structurally limited, institutionally contested, and unfolds its effects in deferent actor constellations at firm level due to its multiple and contradictory embeddedness.     

Precarity and structural racism in Black youth encounters with police

Youth experience increased surveillance by and involuntary contact with police officers compared with other age groups. Studies that explore the experiences of youth during these encounters are scant and focus on youth with criminal histories. This research aims to explore the experiences of college-attending youth between 18 and 24 years old in two southern states. The study was designed and conducted according to the tenets of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Twelve Black youth were recruited and interviewed between April 2015 and April 2016. Three superordinate themes (and subthemes) were identified: (1) negative feelings towards the police; (2) precarity of police encounters (subthemes: police as a threat to welfare; it could be me; steps to follow during police encounters; behavior is irrelevant) and; (3) police response is part of structural racism (subthemes: racism is everywhere; media contributes to racism). The importance of these findings for social work practice and research will be discussed.