A sociological economy of HIV/AIDS vaccine partnerships: case studies from Africa and India

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) are perhaps the key emergent theme in the delivery of what the socio-economic literature terms global public goods. In light of the problems relating to the distribution of health services and products in developing countries, partnerships between public and private institutions are often proposed as an innovative mechanism to reconnect and reorient supply and demand. In this area, the International Aids Vaccine Initiative (IAVI), which is driving the development of candidate HIV/AIDS vaccines through injections of capital into the research process, represents a significant case study. IAVI seeks to form partnerships between key public and private interests committing them to sharing the risks, costs and benefits of research into an effective and affordable vaccine against HIV. Our empirical work covers partnerships based in several countries including Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and India. Our early findings highlight IAVI's ability as a learning institution as it adapts its institutional arrangements to various local contexts. An offshoot of this appears to be the building of real local capacity.     

A bayesian test for a two-way contingency table using independence priors

One method of testing for independence in a two-way table is based on the Bayes factor, the ratio of the likelihoods under the independence hypothesis H and the alternative hypothesis H. The main difficulty in this approach is the specification of prior distributions on the composite hypotheses H and H. A new Bayesian test statistic is constructed by using a prior distribution on H that is concentrated about the “independence surface” H. Approximations are proposed which simplify the computation of the test statistic. The values of the Bayes factor are compared with values of statistics proposed by Gunel and Dickey (1974), Good and Crook (1987), and Spiegelhalter and Smith (1982) for a number of two-way tables. This investigation suggests a strong relationship between the new statistic and the p-value.     

Testing for a trend in exponential means: A two-moment approximation to the null distribution of the likelihood-ratio statistic

The likelihood-ratio test statistic for testing homogeneity of exponential means with an ordered alternative has a rather complex null distribution. Expressions for the mean and variance of its null distribution are derived, and the accuracy of a two-moment chi-squared approximation is studied. The coefficients needed to implement the approximation are tabled. The application of these results in testing for a constant versus a nondecreasing intensity in a nonhomogeneous Poisson process is also discussed.     

THE JOYS OF GARDENING: COLLECTIVIST AND BUREAUCRATIC CULTURES IN CONFLICT

Collectives and bureaucracies differ not only in structure and values, but interpret the social world and engage in actions based on quite different themes, symbols, and meanings. These diverse patterns of symbolic discourse, or organizational cultures, are assessed in the case of the recent urban gardening movement. Although government agencies assisted the movement by providing resources to movement collectives and by establishing thousands of urban gardening projects, collectives and bureaucracies had different meanings for what appeared to be the same experience. A comparison of how each described the benefits of urban gardening and structured the gardening experience for participants show serious underlying differences between these organizational cultures and a source of potential bureaucratic/collectivist conflict. Implications for understanding apparent official opposition to collectivist movements are also assessed.