School Students at Work

Over half of three hundred fifth-formers surveyed had taken holiday jobs and over a third worked part-time during the school term. The average remuneration for those who worked was $1.75 for boys and $1.20 for girls and the average time in employment per week was almost twenty hours in the holidays and about seven and a half during term. While the respondents reported that they worked for money and to gain acceptance in the adult world, a majority of them stated that they favoured compulsory work experience, advocating that all students should spend time on farms or in factories as part of their education.     

Partisanship and Support for Propositions on the Ballot: A State-Level Longitudinal Study

Objective . Previous studies suggest that there is reason to believe that changes in the partisan composition of a state's electorate will be associated with changes in the level of support for certain types of propositions on the ballot. Scholars, however, differ over the reasons for this relationship. Some have suggested the importance of party differences over substantive issues. Others have indicated the importance of differences among partisans in their willingness to defer to legislative judgments or recommendations. Still others have pointed to the importance of partisan cue taking; for example, that Republicans are more likely to vote for propositions put on the ballot by Republican legislatures and Democrats are likely to oppose such measures. We test these rival hypotheses. Methods . Using multivariate analysis and time series techniques, we examine voting patterns on 361 propositions submitted to voters in Arizona from 1912 to 1996. Results . We find that increases in the Republican vote were significantly linked to increase in support for measures submitted by state legislatures, particularly legislatures controlled by Republicans. Conclusions . The findings give some support to deference theory and to the notion that a subtle process of partisan cue taking may be involved in proposition voting.     

Estimating numbers of infectious units from serial dilution assays

Summary.  The paper concerns the design and analysis of serial dilution assays to estimate the infectivity of a sample of tissue when it is assumed that the sample contains a finite number of indivisible infectious units such that a subsample will be infectious if it contains one or more of these units. The aim of the study is to estimate the number of infectious units in the original sample. The standard approach to the analysis of data from such a study is based on the assumption of independence of aliquots both at the same dilution level and at different dilution levels, so that the numbers of infectious units in the aliquots follow independent Poisson distributions. An alternative approach is based on calculation of the expected value of the total number of samples tested that are not infectious. We derive the likelihood for the data on the basis of the discrete number of infectious units, enabling calculation of the maximum likelihood estimate and likelihood-based confidence intervals. We use the exact probabilities that are obtained to compare the maximum likelihood estimate with those given by the other methods in terms of bias and standard error and to compare the coverage of the confidence intervals. We show that the methods have very similar properties and conclude that for practical use the method that is based on the Poisson assumption is to be recommended, since it can be implemented by using standard statistical software. Finally we consider the design of serial dilution assays, concluding that it is important that neither the dilution factor nor the number of samples that remain untested should be too large.     

The Accessibility of Public Spaces for People with Dementia: a new priority for the 'open city'

The social model of disability de-medicalises disability and politicises it as an issue of universal rights. However, the rights of people with dementia have been less strongly advocated than those of people with physical disabilities. This is particularly the case with environmental planning and design. The needs of people with dementia are now informing the design of residential homes and day centres, but the issue of accessibility to public spaces and amenities has been almost completely neglected. Many outdoor environments such as shopping centres or parks may be inhospitable for people with dementia because they are disorientating, difficult to interpret and navigate, threatening or distressing. The article reviews the literature on indoor design for dementia, reports on research investigating the accessibility of outdoor environments, and describes a new approach using virtual reality technology to enable people with dementia to identify and test outdoor design and planning improvements themselves.