A Stochastic Model to Assess the Effect of Meat Inspection Practices on the Contamination of the Pig Carcasses

The objective of meat inspection is to promote animal and public health by preventing, detecting, and controlling hazards originating from animals. With the improvements of sanitary level in pig herds, the hazards profile has shifted and the inspection procedures no longer target major foodborne pathogens (i.e., not risk based). Additionally, carcass manipulations performed when searching for macroscopic lesions can lead to cross‐contamination. We therefore developed a stochastic model to quantitatively describe cross‐contamination when consecutive carcasses are submitted to classic inspection procedures. The microbial hazard used to illustrate the model was Salmonella, the data set was obtained from Brazilian slaughterhouses, and some simplifying assumptions were made. The model predicted that due to cross‐contamination during inspection, the prevalence of contaminated carcass surfaces increased from 1.2% to 95.7%, whereas the mean contamination on contaminated surfaces decreased from 1 logCFU/cm² to ?0.87 logCFU/cm², and the standard deviations decreased from 0.65 to 0.19. These results are explained by the fact that, due to carcass manipulations with hands, knives, and hooks, including the cutting of contaminated lymph nodes, Salmonella is transferred to previously uncontaminated carcasses, but in small quantities. These small quantities can easily go undetected during sampling. Sensitivity analyses gave insight into the model performance and showed that the touching and cutting of lymph nodes during inspection can be an important source of carcass contamination. The model can serve as a tool to support discussions on the modernization of pig carcass inspection.     

Disentangling the Governance Configurations of Strategic Spatial Plan-Making in European Urban Regions

This paper is aimed at assessing and disentangling how territorial governance configurations influence contemporary practices in strategic plan-making in 14 European urban regions. The findings allow us to distinguish three dominant practices: i) plan-making shaped by consensus building and multilevel government cooperation; ii) plan-making shaped by the involvement of profit-oriented actors and negotiations, and iii) plan-making shaped by consolidated planning practice. To truly grasp plan-making practice, it is necessary to scrutinize who rules and who is ruled while negotiations are unfolding, as well as the extent to which private actors’ interests influence how spatial development goals and strategies are defined.     

Application of the OCRA Method in the sugar cane harvest and its repercussion on the workers' health. Preliminary study

In Brazil the sugar ethanol industry has had strong growth in the last 10 years, sometimes due to the growing sugar exportation, sometimes due to the alcohol production for automobile fuel and for exportation. Despite the growing mechanization of the raw material harvest (sugar cane), the manual work still persists. The development of this article was based in the application of the OCRA Method in the sugar cane harvesting process, to evaluate the risks to the upper limbs by repetitive movements and epidemiologically prove the ratio risk x harm to the heath of the workers, as well as the probability of developing improvements in the working conditions. The analysis process consists of studying the work organization, the risks to the health of the worker and the distribution of the recovery periods during the working day.     

“I Did Not Get that Job Because of a Black Man...”: The Story Lines and Testimonies of Color-Blind Racism

In this paper we discuss the dominant racial stories that accompany color-blind racism, the dominant post–civil rights racial ideology, and asses their ideological role. Using interview data from the 1997 Survey of College Students Social Attitudes and the 1998 Detroit Area Study, we document the prevalence of four story lines and two types of testimonies among whites. We also provide data on ideological dissidence among some whites (we label them racial progressives) and blacks. We show that although these stories, and the racial ideology they reinforce, have become dominant, neither goes uncontested.     

Choosing Choices: Agenda Selection With Uncertain Issues

We study selection rules: voting procedures used by committees to choose whether to place an issue on their agenda. At the selection stage of the model, committee members are uncertain about their final preferences. They only have some private information about these preferences. We show that voters become more conservative when the selection rule itself becomes more conservative. The decision rule has the opposite effect. We compare these voting procedures to the designation of an agenda setter among the committee and to a utilitarian social planner with all the ex interim private information.     

Quadratic perturbation expansions of certain functions of eigenvalues and eigenvectors and their application to sensitivity analysis in multivariate methods

Tanaka (1988) lias derived the influence functions, which are equivalent to the perturbation expansions up to linear terms, of two functions of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a real symmetric matrix, and applied them to principal component analysis. The present paper deals with the perturbation expansions up to quadratic terms of the same functions and discusses their application to sensitivity analysis in multivariate methods, in particular, principal component analysis and principal factor analysis. Numerical examples are given to show how the approximation improves with the quadratic terms.     

Nonparametric product partition models for multiple change-points analysis

ABSTRACT

We propose an extension of parametric product partition models. We name our proposal nonparametric product partition models because we associate a random measure instead of a parametric kernel to each set within a random partition. Our methodology does not impose any specific form on the marginal distribution of the observations, allowing us to detect shifts of behaviour even when dealing with heavy-tailed or skewed distributions. We propose a suitable loss function and find the partition of the data having minimum expected loss. We then apply our nonparametric procedure to multiple change-point analysis and compare it with PPMs and with other methodologies that have recently appeared in the literature. Also, in the context of missing data, we exploit the product partition structure in order to estimate the distribution function of each missing value, allowing us to detect change points using the loss function mentioned above. Finally, we present applications to financial as well as genetic data.     

Social workers and intercultural mediators: challenges for collaboration and intercultural awareness

ABSTRACT

Social work in Europe is facing numerous challenges in terms of promoting the participation of migrants and their descendants in super-diverse societies. This study investigates collaboration between social workers and intercultural mediators based on international debate and fieldwork in Italy. Does social work require collaboration with other professions specialised in intercultural relations? What are the characteristics of intercultural professionals? What are the pros and cons of collaboration between social workers and intercultural mediators? This study shows that local social services need to work with intercultural mediators, allowing local social services to implement various strategies for tackling cultural and linguistic barriers with their clients and rely on professionals inside or outside their own. Furthermore, intercultural mediators tend to have weak and heterogeneous training backgrounds and working conditions. This article aims to contribute to the debate on the welfare reform process to support migrants and their descendants’ equal rights and participation in society, highlighting the need for collaboration between interculturally aware social workers and intercultural mediators to tackle institutional structural weaknesses in such professions as part of an organisational innovation process in social-welfare institutions.     

A non-parametric regression approach to repeated measures analysis in cancer experiments

The validity conditions for univariate or multivariate analyses of repeated measures are highly sensitive to the usual assumptions. In cancer experiments, the data are frequently heteroscedastic and strongly correlated with time, and standard analyses do not perform well. Alternative non-parametric approaches can contribute to an analysis of these longitudinal data. This paper describes a method for such situations, using the results from a comparative experiment in which tumour volume is evaluated over time. First, we apply the non-parametric approach proposed by Raz in constructing a randomization Ftest for comparing treatments. A local polynomial fit is conducted to estimate the growth curves and confidence intervals for each treatment. Finally, this technique is used to estimate the velocity of tumour growth.     

A Household-Based Distribution-Sensitive Human Development Index: An Empirical Application to Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru

In measuring human development, one of the main concerns relates to the inclusion of a measure that penalizes inequalities in the distribution of achievements across the population. Using indicators from nationally representative household surveys and census data, this paper proposes a straightforward methodology to estimate a household-based distribution-sensitive human development index aggregated through generalized means. The evidence shows that the losses in human development due to inequality reach up 22, 29 and 57% in Mexico, Peru and Nicaragua, respectively. Among dimensions, the loss in the income index reaches up 61% in Nicaragua, while the education index appears as the most sensitive in the case of Mexico and Peru, with a percentage of loss between 38 and 48%. The importance of household-level calculations is highlighted when we compare the indices computed from the entire distribution with those existing indices computed for quintiles of the distribution, which minimizes the losses due to inequality. Overall, the estimations evidence a higher sensitivity of the index to inequality, and therefore an important space for public action to reduce inequality that could involve positive development returns.