Prevalence rate of DSM mental disorders among adolescents living in residential group homes of the French Child Welfare System

Purpose

To determine the prevalence of some major mental disorders among adolescents living in a residential group home and the distribution of these disorders by gender.

Method

The participants included 183 adolescents (13–17 years old) living in residential group homes of the Child Welfare System in the county of Bouches-du-Rhône (South of France). A structured psychiatric Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children was used to assess the existence of Anxiety Disorder (AD), Major Depression (MD), Conduct Disorder (CD), Eating Disorder (ED), Enuresia (En), Psychosis Screen (PS) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) among the study participants over the six-month period before the assessment was taken. The existence of Suicide Attempts (SA) during the lifetime of each child was also assessed.

Results

Of the youths qualified, 48.6% as having at least one psychiatric disorder during the last six months (AD: 28.4%; CD: 15.3%; MD: 14.8%; PS: 18.6%; ADHD: 3.8%), and SA have been reported in 23% of them. Females were more affected than boys (p < 0.001) with 64.9% having at least one disorder compared to 36.8% of boys; AD: 49.3% vs. 13.2%; and MD: 27.3% vs. 5.6%.

Conclusion

Adolescents living in residential group homes of the Child Welfare System in France have notably high rates of mental disorder (about three times more than those of the general population of the same age), similar to the patterns found in adolescents in North America and Europe. These data are the first of their kind in France and will guide necessary changes to the child welfare system.     

CAPITAL INFLOWS,FINANCIAL STRUCTURE AND HOUSING BOOMS

We use a panel VAR to study the effect of shocks to capital inflows, which are identified using sign restrictions, on the housing market in OECD countries. To explore how effects of these shocks change with the structure of the mortgage market and the degree of mortgage securitization, we allow the VAR coefficients to vary with mortgage‐market characteristics. Our results indicate that capital‐inflow shocks have a significant and positive effect on real house prices, real credit available to the private sector, and real residential investment. The responses of these variables are stronger in countries with more developed mortgage markets and in countries where securitization is allowed.     

Creeping-In als neues Instrument des Erwerbs von Unternehmenskontrollrechten ?C Taktische Meisterleistung oder unkalkulierbares Risiko?

A modern method for (partial) acquisitions is the so called creeping-in tactic. In this procedure the acquirer uses cash settled equity swaps to undermine WpHG notification requirements systematically until she holds at least 30% of the voting rights in the target company. In this case the acquirer has the obligation to submit a mandatory takeover bid for the remaining outstanding shares. In many cases acquirers are not interested in a complete acquisition of the target company but rather want to make use of low shareholder presence levels during the general assembly and therefore have the opportunity to significantly influence fundamental decisions like, e.g. allocation of the net income, corporate actions etc. The mandatory takeover bid has to be equal at least to the three months average share price. At first glance, this involves a high risk of an unintentional acceptance by the targets?? shareholders. The goal of this paper is to analyze the effectiveness of the mandatory takeover bid. We show that with a temporal shift of the mandatory takeover bid to a point in time when the share price is above the three months average share price an unintentional acceptance is virtually impossible. In a logit-regression company specific context factors for the acceptance risk are indentified and rejected.     

Validation of Multimedia Models Assessing Exposure to PAHs—The SOLEX Study

Polluted soils have become a public health problem. While population exposure to soil pollutants is generally quantified using multimedia models, their estimations have not been validated, and studies that attempted to do so are scarce. The objective of the SOLEX study was to compare the predictions of pyrene exposure levels (converted into 1 hydroxypyrene) computed by several models with the results of urinary 1-hydropyrene (1-HOP) assays among 110 employees working at three sites polluted during their past use as manufactured gas plants. Four models were used: AERIS (Canada), CalTOX (California, USA), CLEA (UK), and HESP (The Netherlands). Three occupational exposure scenarios--with office, mixed, and outdoor workers--were constructed, based upon job activities during two measurement campaigns, one in winter and one in summer. The exposure levels estimated by the four models could differ markedly (from 7 up to 80 times) according to the exposure scenario. Also, the predominant exposure routes differed according to the model (direct soil ingestion for HESP and CalTOX, inhalation for AERIS, and dermal absorption for CLEA). The predictions of CalTOX are consistent with the 1-HOP measurements for all the scenarios. For HESP, the consistency is observed for the scenarios, office and mixed, for which the pyrene level in the soil is low. AERIS and CLEA yield results that are systematically above the 1-HOP measurements. This study confirms that validation of the models is crucial and points out to the need to proceed to assess components of the models that are the most influential using appropriate statistical analysis in combination with true field data.     

The babelisation of debate on GM maize via the media in southern Africa in 2002

The operations of public debate on science in the media have been little understood in southern Africa. Public sphere theory has not specifically addressed the complexities of debate on science in public, in the media, and science communication in general. This article focuses on media debate centred on genetically modified maize in 2002 in southern Africa in order to illuminate such operations. The article argues that the debate became a cacophony of voices, or what I term ‘babelised’, because the media did not actively orchestrate the discussion. Instead, they relay‐mediated the various contributions to the debate. Such ‘babelisation’, the article argues, appears to be an inevitable consequence of the journalistic practices inherent in newsmaking.     

What Do We Mean by Performativity in Organizational and Management Theory? The Uses and Abuses of Performativity

John Austin introduced the formulation ‘performative utterance’ in his 1962 book How to Do Things with Words. This term and the related concept of performativity have subsequently been interpreted in numerous ways by social scientists and philosophers such as Lyotard, Butler, Callon and Barad, leading to the coexistence of several foundational perspectives on performativity. This paper reviews and evaluates critically how organization and management theory (OMT) scholars have used these perspectives, and how the power of performativity has, or has not, stimulated new theory‐building. In performing a historical and critical review of performativity in OMT, the authors’ analysis reveals the uses, abuses and under‐uses of the concept by OMT scholars. It also reveals the lack of both organizational conceptualizations of performativity and analysis of how performativity is organized. Ultimately, the authors’ aim is to provoke a ‘performative turn’ in OMT by unleashing the power of the performativity concept to generate new and stronger organizational theories.     

Frontex: A Literature Review

Frontex is the EU agency in charge of managing the external borders of the European Union. Its budget and tasks have expanded dramatically since it was founded in 2004. Academic attention for Frontex has likewise increased. This article provides an overview of the existing literature on Frontex. In total, 72 articles were selected and analysed. Five dominant themes of research emerged from this review: Frontex’ activities, the agency’s characteristics, its operational effects, the issue of human rights and its position in the EU bureaucracy. Recurring debates and relevant findings in these research strands are reported. In the final section, a research agenda with recommendations for future studies is formulated.     

On a measure of information gain for regression models in survival analysis

Papers dealing with measures of predictive power in survival analysis have seen their independence of censoring, or their estimates being unbiased under censoring, as the most important property. We argue that this property has been wrongly understood. Discussing the so-called measure of information gain, we point out that we cannot have unbiased estimates if all values, greater than a given time τ, are censored. This is due to the fact that censoring before τ has a different effect than censoring after τ. Such τ is often introduced by design of a study. Independence can only be achieved under the assumption of the model being valid after τ, which is impossible to verify. But if one is willing to make such an assumption, we suggest using multiple imputation to obtain a consistent estimate. We further show that censoring has different effects on the estimation of the measure for the Cox model than for parametric models, and we discuss them separately. We also give some warnings about the usage of the measure, especially when it comes to comparing essentially different models.     

Endothelial progenitor cell therapy for atherosclerosis: the philosopher's stone for an aging population?

Much of the increased risk for atherosclerosis progression with age may be a result of age-related declines in the capacity of precursor cells to repair damage in the arterial endothelium. To estimate the impact of progenitor cell therapy for atherosclerosis on cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality, life expectancy, and survival, as compared with the lifetime control of conventional risk factors, we modeled the health effects of bone marrow-derived endothelial progenitor cell therapy using data from the 1950 to 1996 follow-up of the Framingham Heart Study. To model cardiovascular disease mortality, we assumed that progenitor cell therapy was applied at age 30, with the effect assumed to be a 10-year delay in atherosclerosis progression. Age projections were constructed analytically using the stochastic process model for risk factor dynamics and mortality and microsimulation techniques. We considered three types of interventions: (i) keeping risk factors within selected limits to model current clinical recommendations; (ii) an age shift of 10 years to model the effects of progenitor cell therapy; and (iii) elimination of a competing risk (such as cancer). Our study suggests that progenitor cell therapy might increase life expectancy in the population as much as the complete elimination of cancer (in females, an additional 3.67 versus 3.37 years; in males, an additional 5.94 versus 2.86 years, respectively).