An Alternative Approach to Dietary Exposure Assessment

The method of dietary exposure assessment currently used by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Dietary Residue Evaluation System (DRES), combines a consumption distribution derived from the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) 1977-1978 Nationwide Food Consumption Survey (NFCS) with a single estimate of residue level. The National Academy of Sciences'¹' recommended that EPA incorporate both the distribution of residues and the distribution of consumption into their exposure assessment methodology and proposed using a Monte Carlo approach. This paper presents an alternative method, the Joint Distributional Analysis (JDA), that combines the consumption and residue distributions, without relying on random sampling or fitting theoretical distributions like the Monte Carlo method. This method permits simultaneous analysis of the entire diet, including assessing exposure from residues in different foods.     

Imposing the Regular Ultra Passum law in DEA models

Recently there has been some discussion in the literature concerning the nature of scale properties in the Data Envelopment Model (DEA). It has been argued that DEA may not be able to provide reliable estimates of the optimal scale size. We argue in this paper that DEA is well suited to estimate optimal scale size, if DEA is augmented with two additional maintained hypotheses which imply that the DEA-frontier is consistent with smooth curves along rays in input and in output space that obey the Regular Ultra Passum (RUP) law, i.e. monotonically decreasing scale elasticities. A necessary condition for a smooth curve passing through all vertices to obey the RUP-law is presented. If this condition is satisfied then upper and lower bounds for the marginal product at each vertex are presented. It is shown that any set of feasible marginal products will correspond to a smooth curve passing through all points with a monotonic decreasing scale elasticity. The proof is constructive in the sense that an estimator of the curve is provided with the desired properties. A typical DEA based return to scale analysis simply reports whether or not a DMU is at the optimal scale based on point estimates of scale efficiency. A contribution of this paper is that we provide a method which allows us to determine in what interval optimal scale is located.     

The transition from in-home services to out-of-home care: A Danish register-based study

Objective

This register-based study describes the transition from in home-based care to placements in out-of-home care. It also describes whether children who enter care directly differ from children who enter care after episodes of in home-based care.

Method

The study includes all children who entered the child protection system of a larger regional social service system in Denmark from 1993 to 2006 (N = 9961). Graphs of cumulative incidences were used to describe transitions into out-of-home care within two years after in home-based care started. Cox regression models are used to estimate the impacts of child and parental characteristics. In addition, Chi² tests are used to identify differences between children who enter care directly and children who receive in home-based care.

Results

Results indicate that the majority of children do not enter out-of-home care but that risks differ among age groups. Covariates did not predict transitions into out-of-home care for those who entered in-home care after becoming teenagers. Especially for those who entered in-home care before entering their teens, the psychiatric histories of the mothers and the children predicted the transitions into out-of-home care. Immigration background was a protective factor for those who entered in-home care as pre-scholars. Depending on the age group, low birth weight, children's fathers' and mothers' psychiatric histories, and single parentship were all characteristics more likely to be associated with children who entered care directly. Children who entered care directly differed from children who entered care within two years after an in home-based service had been initiated on covariates that described psychiatric history.     

Der Fragebogen Karls des Grossen

A document compiled by Charlemagne in the year 811 can be viewed as a precursor to the structured survey and thus as a part of the very beginnings of empirical social research. Charlemagne intended to use the list, which resembles a discussion guide employed in an intensive interview, to exert moral pressure on the secular and clerical leaders of his realm, who were gathered for a parliamentary assembly. At the same time, however, it is also evident that at least some of the questions were designed to gather information on the mood of the population throughout the empire. These questions were probably passed on to the sovereigns and clerics in the provinces. Another document from the year 811 would seem to indicate that answers to similar lists of questions did in fact arrive at the emperor’s court. Both documents attest to a means of gathering information that could be viewed as the first attempt to conduct at an opinion survey.     

That Teenage Feeling

This article deconstructs news media representations of two custody abductions that took place in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-2000s. In the first case, the father abducted his five-month-old daughter; in the second case, the mother was held responsible for the abduction of her six-year-old son even though he was in the presence of his maternal grandfather. The analysis demonstrates that the media's pejorative construction of the mothers at the center of both cases was facilitated by a number of significant gaps and silences in the narration of the abductions. These silences, in lending support to a fathers' rights construction of custody disputes in which mothers are to blame for dispossessing fathers of their children, reveal the media's reliance on pro-father discourses, particularly fathers' rights discourse.     

Community And Commitment Among Catholics: A Test Of Local-Cosmopolitan Theory*

This study tests Roof's (1972,1976,1978) local-cosmopolitan theory of religious commitment using a sample of Catholics living in west Tennessee. Consistent with Roof's theory, local community reference (localism) had significant positive effects on four measures of religious beliefs and played a limited role in mediating the effects of education, size of hometown, and length of residence on these measures. However, localism had inconsequential effects on four behavioral measures of religiosity. Possible explanations for these findings and implications they have for the generalizability of the theory are discussed.