Spatial heterogeneity in drinking water sources in the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), Ghana

Population and Environment - Universal access to safe drinking water is essential to population health and well-being, as recognized in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). To develop targeted...     

Quality of life indicators and health: Current status and emerging conceptions

Quality of life is an increasingly common theme in the health status and health promotion literatures. Six approaches that consider quality of life and health are reviewed. These are (a) health-related quality of life; (b) quality of life as social diagnosis in health promotion; (c) quality of life among persons with developmental disabilities; (d) quality of life as social indicators; (e) the Centre for Health Promotion (University of Toronto) model, and (f) Lindstrom's quality of life model. Each approach is considered as to its emphasis on objective or subjective indicators, individual or system-level measurement, value-laden or value-neutral assumptions, and potential relationship to social policy and social change goals. The links among the social indicators, quality of life, and health promotions areas are examined.     

Adult perpetrator gender asymmetries in child sexual assault victim selection: results from the 2000 National Incident-Based Report System

Data from the 2000 National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) show that while males make up about nine out of every 10 adult sexual assault perpetrators, totaling about 26,878 incidents within the reporting period, females account for about one out of 10 perpetrators, totaling about 1,162 incidents. Male sexual assault perpetrators offend against child victims about 25% of the time and predominantly choose female child victims, whereas female perpetrators offend against child victims about 40% of the time and choose child victims of both genders equally. Male perpetrators offend against adolescent victims about 40% of the time, and once again tend to choose female adolescent victims. Female perpetrators offend against adolescent victims a comparable amount of time (about 45%), and for forcible offenses (rape, sodomy, sexual assault with an object, and forcible fondling) choose adolescent victims of both genders equally, while for non-forcible offenses (non-forcible incest and statutory rape) they tend to choose predominantly male victims. Finally, adult male sexual assault perpetrators choose adult victims about 36% of the time while female perpetrators choose adult victims only 16% of the time. Implications for professionals are discussed, including recommendations to aid in correct identification of adult perpetrators and child/adolescent victims of sexual assault.     

Support system for management of shares ergonomic

This article discusses the development of a computerized support to demands for treatment of a wide spectrum and diverse nature. Developed under SPM platform (Situa??o, Problema e Melhoria), the practitioner seeks to provide an ergonomic aid from the identification and characterization of the processes of analysis demands. The interest of a technological support the practice of ergonomics is a domestic origin, which already features a wide universe. For purposes of this article will be drawn the line defined by the universe in the Federal Public Service occupations within the guidelines set Subsystem Integrated System for Health Care Workers of the Federal Government. The development of this system initially intended to assist the practitioner in ergonomics mapping situations in which the federal public servant has been undergoing for the second time that can classify and then treat them.     

Flexible mixture modeling via the multivariate t distribution with?the?Box-Cox transformation: an?alternative to?the?skew-t distribution

Cluster analysis is the automated search for groups of homogeneous observations in a data set. A popular modeling approach for clustering is based on finite normal mixture models, which assume that each cluster is modeled as a multivariate normal distribution. However, the normality assumption that each component is symmetric is often unrealistic. Furthermore, normal mixture models are not robust against outliers; they often require extra components for modeling outliers and/or give a poor representation of the data. To address these issues, we propose a new class of distributions, multivariate t distributions with the Box-Cox transformation, for mixture modeling. This class of distributions generalizes the normal distribution with the more heavy-tailed t distribution, and introduces skewness via the Box-Cox transformation. As a result, this provides a unified framework to simultaneously handle outlier identification and data transformation, two interrelated issues. We describe an Expectation-Maximization algorithm for parameter estimation along with transformation selection. We demonstrate the proposed methodology with three real data sets and simulation studies. Compared with a wealth of approaches including the skew-t mixture model, the proposed t mixture model with the Box-Cox transformation performs favorably in terms of accuracy in the assignment of observations, robustness against model misspecification, and selection of the number of components.     

A Review of Research on Welfare and Domestic Violence

In this article we review the growing body of research literature on domestic violence and welfare. We summarize and critique the existing research on domestic violence and welfare in several areas: prevalence of domestic violence among women receiving welfare; the relationship of domestic violence to theiremployment; and physical health and mental health, child support, andevaluations of policies and programs. We also raise some methodological concerns that can inform interpretation of existing data. We examine the relevance of the research for practice and policy, particularly for the implementation of the Family Violence Option. This review includes published research as well as unpublished studies presented at recent conferences.     

From depth psychology to depth sociology: Freud,Jung, and Lévi-Strauss

Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to consider some of the common themes in the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss, and to offer some observations on their historical significance. Firstly, all three theorists were historical pessimists. While it may be true that their historical pessimism reflected their class position as bourgeois social theorists in the age of mass society, I think it is equally important to recognize that utilization of the theory of the unconscious itself creates a paradigm with strongly conservative and anti-utopian implications. Their dependence on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is significant. His work, early in the nineteenth century, lay the foundations both for the theory of the unconscious and for the historical pessimism that went with it. His metaphysical pessimism lies behind not only Freud's Libidolehre and Jung's psychic energy, but also behind the somber prophetic, cataclysmic imagery employed by Claude Lévi-Strauss from Tristes Tropiques to L'Homme Nu.The following passage, which draws to a finale the pessimism of Tristes Tropiques, a very Schopenhauerian book, is typical: The world began without the human race and it will end without it. The institutions, manners, and customs which I shall have spent my life cataloguing and trying to understand are an ephemeral efflorescence of a creative process in relation to which they are meaningless, unless it be that they allow humanity to play its destined role. That role does not, however assign to our race a position of independence. Nor, even if man himself is condemned, are his vain efforts directed towards the arresting of a universal process of decline. Far from it: his role is itself a machine, brought perhaps to a greater point of perfection than any other, whose activity hastens the disintegration of an initial order and precipitates a powerfully organized Matter towards a condition of inertia which grows even greater and will one day prove definitive. From the day when he first learned how to breath and how to keep himself alive through the discovery of fire and right up to the invention of the atomic and thermonuclear devices of the present day, man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated. No doubt he has built cities and brought the soil to fruition; but if we examine these activities closely we shall find that they also are inertia-producing machines, whose scale and speed of action are infinitely greater than the amount of organization implied in them. As for the creations of the human mind, they are meaningful only in relation to that mind, and will disappear into nothingness as soon as it ceases to exist. Taken as a whole, therefore, civilization can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism: tempting as it would be to regard it as our universe's best hope of survival, its true function is to produce what physicists call entropy: inertia, that is to say. Every scrap of conversation, every line set up in type, establishes a communication between two interlocutors, levelling what had previously existed on two different planes and had had for that reason, a greater degree of organization. Entropology, not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.And yet I exist. Not in any way, admittedly, as an individual: for what am I, in that respect, but a constantly renewed stake in the struggle between the society, formed by the several million nerve-cells which take shelter in the anthill of the brain, and my body, which serves that society as a robot?I have quoted this passage at length because it gives a vivid feeling of the profound metaphysical despair that lies at the roots of Lévi-Strauss' work. In his recent writings and interviews his pessimism has become even more pronounced; he seems convinced that the entire civilized world is moving rapidly and inexorably towards its ecological self-destruction.A second theme that runs through the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss is the concern with polarities and their dialectical reconciliation or transcendence. Freud's theory was shot through with polarities-one thinks of the dualism of instincts, and the polarities of pleasure/unpleasure, active/passive, subject/object, etc. In the eternal struggle between these immortal adversaries, Life and Death, Super-Ego and Id, Mind and Body, Freud placed the Ego as an integrating and synthesizing principle. Freud's proclivity for dualistic ideas was shared by Jung. The interests of Jung and Lévi-Strauss in the dialectical reconciliation of the opposites was already discussed above. Once opposites are seen to be in relationship, as parts of a system, they cease to be opposites and become polarities.Schopenhauer provides a link to another common theme shared by these writers, the belief that everything is inter-related and mutually attuned. Schopenhauer believed that physical causality was only one of the rulers of the world; at a deeper level there was a kind of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness was rather like a dream compared to wakefulness. For all of these thinkers individual consciousness was based on a larger system of intercommunications, but whereas this theme was not stressed by Freud, it became central in the works of Jung and Lévi-Strauss.As we have seen throughout this essay, Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss were committed to the notion that there is a hidden order in the mental and cultural life of mankind, and they were convinced that this hidden order can be discovered by human reason. Behind the diversity of human cultures they believed that they saw an underlying unity, and they explained this unity in terms of what they believed to be a universality of unconscious processes of the human mind. Freud and Jung tried to explain their notions of the unconscious in terms of energy, drawing their models from physics. Freud's libido theory was more physical, Jung's more psychical, but they both remained tied to an energy model. I believe that one of Claude Lévi-Strauss' most important contributions to the social sciences was to liberate the notion of the unconscious from this energy theory. Instead, he spoke of it as being like a language, employing the ideas of system and structure and particularly the concept of the symbolic function drawn from structural linguistics and information theory.In Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology System and Structure are treated as belonging to the realm of Information/Communication rather than as belonging to the realm of matter/energy. Structure is the ensemble of laws which govern the behavior of the system, and the components in the system are largely interchangeable. They do not necessarily derive from the same level of organization as the system which controls their various combinations, permutations and structural transformations. As we saw above, for Lévi-Strauss the unconscious is empty. It is simply a universe of rules similar to the phonological laws that govern languages. In this usage, the unconscious is a term designating a process of the human mind, a process which operates in all human cultures according to the same laws. In fact, the unconscious is nothing but the totality of these laws and relationships. Even the world of symbolism—though it exhibits an infinite variety of contents-is always bound and limited by these structural laws, because all human beings are bound by the same mental constraints. In the Kantian tradition, Lévi-Strauss sees his task as analyzing the operations of the human mind (l'esprit humain) within these contraints, and I think it is fair to say that his work is a kind of critique of sociological and anthropological reason in the same sense that Wilhelm Dilthey's was a critique of historical reason.In this paper I have attempted to show that there was a progressive development in the theory of the unconscious from Freud, through Jung, to Lévi-Strauss. Jung, working in German Switzerland, was more sympathetic to German idealism and historicism than was Freud. In his work Jung blended this German philosophical tradition with French sociological theory. This unique amalgam could have led him to elaborate a depth sociology correlative with his depth psychology, but his search for his own historical predecessors led him to investigate the psycho-historical significance of mysticism, spiritualism and alchemy instead. He was always convinced of the power, importance and significance of the collective representations that guide and shape our perception and experience. Jung wrote: We should never forget that in any psychological discussion, we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. Modern civilized man's belief in the sole reality of the individual, along with his belief that he is born a tabula rasa, was simply an illusion, a modern myth. At our deepest core level, each of us is united to all mankind and to the history of the human race. Whether we call this deepest level society with Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, the will and its representations with Schopenhauer, the wider self through which saving experiences come with William James, the Unconscious with Freud, or the Psyche with Jung, or the structures of the human mind with Lévi-Strauss, depends on our primary assumptions, metaphysics and temperament. They are but different terms pointing towards the one common transpersonal background structure that makes possible both human experience and communication of that experience.Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, p. 397. Compare L'Homme Nu, p. 620.Anthony Wilden: System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange (London, 1972), pp. 242–243.Jung: The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, 1. (Princeton, 1969), p. 268. Theory and Society, 3 (1976) 303–338