Friends and family: regulation and relationships on the locked ward

This ethnographic project explored the lives of women with learning disabilities on three locked wards. Aspects of these women’s lives were regulated by the service; in particular, relationships with family outside the unit, and peer relationships inside the unit. The women in this study valued these relationships, but they were treated with ambivalence by the service. Success in future community integration and accessing community resources can be dependent on the nature and quality of relationships with others, and therefore services should acknowledge that service-users need to forge relationships of their own choosing.     

Justice Sensitivity in Childhood and Adolescence

Individuals differ in their sensitivity toward injustice. Justice‐sensitive persons perceive injustice more frequently and show stronger responses to it. Justice sensitivity has been studied predominantly in adults; little is known about its development in childhood and adolescence and its connection to prosocial behavior and emotional and behavioral problems. This study evaluates a version of the justice sensitivity inventory for children and adolescents (JSI‐CA5) in 1472 9‐ to 17‐year olds. Items and scales showed good psychometric properties and correlations with prosocial behavior and conduct problems similar to findings in adults, supporting the reliability and validity of the scale. We found individual differences in justice sensitivity as a function of age and gender. Furthermore, justice sensitivity predicted emotional and behavioral problems in children and adolescents over a 1‐ to 2‐year period. Justice sensitivity perspectives can therefore be considered as risk and/or protective factors for mental health in childhood and adolescence.     

A discrete-time risk model with Poisson ARCH claim-number process

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a discrete-time risk model with the claim number following an integer-valued autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) process with Poisson deviates. In this model, the current claim number depends on the previous observations. Within this framework, the equation for finding the adjustment coefficient is derived. Numerical studies are also carried out to examine the impact of the Poisson ARCH dependence structure on the ruin probability.     

High-dimensional changepoint detection via a geometrically inspired mapping

Statistics and Computing - High-dimensional changepoint analysis is a growing area of research and has applications in a wide range of fields. The aim is to accurately and efficiently detect...     

How Autonomous are Public Corporations in Hong Kong? The Case of the Airport Authority

This article examines the degree of autonomy of Hong Kong’s Airport Authority (AA). Traditionally, airport management in Hong Kong was the responsibility of the government’s Civil Aviation Department. The AA was established in 1995 to manage the new international airport at Chek Lap Kok which opened in 1998. It was expected to run as a commercial enterprise but, because of its strategic importance, there was concern that it should not become an independent empire detached from government control. As a hybrid type of organization, the AA has moved steadily towards full commercialization. The government has also put its privatization on the agenda. Its transformation may have some implications for the redefinition of the future autonomy boundaries of public corporations in Hong Kong.

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Risk of Legionellosis in residential areas around farms irrigating with municipal wastewater

The conservation of freshwater is of both global and national importance, and in the United States, agriculture is one of the largest consumers of this resource. Reduction of the strain farming puts on local surface or groundwater is vital for ensuring resilience in the face of climate change, and one possible option is to irrigate with a combination of freshwater and reclaimed water from municipal wastewater treatment facilities. However, this wastewater can contain pathogens that are harmful to human health, such as Legionella pneumophila, which is a bacterium that can survive aerosolization and airborne transportation and cause severe pneumonia when inhaled. To assess an individual adult's risk of infection with L. pneumophila from a single exposure to agricultural spray irrigation, a quantitative microbial risk assessment was conducted for a scenario of spray irrigation in central Illinois, for the growing seasons in 2017, 2018, and 2019. The assessment found that the mean risk of infection for a single exposure exceeded the safety threshold of 10^–6 infections/exposure up to 1 km from a low-pressure irrigator and up to 2 km from a high-pressure irrigator, although no median risk exceeded the threshold for any distance or irrigator pressure. These findings suggest that spray irrigation with treated municipal wastewater could be a viable option for reducing freshwater consumption in Midwest farming, as long as irrigation on windy days is avoided and close proximity to the active irrigator is limited.     

Embeddedness of Organizational Capabilities*

Managers must regularly make decisions on how to access and deploy their limited resources in order to build organizational capabilities for a sustainable competitive advantage. However, failure to recognize that organizational capabilities involve complex and intricately woven underlying processes may lead to an incomplete understanding of how capabilities affect competitive advantage. As a means of understanding this underlying complexity, we discuss how managerial decisions on resource acquisition and deployment influence capability embeddedness and argue that capability embeddedness has an incremental effect on firm performance beyond the effects from organizational resources and capabilities. To investigate these issues, we present a hierarchical composed error structure framework that relies on cross‐sectional data (and allows for generalizations to panel data). We demonstrate the framework in the context of retailing, where we show that the embeddedness of organizational capabilities influences retailer performance above and beyond the tangible and intangible resources and capabilities that a retailer possesses. Our results illustrate that understanding how resources and capabilities influence performance at different hierarchical levels within a firm can aid managers to make better decisions on how they can embed certain capabilities within the structural and social relationships within the firm. Moreover, understanding whether the underlying objectives of the capabilities that are being built and cultivated have convergent or divergent goals is critical, as it can influence the extent to which the embedded capabilities enhance firm performance.     

Evaluating the Temporal Location of Feedback: Providing Feedback Following Performance vs. Prior to Performance

In order to make feedback as effective as possible, it is important to understand its function in the three-term contingency (TTC) and the impact of various factors involved in delivering feedback. Timing of feedback is one factor that can affect the impact of feedback on learner’s behavior. An analysis of timing of feeback may help us getting closer to better understanding how feedback functions in the TTC. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of feedback at different temporal locations. Specifically, feedback was provided either immediately (a) after a teaching session or (b) before the following teaching session, on teaching performance of undergraduate psychology students. The results indicated that feedback provided before the teaching session was more effective in improving teaching skills than feedback that was provided after the session. These findings suggest that feedback may function primarily as an antecedent to future performance and not necessarily as a consequence for past performance. However, the behavioral mechanism that explains these results is not yet clear. Future studies should investigate this further by manipulating the content of feedback prior to the teaching performance.     

The Impact of Information Sharing and Advance Order Information on a Supply Chain with Balanced Ordering

This paper considers a supply chain with one supplier and multiple retailers that face exogenous heterogeneous end‐customer demands, where all parties utilize base‐stock policies. Each retailer is restricted to order once in every order cycle and their orders are replenished in a balanced manner within the cycle. Our study investigates the impact of information sharing and advance order information (AOI) on the supply chain. We find that the supplier benefits from the two mechanisms via two important factors, the information about observed end‐customer demands and the decision on re‐establishing the replenishment sequence. We derive the supplier's optimal sequence for stochastically comparable end‐customer demands with AOI and propose a sequencing rule for the setting with information sharing. Our numerical study examines the cost impacts of two proposed mechanisms on the entire supply chain.