Outcomes of permanent family placement for children of minority ethnic origin

The paper explores the outcomes of permanent family placement for children of minority ethnic origin, using a sample of 254 placements drawn, in the main, from a cohort of 1165 British children placed between 1980 and 1985. Statistical techniques are used to explore the relationship between 'success' (defined, for the purposes of this paper, as the placement not known to have broken down) and a range of variables, including the characteristics of the child, the birth parents and the adoptive parents, and the type of placement. In most respects, the findings are consistent with those of similar studies. Age at placement is found to have an important effect, with success least likely for children placed in the middle age range. Lack of problem behaviours in the children at the time of placement is also found to be associated with success. Variables which are found to have no effect on the probability of success include ethnic origin of the child, whether it is an adoptive or permanent foster placement, and whether contact with birth parents continued after placement. There was an interesting gender effect in that boys did better in 'transracial' than in 'matched' placements, but the opposite was the case for girls.     

Coaching von Managern in Ostdeutschland

Coaching managers in East Germany The author discusses problems of the transformation process in East Germany. The main thesis: The patterns of behaviour established in the former DDR are still effective. This is demonstrated by the situation of managers and the company’s internal milieus. In order to support managers active in East Germany it is important, to know the patterns practised in the DDR and to transform them into those, which are compatible with the free enterprise economy. To increase the motivation, managers should be encouraged to refer to the former experiences of community and to meet in this way the specific needs of the employees.     

Rank tests in the two-sample scale problem with unequal and unknown locations

The two-sample scale problem is studied in the case of unequal and unknown location parameters. The method proposed is based on the idea of Moses (1963) and it is distribution-free. The two samples are separated into random subgroups of the same sizek. It is proposed to choosek=4 and to apply the Wilconxon test or the Savage test to the ranges or sample variances of the subgroups. The asymptotic power functions of the tests are compared. For small and moderate sample sizes simulations are carried out. Relations to some other procedures, especially to the method of Compagnone and Denker (1996) are briefly discussed.     

Faktoren der Veränderung des Selbst bei computervermittelter Kommunikation

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) influences the users’ self. Different expectations are currently made towards how the self may arise in an ‘a-social’ setting during the use of modern “Information” and communication technologies. Some of these discourses even observe a new potential for self-constructions. The conceptual frame of the paper is delivered by the combination of different social scientific approaches coming from Social Psychology, Sociology and Communications Studies. Based upon a series of experiments the paper investigates how the social self develops in CMC. Overall the self is moderated by the characteristics of the channel, by psycho-social and finally by socialisation variables. The influence of the channel is marked by immediate effects of certain cues. The psycho-social variable is the individual versus joint usage of CMC. The sociological dimension is the familiarity with CMC. Finally a model is discussed that introduces the prototypical character of CMC for the development of the self in further forms of mediated interpersonal communication.     

The quincunx: history and mathematics

Received: December 30, 1999; revised version: July 19, 2000     

Adaptive weights smoothing with applications to image restoration

We propose a new method of nonparametric estimation which is based on locally constant smoothing with an adaptive choice of weights for every pair of data points. Some theoretical properties of the procedure are investigated. Then we demonstrate the performance of the method on some simulated univariate and bivariate examples and compare it with other nonparametric methods. Finally we discuss applications of this procedure to magnetic resonance and satellite imaging.     

Evaluating the Simplified Conjoint Expected Risk Model: Comparing the Use of Objective and Subjective Information

The simplified Conjoint Expected Risk (CER) model by Holtgrave and Weber posits that perceived risk is a linear combination of the subjective judgments of the probabilities of harm, benefit, and status quo, and the expected harm and benefit of an activity. It modifies Luce and Weber's original CER model—that uses objective information to evaluate financial gambles—to accommodate activities such as health/technology activities where values of the model variables are subjective. If the simplified model is a valid modification of the original model, its performance should not be sensitive to the use of subjective information. However, because people may evaluate information differently when objective information is provided to them than when they generate information on their own, the performance of the simplified CER model may not be robust to the source of model-variable information. We compared the use of objective and subjective information, and results indicate that the estimates of the simplified CER model parameters and the proportion of variance in risk judgments accounted for by the model are similar under these two conditions. Thus, the simplified CER model is viable with activities for which harm and benefit information is subjective.     

A note on modelling underreported Poisson counts

In this paper we present a parsimonious model for the analysis of underreported Poisson count data. In contrast to previously developed methods, we are able to derive analytic expressions for the key marginal posterior distributions that are of interest. The usefulness of this model is explored via a re-examination of previously analysed data covering the purchasing of port wine (Ramos, 1999).     

Six‐Month‐Olds' Detection of Clauses Embedded in Continuous Speech: Effects of Prosodic Well‐Formedness

Three experiments investigated the role of prosodic structure for infants' recognition of embedded word sequences. Six‐month‐olds were familiarized with 2 versions of the same sequence, 1 corresponding to a well‐formed prosodic unit and the other to a prosodically ill‐formed sequence (although a successive word series). Next, infants heard 2 test passages. One included the well‐formed unit, and the other included the ill‐formed sequence. In Experiment 1, infants listened longer to the passage containing the well‐formed unit, suggesting that such units, even when they are embedded, are better recognized. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this better recognition does not depend on an acoustic match between the familiarized sequences and their later embeddings. This suggests that the advantage of the well‐formed unit is at least partially due to infants' use of prosody to parse continuous speech.