Population projections: states, 1995 - 2025

All states will have more people in the future, especially in the south and west, while population aging occurs as the baby boomers age. This report identifies population changes projected to affect the US's 50 states and District of Columbia during 1995-2015. Basic assumptions for state population projections are presented with regard to population, births, deaths, net international migration, and net internal migration. The methodology used to produce the report is also described. Total population and net change is presented in tabular format for each state over the period. These data are used as the basic input to many federal, state, and local projection models which produce detailed statistics on education, economic factors, labor force, health care, voting, and other subjects. State differentials in fertility and mortality are also projected to widen, reflecting the concentration of race and ethnic groups with high fertility in some states and differential migration patterns.     

How consumers/survivors are evaluating the quality of psychiatric care

In the past decade, mental health consumers have increasingly become involved in evaluating the quality of psychiatric care and applying sophisticated data strategies to affect system reform. Through multistakeholder partnerships, they have identified outcome indicators, collaborated in the development of a mental health report card, and designed and conducted consumer self report surveys on satisfaction and needs and preferences for housing and supports. The formation of multistakeholder assessment teams; the definition of the consumer perspective through focus groups and concept-mapping pilots; and research on coercion, personhood, recovery, and empowerment are key activities of consumers/survivors in the field of evaluation.     

Young people's resilience and post-financial crisis television: allegories of economic and social survival

ABSTRACT

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 added significant stress and anxieties to the already precarious lives of many young people. Despite this, there is emerging evidence that young people are able to demonstrate remarkable resilience in the midst of economic uncertainties that render the trajectories of their futures uncertain. The pressure to be resilient, to find effective ways to manage the uncertainties inherent to the liberal democracies of the twenty-first century, can be significant. The consequences of failure include deteriorating health and well-being, losses in motivation and hope, economic marginalisation, and ambivalence about the markers of what is means to be an adult. In this paper we spotlight moments in post-GFC television that have drawn on these social narratives, depicting young people's experiences of resilience and uncertainties. We view these moments as more than just television or popular culture. The stories we tell are allegorical, but they are not mere fictions. We focus on the popular television comedy Broad City (2014-) that focusses on the marginalised lifeworlds of trendy, college-educated, young hipsters Ilana and Abbi who are barely getting by in New York City.     

Are Conventional Farmers Conventional? Analysis of the Environmental Orientations of Conventional New Zealand Farmers*

Abstract Within the political economy of agriculture and agrofood literatures there are examples of approaches that reject simple dichotomies between alternatives and the mainstream. In line with such approaches, we challenge the assumption that alternative agriculture, and its attendant improved environmental practices, alternative management styles, less intensive approaches, and better approaches to animal and ecosystem welfare, is the only source of agricultural sustainability. This article uses national farm‐survey results for New Zealand's sheep and beef, dairy, and horticulture sectors to examine conventional farmers, measure their assessments of farming practices, and assess their environmental orientation. Analysis identifies a proenvironmental cluster of farmers in each sector characterized by a higher environmental‐orientation score and distinct ratings of other farm practices queried in the survey. We interpret the results in terms of the exposure of different agricultural sectors to the effects of market‐based, audited, best‐practice schemes. The presence of shades of “greenness” among conventional farmers has important implications for environmental management and for our understanding of the various and complex pathways toward the greening of agrofood systems.     

Smooth functional tempering for nonlinear differential equation models

Differential equations are used in modeling diverse system behaviors in a wide variety of sciences. Methods for estimating the differential equation parameters traditionally depend on the inclusion of initial system states and numerically solving the equations. This paper presents Smooth Functional Tempering, a new population Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach for posterior estimation of parameters. The proposed method borrows insights from parallel tempering and model based smoothing to define a sequence of approximations to the posterior. The tempered approximations depend on relaxations of the solution to the differential equation model, reducing the need for estimating the initial system states and obtaining a numerical differential equation solution. Rather than tempering via approximations to the posterior that are more heavily rooted in the prior, this new method tempers towards data features. Using our proposed approach, we observed faster convergence and robustness to both initial values and prior distributions that do not reflect the features of the data. Two variations of the method are proposed and their performance is examined through simulation studies and a real application to the chemical reaction dynamics of producing nylon.     

Markov models of mite movements

Continuous time Markov models were used to analyse data from two bioassays to investigate the influence of β-fraction, a by-product of hop processing, on the two-spotted spider mite. The models were fitted to aggregate counts of the numbers of live and dead mites on treated and untreated halves of discs cut from leaves of hop and French bean plants. Some of the rate parameters were time dependent. Although not all parameters could be estimated precisely, the analysis enabled the quantitative effects of treatment over time to be estimated with reasonable precision. The estimated treatment effects were largely insensitive to the assumed values of other parameters. The first bioassay showed a progressive initial response to increasing concentration of β-fraction, although data at the intermediate concentration appeared anomalous. The second bioassay showed similar responses on hop and French bean leaves, with a stronger repellent effect on the lower leaf surface than on the upper surface.     

Social work education and political conflict: preparing students to address the needs of victims and survivors of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

This paper reports on the evaluation of a European PEACE III sponsored teaching and learning project that was designed to enable social work students to better understand the needs of victims and survivors of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The paper begins with an introduction to policy, practice and educational contexts before reviewing the literature on social work, conflict and trauma. It also summarises key, innovative pedagogical approaches used in the teaching, including the use of ground rules, teaching teams consisting of lecturer and service user dyads, learning exercises and case studies. The paper then explains the evaluation methodology. This involved two surveys which returned 144 student and 34 practice teacher questionnaires. The findings revealed that students were generally committed to this form of teaching and engagement with victims and survivors of the conflict, although some students reported that their attitudes towards this subject had were not changed. Some students also discussed how the conflict had affected their lives and the lives of families and friends; it is argued that such biographical details are crucial in developing new pedagogical approaches in this area. Practice teachers who supervised some of these students on placement reported general levels of satisfaction with preparedness to work with conflict related situations but were less convinced that organisations were so committed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the study limitations and a recommendation for more robust methods of teaching and evaluation in this area of social work education and practice.