从入藏路线的书写看19世纪法国对中国藏族地区的殖民想象——以法国人旅藏游记为中心

文章以19世纪中后期法国人旅藏游记文本为基点,以各文本均强调的“入藏路线”为引子,在19世纪中后期中法关系的历史背景下,论述了19世纪法国对藏族地区想象性的殖民意图。在较少的关于法国同中国藏族地区交往史的研究中,这是一个值得关注的重要内容。     

Oncology phase II proof‐of‐concept studies with multiple targets: Randomized controlled trial or single arm?

For oncology drug development, phase II proof‐of‐concept studies have played a key role in determining whether or not to advance to a confirmatory phase III trial. With the increasing number of immunotherapies, efficient design strategies are crucial in moving successful drugs quickly to market. Our research examines drug development decision making under the framework of maximizing resource investment, characterized by benefit cost ratios (BCRs). In general, benefit represents the likelihood that a drug is successful, and cost is characterized by the risk adjusted total sample size of the phases II and III studies. Phase III studies often include a futility interim analysis; this sequential component can also be incorporated into BCRs. Under this framework, multiple scenarios can be considered. For example, for a given drug and cancer indication, BCRs can yield insights into whether to use a randomized control trial or a single‐arm study. Importantly, any uncertainty in historical control estimates that are used to benchmark single‐arm studies can be explicitly incorporated into BCRs. More complex scenarios, such as restricted resources or multiple potential cancer indications, can also be examined. Overall, BCR analyses indicate that single‐arm trials are favored for proof‐of‐concept trials when there is low uncertainty in historical control data and smaller phase III sample sizes. Otherwise, especially if the most likely to succeed tumor indication can be identified, randomized controlled trials may be a better option. While the findings are consistent with intuition, we provide a more objective approach.     

Critical Thinking in Social Work Education: A Research Synthesis

In a meta-analytic review of critical thinking in social work education, findings revealed variability in research designs, methods, and subsequent findings. The 10 studies reviewed assessed different components of critical thinking and highlighted different potential moderator variables. Although there are significant limitations to all the studies analyzed in this review, findings suggest some practical significance and point to the need for future research to include more rigorous experimental research designs that include control groups and a comprehensive analysis of potential moderator variables that may include socioeconomic status, ethnicity, academic rank, and teaching methodology.     

Friends' influences on young people's aggression risk

Just as a young person's earlier aggression is likely to predispose later aggression, the person's friends may also play a role in the predisposition. For the latter, however, theory and research have not been consistently supportive. To clarify the personal and friends' influences, the present study analyzed data from 1746 Hong Kong Chinese pupils (i.e., 4th to 7th graders). The data included direct measures of friends nominated by the pupils. Results show that association with friends did not affect aggression risk. Friend aggression had a very weak but statistically significant effect on aggression risk, when the friend was the first nominated friend or reciprocally nominated friend. This effect was higher when the pupil had higher aggression before. The weak and conditional effects of friend aggression suggest that friendship had little direct influence on the child's aggression.     

Chebyshev Inequality with Estimated Mean and Variance

Chebyshev's inequality is investigated when the population mean and variance are estimated from a sample. The necessary modification to the inequality is simple and is actually valid when (a) the population moments do not exist and (b) the sample is exchangeably distributed. The latter case would include, for example, a sample taken without replacement from a finite population and the independent and identically distributed case.     

Long‐term continuous clients and their needs: a New Zealand analysis

National New Zealand data (2002) indicate that 27% of gambling clients remain in treatment for longer than 12 months. This research retrospectively analysed data from long‐term continuous, re‐admitted and brief therapy clients. The data were obtained from a national database and were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Results indicated that relevant differences between long‐term continuous and other clients occurred in ethnicity and clinic location. The latter was confounded by the number of clinics versus clients. The average age of long‐term continuous clients was 43 years; 5–6 years older than other clients; however, this marginally failed to reach a level of statistical significance. The results led to the proposal of two alternative models of therapy for clients with gambling problems: (a) a six‐session capsule model and (b) an inductive, open‐ended model (with regular review component). Further research is required to test the efficacy of these models.     

藏族文化与20世纪初的法国文学创作

同英国一样,19世纪的法国也同中国藏族地区有相当的历史交往,藏族文化通过传教士、冒险家、旅行者、外交官、藏族文化研究者等不同职业的人得以在法国传递。到世界局势动荡的20世纪初,法国出现了一些与藏族文化相关的文学创作,自此藏族文化以象征性的形式进入到法国人的意识中,这是长期以来法国接受藏族文化的一个结果,同时也反映出法国人对藏族文化的认识和理解进入了一个新的发展阶段。     

A stakeholder perspective on process improvement behaviours: delivering the triple bottom line in SMEs

Abstract

The primary focus of operations management is to add value through operational processes. Considerable attention has been given to using process improvement (PI) techniques to reduce costs and time, in order to develop a competitive advantage for the wider organization. However, this narrow definition of value at times overlooks the triple bottom line (TBL) which can result in a number of unintended consequences, specifically issues related to environmental and social measures of performance. To address this, a stakeholder theory lens will be used to analyze PI activities within the context of small and medium-sized enterprises. The TBL will be used to complement the stakeholder perspective, to interpret the benefits that are realized from PI activities. This article highlights both the direct benefits from PI as well as more indirect benefits realized by involving a selection of salient stakeholders in PI. It will show how a developed view of PI can provide an important mechanism for delivering improvements to a firm’s TBL. The work concludes by highlighting the contributions made to both PI practice and stakeholder theory, while acknowledging the need for more research on PI, both from a stakeholder perspective and how it impacts a firm’s TBL.     

An Integrative Review of Employee Voice: Identifying a Common Conceptualization and Research Agenda

Employee voice has been studied across a diverse range of disciplines, generating an extensive body of literature on the topic. However, its conceptualization across the disciplines has differed, resulting in a lack of integrative theories and frameworks on employee voice. The main objective of this paper is to conduct a multidisciplinary review of the academic research on employee voice, to show where there is an opportunity to adopt and adapt the findings and research on employee voice within alternate disciplines, and to demonstrate how this may lead to more common ground in the conceptualization of employee voice. This review focuses on an analysis of the Human Resource Management/Employment Relations and Organizational Behaviour disciplines' conceptualization of employee voice, beginning with the identification of where the disciplines diverged in their concept and study of employee voice. Further, it maps their similarities and differences, on the basis of motive, content, mechanism, target and management of voice. Finally, it identifies opportunities to incorporate the alternate disciplinary perspective and proposes a conceptual model, which addresses the blind spots in each discipline. It is proposed that the consideration of formal and informal employee voice in future studies will enable the better integration of voice research.     

A SAEM algorithm for the estimation of template and deformation parameters in medical image sequences

This paper is about object deformations observed throughout a sequence of images. We present a statistical framework in which the observed images are defined as noisy realizations of a randomly deformed template image. In this framework, we focus on the problem of the estimation of parameters related to the template and deformations. Our main motivation is the construction of estimation framework and algorithm which can be applied to short sequences of complex and highly-dimensional images. The originality of our approach lies in the representations of the template and deformations, which are defined on a common triangulated domain, adapted to the geometry of the observed images. In this way, we have joint representations of the template and deformations which are compact and parsimonious. Using such representations, we are able to drastically reduce the number of parameters in the model. Besides, we adapt to our framework the Stochastic Approximation EM algorithm combined with a Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure which was proposed in 2004 by Kuhn and Lavielle. Our implementation of this algorithm takes advantage of some properties which are specific to our framework. More precisely, we use the Markovian properties of deformations to build an efficient simulation strategy based on a Metropolis-Hasting-Within-Gibbs sampler. Finally, we present some experiments on sequences of medical images and synthetic data.