School, Family and County Effects on Adolescents’ Later Life Chances

This paper explores the links between family, school and area background influences during adolescence and later adult economic outcomes. The empirical analysis is based on data covering the period 1979 to 1996, drawn from the 1979 US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. For a sample of individuals aged 14–19 in 1979, we estimate the association between family, school and area characteristics when growing up, on adult earnings capacity and poverty risk. We show that including all these influences jointly, family and school quality generally have significant associations with adult outcomes, but that area influences generally do not.Simon Burgess, Department of Economics, University of Bristol and CASE, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK; e-mail: Simon.Burgess@bristol.ac.ukKaren Gardiner, Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Claverton Down Bath BA2 7AY, UK; e-mail: K.S.Gardiner@bath.ac.ukCarol Propper, Department of Economics, University of Bristol and CASE, 8 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TN, UK; e-mail: Carol.Propper@bristol.ac.uk     

Place-based urban ecology: A century of park planning in Seattle

This research responds to calls from within the field of urban ecology to explicitly incorporate humanities-based research in order to achieve robust interdisciplinarity. Our research provides an example of a place-based urban ecological analysis. We use this framework to analyze over a century of park planning and development within the city of Seattle. We identify four eras of park planning that are linked by a comprehensive 100-year park plan. This case study examines how the political, cultural, and economic aspects of park planning have produced and been influenced by long-term trends and historical contingencies. This research also offers practical insights for effective contemporary urban planning, emphasizing the need for flexible and adaptive long-term plans when confronted with unpredictable events, emerging political arrangements, changing cultural priorities, and shifting fiscal climates.     

Bayesian phylogenetic inference from animal mitochondrial genome arrangements

Summary. The determination of evolutionary relationships is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology. Genome arrangement data are potentially more informative than deoxyribonucleic acid sequence data for inferring evolutionary relationships between distantly related taxa. We describe a Bayesian framework for phylogenetic inference from mitochondrial genome arrangement data using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. We apply the method to assess evolutionary relationships between eight animal phyla.     

Characterizing Environmental Harm: Developments in an Approach to Strategic Risk Assessment and Risk Management

Environmental policymakers and regulators are often in the position of having to prioritize their actions across a diverse range of environmental pressures to secure environmental protection and improvements. Information on environmental issues to inform this type of strategic analysis can be disparate; it may be too voluminous or even absent. Data on a range of issues are rarely presented in a common format that allows easy analysis and comparison. Nevertheless, judgments are required on the significance of various environmental pressures and on the inherent uncertainties to inform strategic assessments such as “state of the environment” reports. How can decisionmakers go about this type of strategic and comparative risk analysis? In an attempt to provide practical tools for the analysis of environmental risks at a strategic level, the Environment Agency of England and Wales has conducted a program of developmental research on strategic risk assessment since 1996. The tools developed under this program use the concept of “environmental harm” as a common metric, viewed from technical, social, and economic perspectives, to analyze impacts from a range of environmental pressures. Critical to an informed debate on the relative importance of these perspectives is an understanding and analysis of the various characteristics of harm (spatial and temporal extent, reversibility, latency, etc.) and of the social response to actual or potential environmental harm from a range of hazards. Recent developments in our approach, described herein, allow a presentation of the analysis in a structured fashion so as to better inform risk‐management decisions.     

On diagnostic checking of the autoregressive conditional intensity model

The autoregressive conditional intensity model proposed by Russell (1998) is a promising option for fitting multivariate high frequency irregularly spaced data. The authors acknowledge the validity of this model by showing the independence of its generalized residuals, a crucial assumption of the model formulation not readily recognized by researchers. The authors derive the large‐sample distribution of the autocorrelations of the generalized residual series and use it to construct a goodness‐of‐fit test for the model. Empirical results compare the performance of their test with other off‐the‐shelf tests such as the Ljung–Box test. They illustrate the use of their test with transaction records of the HSBC stock.     

Constructing a Life That Works: Part 2, An Approach to Practice

The 1st article (C. Campbell & M. Ungar, 2004) of this 2‐part exploration of postmodern approaches to family therapy and narrative approaches to career counseling explored the differences between traditional trait and factor counseling models and postmodern approaches using life narratives and social constructionism. In this 2nd article, the authors discuss 7 aspects of their practice as postmodern career counselors that ask clients to (a) know what you want, (b) know what you have, (c) know what you hear, (d) know what constrains you, (e) map your preferred story, (f) grow into your story, and (g) grow out of your story. Several case studies demonstrate the applicability of these theories to practice.     

A new Method of Estimating the Asymptotic Standard Error of the Hodges-Lehmann Estimator Based on Generalized Least Squares

A method of estimating the asymptotic standard error of the Hodges-Lehmann estimator based on generalized least squares is described. The results of a Monte Carlo study comparing the new method with existing ones are given.     

ANALYSIS OF DOUBLY CENSORED DATA AND THE HIV INCUBATION PERIOD DISTRIBUTION IN WESTERN AUSTRALIA

The paper analyses the distribution of times from HIV seroconversion to the first AIDS defining illness for a subcohort of the Western Australian HIV Cohort Study for whom the seroconversion date is known to fall within a calendar time window. The analysis is based on a generalised gamma model for the incubation times and a piecewise constant distribution for the conditional times of seroconversion given the seroconversion windows. This allows flexible hazard shapes and also allows comparison of goodness of fit of the gamma and Weibull distributions which are often used for modelling incubation times. Computational issues are discussed. In these data, neither age at seroconversion, nor calendar time of seroconversion, nor the identification of a seroconversion illness appears to afFect incubation distributions. The Weibull distribution appears to provide a reasonable fit. The distribution of times from seroconversion to an HIV-related death is also briefly considered.