Taking Rights Structurally: Disability, Rights and Social Worker Responses to Direct Payments

Correspondence to: Tim Stainton, School of Social Work and Family Studies, University of British Columbia, 2080 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z2. E-mail: timst{at}interchange.ubc.ca Summary This article examines the link between a justice and rightsdiscourse and disability policy and practice. Specifically,it considers social worker responses to direct payments, a policywhich has been linked to a discourse of social justice and rights.The article initially considers the nature of justice and rights,arguing that these can plausibly be seen to be grounded in theidea of autonomy and that a rights or justice based social policyand practice must be grounded in the protection, enhancementand development of the capacity for autonomous action. The articlethen presents partial findings of a research project, whichsampled social workers' views and attitudes towards direct paymentsin three local authorities. The findings suggest that socialworkers are aware of the link between direct payments and autonomyand are generally very supportive of the move to a rights basedapproach to policy and practice as evidenced by programmes suchas direct payments. The paper also concludes that structuralconstraints limit social workers' ability to fully functionfrom a rights based approach to disability.     

Biased Mentalizing in Children Aged Seven to 11: Latent Class Confirmation of Response Styles to Social Scenarios and Associations with Psychopathology

A new approach to the measurement of mentalizing is introduced. Instead of measuring the presence or absence of mentalizing capacity, the current study aimed at developing a mentalizing task that focuses on investigating biases in mentalizing through the use of ambiguous peer‐related social scenarios. The response consistency of 659 children was investigated in a community sample of children aged seven to 11. Confirmatory latent class analysis allocated children to three groups on the basis of their responses: an overly positive style (OP), a rational/neutral style (R) or an overly negative style (ON). Children classed as OP showed a greater likelihood of being above cut‐off on a population screen for externalizing disorder. Over a two‐year follow‐up period, the children who were classified as R were most likely to remain so whereas the OP and ON children were found to change group. The results are discussed in the context of social‐cognitive research in this age group. Further studies should examine the external validity of the mentalizing task because the results reported here concern only internal construct validity.     

Quasi-maximum likelihood estimation and inference in dynamic models with time-varying covariances

We study the properties of the quasi-maximum likelihood estimator (QMLE) and related test statistics in dynamic models that jointly parameterize conditional means and conditional covariances, when a normal log-likelihood os maximized but the assumption of normality is violated. Because the score of the normal log-likelihood has the martingale difference property when the forst two conditional moments are correctly specified, the QMLE is generally Consistent and has a limiting normal destribution. We provide easily computable formulas for asymptotic standard errors that are valid under nonnormality. Further, we show how robust LM tests for the adequacy of the jointly parameterized mean and variance can be computed from simple auxiliary regressions. An appealing feature of these robyst inference procedures is that only first derivatives of the conditional mean and variance functions are needed. A monte Carlo study indicates that the asymptotic results carry over to finite samples. Estimation of several AR and AR-GARCH time series models reveals that in most sotuations the robust test statistics compare favorably to the two standard (nonrobust) formulations of the Wald and IM tests. Also, for the GARCH models and the sample sizes analyzed here, the bias in the QMLE appears to be relatively small. An empirical application to stock return volatility illustrates the potential imprtance of computing robust statistics in practice.     

Service Package Switching in Hotel Revenue Management Systems

Revenue Management Systems (RMS) are commonly used in the hotel industry to maximize revenues in the short term. The forecasting‐allocation module is a key tactical component of a hotel RMS. Forecasting involves estimating demand for service packages across all stayover nights in a planning horizon. A service package is a unique combination of physical room, amenities, room price, and advance purchase restrictions. Allocation involves parsing the room inventory among these service packages to maximize revenues. Previous research and existing revenue management systems assume the demand for a service package to be independent of which service packages are available for sale. We develop a new forecasting‐allocation approach that explicitly accounts for this dependence. We compare the performance of the new approach against a baseline approach using a realistic hotel RMS simulation. The baseline approach reflects previous research and existing industry practice. The new approach produces an average revenue increase of at least 16% across scenarios that reflect existing industry conditions.     

Value of Self-Disclosure to Parents and Peers During Adolescence

Self-disclosure is a crucial part of developing close interpersonal relationships during adolescence. In particular, sharing information with a greater depth of intimacy is thought to strengthen social bonds and thus support mental health. The current study investigated the value for different depths of self-disclosures to close others (mothers and best friends) during adolescence and its association with mental health and well-being. Fifty-four girls (11.0–15.9 years) completed a forced-choice monetary paradigm to assess value for self-disclosures and questionnaires on mental health. Participants significantly valued (i.e., forfeited monetary reward) for disclosures to both mothers and best friends, although intimate disclosures were more “costly” than superficial disclosures. Greater value for intimate self-disclosures to mothers was also associated with better mental health and well-being.     

Excluded by crisis management? Legislative hyperactivity in post-2015 Germany

This article examines the legislative measures taken by Germany since 2014 to manage the “refugee crisis” and analyses the potential effects on the rights and the well-being of asylum seekers and persons with protection needs at large. By taking a closer look at the reasoning given in the respective legislative documents we will show the link between the recent changes in the national asylum and migration law and the underlying migration management framework. The article concludes that Germany has seen a shift from a management to a securitization approach, the latter entailing a special emphasis on deportation (“return turn”) rather than focusing on accommodation and integration of those seeking protection. Acting in a mere “crisis mode”, the German legislator has implemented an exclusion paradigm that incrementally substituted the prior inclusive policies over time.     

Towards a re-conceptualization of flow in social contexts

The antecedents and outcomes of individual-level flow are well documented in a large body of literature. However, flow does not only occur in isolation - quite to the contrary, recent evidence suggests that social interaction can facilitate the experience of flow. Therefore, we propose a taxonomy, which distinguishes five different flow states according to two global factors: interactional synchrony and self-other overlap. Solitary flow bears all characteristics developed by Csikszentmihalyi. Co-active flow is facilitated or hampered by the presence of other people. Private interactive flow emerges on the grounds of a minimal unidirectional interaction with more passive others; only the active subject is in flow. In shared interactive flow, a fully synchronized activity between group members takes place and all group members are in flow. In group flow, all members reach a level of complete self-other overlap with the group, which leads to a collective experience of flow on the group-level. In addition to differences and commonalities of the different types of flow, suggestions for how to induce and study social flow are discussed.     

Quarterback evaluation in the national football league using tracking data

AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis - This paper evaluates quarterback performance in the National Football League. With the availability of player tracking data, there exists the capability to...     

Gateway cities for transnational higher education? Doha,Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah as regional amplifiers in networks of the ‘global knowledge-based economy’

This paper investigates how the developmental ambitions of governments to attract university offshore campuses to Doha, Dubai and Ras al-Khaimah and these universities’ internationalization strategies affect the three cities’ positionalities. It links interdisciplinary literature on globally uneven geographies of higher education to geographical debates on the intermediating role of cities in regional and global economies. The paper conceptualizes the three cities as a triadic ensemble of gateways for transnational higher education (TNE), thereby contributing to further theorization of gateway cities. The paper shows that the three cities fulfil two crucial gateway functions. First, they connect internationalizing universities with particular student segments from their regional hinterlands seeking access to TNE. Second, they thereby amplify and disperse hegemonic regimes of the globalising knowledge-based economy in their regional hinterlands. While all three cities share similar functions and rationales, they also have distinct positionalities rooted in different strategies of the respective governments.     

香港和深圳市铁路需求预测

亚洲的许多城市为解决城市交通问题，正关注铁路系统并允许进一步发展．对铁路系统的规划与设计必须有强有力的预测，同时对于有效路径选择效用方面的细微差别必须是敏感的．EMME／2中缺省的公交分配程序能生成出行费用矩阵，这些矩阵适用于战略模型，但是在用这个缺省的程序对铁路进行具体的预测时限制会增加．本文简述了基于logit模型的多路径公交EMME／2模型结构，它适用于低服务间隔的城市铁路网．该模型允许子模式（铁路或其他）的选择，车站和车站间路径的选择，并描述了所必需的网络编码和交通分配增加的自由选择等特征．