Developing From Tranditional Microscale Chemistry to Microscale Green Chemistry

Microscale chemistry is appealing to all levels of education.In contrast to conventional macroscale chemistry,only minute amount of chemicals are required to undertaking a chemical investigation.     

The Hollow Ring of Donor Commitment: Country Concentration and the Decoupling of Aid‐Effectiveness Norms from Donor Practice

The fragmentation of a donor's foreign aid across too many recipient countries is widely believed to be detrimental to aid effectiveness. This article explores the origins of a new norm – recipient concentration – and assesses the extent to which it can be expected to improve aid effectiveness. It also examines 23 donors' actual record of country concentration, and finds that, though there are some potential explanations for donors' behaviour, their collective failure to implement country concentration has very little consequence in theory or in practice.     

Book Reviews and Notes

Although student deliberation of public issues is recognized as a vital component of democratic education, little research focuses on the range of perspectives available to students during such deliberation. Social justice and legitimacy demand a wide range of inclusion, choices, and perspectives during student deliberation. This article contrasts soft versus deliberative democratic education, where the range of perspectives is correspondingly narrow or broad. Unfortunately, research shows that social studies textbooks promote soft democratic education by privileging dominant cultural representations, ideologies, and metanarratives of American exceptionality. This article presents content analysis as a method for identifying the range of civic and cultural perspectives in curricula. Once these perspectives are identified, social studies educators can revise curricula to increase inclusion and strengthen student deliberation. To illustrate this method, the author examines two sets of instructional materials. While on opposite opposite sides of the ideological spectrum, the sets are similar in their narrow range of perspectives concerning controversial public issues.     

Social Distress Theory and Teaching About Homelessness: A Retrospective Analysis

This paper provides a retrospective analysis of our course:“Hamelessness in the United States: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” It analyzes how such a course reveals social distress on two distinct levels: course content and course process. We deploy the concepts, tenets and insights of social distress theory to provide a retrospective analytical framework for the course. In addition, we extend the theory by presenting two corollaries to it and show how the literature on homelessness provides alternative connections among the major elements ofsocial distress theory. Thus, we raise new questions for the theory to consider. We also make recommendations for potential teachers of courses on homelessness.     

Effect of systematic sampling on arima models

Given a general homogeneous non-stationary autoregressive integrated moving average process ARIMA(p,d,q), the corresponding model for the subseries obtained by a systematic sampling is derived. The article then shows that the sampled subseries approaches approximately to an integrated moving average process IMA(d,l), l≤(d-l), regardless of the autoregressive and moving average structures in the original series. In particular, the sampled subseries from an ARIMA (p,l,q) process approaches approximately to a simple random walk model.     

The multivariate alpha-power model

The main object of this paper is to propose a multivariate extension to the alpha-power model which is an alternative to the multivariate skew-normal model (Arellano-Valle and Azzalini, 2008). It also extends the power-normal model discussed in Gupta and Gupta (2008) by making it more flexible. Inference is dealt with by using the likelihood approach and a pseudo-likelihood approach based on conditional distributions which, although slightly less efficient, is simpler to implement. An application to a real data set is used to demonstrate the usefulness of the extension.     

Will you trust your new boss? The role of affective reactions to leadership succession

Affective reactions to the departure of work group leaders are proposed as an important determinant of members' trust-related judgments regarding new leaders. A field test of veterinary hospital employees evaluating new leaders revealed that the affective reaction to the departure of the prior group leader predicted trust when there was no history between the individuals. When there was history between the two individuals, the group member's evaluation of the new leader's ability on their prior job was a significant predictor of trust over and above their affective reaction to the succession. The relationships between affective reactions to succession and trust formation were replicated in a longitudinal simulation of trust formation in student groups. The implications of these findings for the study of trust in organizations and leadership succession processes in work groups are discussed.     

Estimation in an empirical bayes model for longitudinal and cross‐sectionally clustered binary data

Some studies generate data that can be grouped into clusters in more than one way. Consider for instance a smoking prevention study in which responses on smoking status are collected over several years in a cohort of students from a number of different schools. This yields longitudinal data, also cross‐sectionaliy clustered in schools. The authors present a model for analyzing binary data of this type, combining generalized estimating equations and estimation of random effects to address the longitudinal and cross‐sectional dependence, respectively. The estimation procedure for this model is discussed, as are the results of a simulation study used to investigate the properties of its estimates. An illustration using data from a smoking prevention trial is given.