Evidence‐Based Treatment

This polemic argues that evidence‐based treatment is only one important consideration when deciding a therapeutic program. The exclusive use of evidence‐based therapy would be detrimental to the development of better psychotherapy. Evidence‐based therapy has an important part to play in the future of psychotherapy. It employs scientific and statistical procedures rigorously. This article is not intended to argue against its use, only to point to the dangers of an evidence‐based dictatorship in which financial and insurance imperatives will force us into using such therapies exclusively. This situation would stifle creativity and the individuality of both the therapist and the client.     

Simulation of extremes of diffusions

The authors consider the problem of simulating the times of events such as extremes and barrier crossings in diffusion processes. They develop a rejection sampler based on Shepp [Shepp, Journal of Applied Probability 1979; 16:423–427] for simulating an extreme of a Brownian motion and use it in a general recursive scheme for more complex simulations, including simultaneous simulation of the minimum and maximum and application to more general diffusions. They price exotic options that are difficult to price analytically: a knock‐out barrier option with a modified payoff function, a lookback option that includes discounting at the risk‐free interest rate, and a chooser option where the choice is made at the time of a barrier crossing. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 38: 738–755; 2010 © 2010 Statistical Society of Canada     

Nurturing Citizens: Secure Attachment and Democratic Citizenship

Attachment research has been concerned with social policy issues as well as with individual pathology and dysfunction. This paper applies attachment theory to the large populations addressed by sociology and political science. It argues that modern citizenship requires qualities similar to those found in securely attached adults. It proposes an approach that links the development of adult citizenship behaviours with infant attachment style and the child's induction into the family's construction of reality. Discussion of the implications of this approach and proposals for future research complete the paper.     

Optimal designs for calibration of orientations

This paper concerns designed experiments involving observations of orientations following the models of Prentice (1989) and Rivest &Chang (2006). The authors state minimal conditions on the designs for consistent least squares estimation of the matrix parameters in these models. The conditions are expressed in terms of the axes and rotation angles of the design orientations. The authors show that designs satisfying U₁ + … + U_n = 0 are optimal in the sense of minimizing the estimation error average angular distance. The authors give constructions of optimal n‐point designs when n ≥ 4 and they compare the performance of several designs through approximations and simulation.     

The Anglo‐Russian military convention and the Lithuanian immigrant community in lanarkshire,Scotland, 1914–20

This paper describes for the first time in any detail the implementation of the Anglo‐Russian Military Convention of 1917, a measure designed specifically to deal with the problem of Russian Jewish opposition to military service. Special attention is given to the impact of the Military Convention on a non‐Jewish section of the Russian immigrant population: the Lithuanian (Catholic) immigrants of Lanarkshire, Scotland. The role of the government and the police is critically examined and, using previously unpublished Home Office records, it is argued that the treatment of the Lithuanians was determined by factors external to the immigrant community. The paper challenges the view that the state in Britain has been the protector and guarantor of minority rights.     

Efficient use of exact samples

Propp and Wilson (Random Structures and Algorithms (1996) 9: 223–252, Journal of Algorithms (1998) 27: 170–217) described a protocol called coupling from the past (CFTP) for exact sampling from the steady-state distribution of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) process. In it a past time is identified from which the paths of coupled Markov chains starting at every possible state would have coalesced into a single value by the present time; this value is then a sample from the steady-state distribution.Unfortunately, producing an exact sample typically requires a large computational effort. We consider the question of how to make efficient use of the sample values that are generated. In particular, we make use of regeneration events (cf. Mykland et al. Journal of the American Statistical Association (1995) 90: 233–241) to aid in the analysis of MCMC runs. In a regeneration event, the chain is in a fixed reference distribution– this allows the chain to be broken up into a series of tours which are independent, or nearly so (though they do not represent draws from the true stationary distribution).In this paper we consider using the CFTP and related algorithms to create tours. In some cases their elements are exactly in the stationary distribution; their length may be fixed or random. This allows us to combine the precision of exact sampling with the efficiency of using entire tours.Several algorithms and estimators are proposed and analysed.     

Community development and urban regeneration

The history of urban regeneration in the United Kingdom andits connections with community development are complex, especiallyas there have been significant differences in Scotland, England,Wales and Northern Ireland. In this article I highlight somekey turning points and themes in the Scottish context. I thendescribe the situation in the city of Dundee.     

How to make head or tail of ‘bridging’ and ‘bonding’?: addressing the methodological ambiguity1

A distinction has recently been proposed between bridging (or encompassing) and bonding (or inward-looking) social networks. However, existing theoretical contributions remain vague as to the fundamental meaning of both concepts. As a consequence, two distinct interpretations have developed alongside each other. In the present paper, we employ data on voluntary association membership in Flanders to empirically illustrate that both approaches can lead to substantially different outcomes and therefore appear to tap into different dimensions of bridging versus bonding. These findings underline the problematic nature of the current conceptual ambiguity. We conclude that should the bridging/bonding distinction add meaningfully to our understanding of the external effects of social networks, it is essential to resolve the conceptual and methodological imprecision.     

The social construction of ‘Middle England’: The politics of participation in forward planning

In this paper we wish to examine how social actors represent the rural community and the rural environment in the context of the planning system, specifically within the review process of a development plan. In particular, we focus on the role residential, environmental and amenity groups play in stabilizing certain features of rural society and environment and their reasons for seeking such stabilization. We explore their motivations for engaging in political activity of this kind, some of the constraints they encounter along the way and how they attempt to overcome these in order to shape their own local environments, and, in the process, their community.