Productivity Indicators for the Rural Poor in Developing Countries

Meeting the Millennium Development Goals will necessarily require a heavy focus on rural areas, where most of the world’s poor are to be found. More specifically, policy will need to raise the productivity of this group, which includes farmers, wage labourers and those suffering from disease and malnutrition. Yet, at present, no index exists which can assess countries on the basis of technological indicators that bear heavily on the productivity of the rural poor. A wide variety of unresolved problems notwithstanding, this paper constitutes the first attempt to construct an index that is designed specifically to assist those who are concerned with rural-specific policies towards meeting the MDGs.     

Working with managers to improve services: changes in the role of research in social care

The setting of specific objectives for children's services and the identification of key outcome indicators, together with the development of a core information specification for children's services with its practical application in the implementation of the Integrated Children's System, all mean that substantially more data are now available to child welfare agencies. Not so long ago in the UK it was the role of research teams to collect and analyse such data. Now that so much of it is already available to agencies, are researchers who work in this area of applied social policy research becoming redundant? Using data from the cohorts of looked after children being studied at the Centre for Child and Family Research, Loughborough University, the paper demonstrates how researchers can work in consultation with the managers of child welfare agencies to make better sense of the data at their disposal. It considers three issues: what additional variables need to be explored to help agencies better understand their performance; how groups of children could be identified who follow predictable pathways through social care; and how qualitative information is necessary to gain a true picture of what is happening. All of these examples demonstrate a fundamental role for researchers in working with social services personnel to identify how services can be improved.     

企业绩效的辅助评价方法——非财务指标评价

针对目前企业绩效大多采用财务指标进行评价，评价结果不够全面、准确的问题，提出了采用非财务指标进行辅助评价的方法，构建了企业绩效非财务性指标评价的新指标体系，建立了企业绩效的非财务指标综合评价模型，实践表明．这是一种较方便的企业绩效辅助评价方法。     

Simultaneous modelling of multiple traffic safety performance indicators by using a multivariate generalized linear mixed model

Summary.  Traffic safety in the UK is one of the increasing number of areas where central government sets targets based on 'outcome-focused' performance indicators (PIs). Judgments about such PIs are often based solely on rankings of raw indicators and simple league tables dominate centrally published analyses. There is a considerable statistical literature examining health and education issues which has tended to use the generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to address variability in the data when drawing inferences about relative performance from headline PIs. This methodology could obviously be applied in contexts such as traffic safety. However, when such models are applied to the fairly crude data sets that are currently available, the interval estimates generated, e.g. in respect of rankings, are often too broad to allow much real differentiation between the traffic safety performance of the units that are being considered. Such results sit uncomfortably with the ethos of 'performance management' and raise the question of whether the inference from such data sets about relative performance can be improved in some way. Motivated by consideration of a set of nine road safety performance indicators measured on English local authorities in the year 2000, the paper considers methods to strengthen the weak inference that is obtained from GLMMs of individual indicators by simultaneous, multivariate modelling of a range of related indicators. The correlation structure between indicators is used to reduce the uncertainty that is associated with rankings of any one of the individual indicators. The results demonstrate that credible intervals can be substantially narrowed by the use of the multivariate GLMM approach and that multivariate modelling of multiple PIs may therefore have considerable potential for introducing more robust and realistic assessments of differential performance in some contexts.     

Regulating animal health,gender and quality control: A study of veterinary surgeons in Great Britain

This paper explores the validity of performance management regimes for quality assuring animal health regulation by comparing the results of tests for bovine tuberculosis (bTB) between male and female vets. In doing so it hopes to present some practical solutions to the regulation of animal disease and encourage further sociological study of the veterinary profession. Concerns about the quality of animal health regulation by vets have prompted thinking about the role of quality control mechanisms such as performance management systems and performance indicators. To investigate their suitability, bTB testing data from areas with high incidence of bTB in Great Britain were extracted from the Vetnet database. Using the data, a performance indicator ‘reactors per 1000 cattle tested’ was calculated and compared with veterinarians' gender. Results showed statistically significant differences between gender and vets' reactor detection: male vets were more likely to detect animal disease than female vets. The paper considers how the concepts of ‘emotional labour’ and ‘relational distance’ may explain vets' behaviour. The presence of these systematic biases raises questions over the use of performance indicators as means of quality control, and highlights the need for further social scientific analysis of the veterinary profession.     

石油城市可持续发展的AHP评价

石油城市的产业结构调整和可持续发展已经成为全球尤其是学术界关注的热点问题。在对石油城市可持续发展评述的基础上,通过建立石油城市可持续发展评价指标体系,运用层次分析法对盘锦市的可持续发展现状进行综合定量评价,实证分析得出该市属于弱可持续发展水平。     

The Evolutionary Psychology of Human Mate Choice

Abstract

The recent incorporation of sexual selection theories into the rubric of evolutionary psychology has produced an important framework from which to examine human mating behavior. Here we review the extant empirical and theoretical work regarding heterosexual human mating preferences and reproductive strategies. Initially, we review contemporary evolutionary psychology's adaptationism, including the incorporation of modern theories of sexual selection, adaptive genetic variation, and mate choice. Next, we examine women's and men's mating preferences, focusing on the adaptive significance of material, genetic and fertility benefits, and their relationship to environmental characteristics. Following this, we consider human mate choice in relation to non-adaptive preferences. This discussion ends with a look at context effects for individual differences in mate-preferences and reproductive strategies.     

A study of regression calibration in a partially observed stratified Cox model

Regression calibration is a simple method for estimating regression models when covariate data are missing for some study subjects. It consists in replacing an unobserved covariate by an estimator of its conditional expectation given available covariates. Regression calibration has recently been investigated in various regression models such as the linear, generalized linear, and proportional hazards models. The aim of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of this method for estimating the stratified Cox regression model with missing values of the covariate defining the strata. Despite its practical relevance, this problem has not yet been discussed in the literature. Asymptotic distribution theory is developed for the regression calibration estimator in this setting. A simulation study is also conducted to investigate the properties of this estimator.     

Random alliance networks

The morphological properties of kinship and marriage alliance networks, such as circuits, are typically considered as indicators of sociological phenomena — yet, they may also be partly coincidental. To assert the contribution of chance to these morphological features, we develop a standardized method where empirical alliance networks are compared with a random baseline. We apply our framework to a variety of empirical cases and show that some corpuses are remarkably well reconstructed by our random model, while others still feature significant divergencies which may be partly connected to field-based experience. On the whole, our approach may be used to scrutinize the matrimonial role of social groups as asserted by native or ethnological theory.