Adult Exploration of Attachment Interview in Family Therapy

The Adult Exploration of Attachment Interview (AEAI) is a therapeutic interview developed by the author to assist adults to understand themselves and their relationships with others, especially with a partner, co‐parent and/or children. It is suitable for individuals and couples struggling to overcome repeated patterns of relating, helping to improve their intimate or parenting relationships through greater self and other understanding. The AEAI explores an adult's early relational learning, especially in regard to attachment needs, in order to allow change. The interview uses specific externalising language to help persons tolerate difficult memories, reduce guilt and shame and integrate their thoughts and feelings. It applies key implications of attachment theory and the approach is illustrated by examples from therapy.     

Chilling out in ‘cosmopolitan country’: Urban/rural hybridity and the construction of Daylesford as a ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’

This paper advances scholarship on ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’. A growing literature examines how ‘lesbian and gay rural idylls’ are not only produced in opposition to the urban, but are themselves urban constructs. We extend these contentions by exploring the processes of idyllisation suffusing lesbian and gay festival tourism in Daylesford, a town in non-metropolitan Victoria, Australia. We find that Daylesford’s idyllisation by the lesbian and gay tourism industry blurs the urban/rural binary, and instead hybridises rurality and urbanity in the tourism images and practices of ‘cosmopolitan country’ associated with the town. Research findings from Daylesford are analysed to examine how the dynamics of tourism marketing and festival attendance help produce and articulate this hybrid variant of the ‘lesbian and gay rural idyll’. We utilise two sets of mostly qualitative data for this inquiry: travel commentaries in the news media, and a survey conducted in Daylesford at the 2006 ChillOut Festival, Australia’s largest lesbian and gay rural festival.     

Organizing Identities: Immigrant New Yorkers Negotiating Latinidad1

Across the United States, immigrants’ rights protests, marches, and demonstrations captured the attention of the public and of lawmakers in the spring of 2006. Much of the rhetoric that emerged from these mobilizations included an assertion of Latino/a immigrant identity. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in New York City in 2006 and 2007, this article argues that, confronted with a strong and clear organizational discourse of pan‐ethnic Latino/a unity, Latin American immigrants articulated a variety of identities. I found no clear link between self‐identification as Latino/a and participation in political mobilizations for immigration reform; this is in contrast to previous studies of Latino/a political activity. Examining the interactions, perspectives, and practices of Latin American immigrants involved with one community‐based organization, this study attempts to address the lack of micro‐level studies of immigrants’ everyday lives.     

Who runs the mill? The distribution of power in Swedish social service agencies

The aim of the article is to describe how significant actors in Swedish social service agencies perceive their own and other groups' influence over central areas of their agencies, and also to investigate the correspondence between these actors' perceptions of influence and what is said about the distribution of influence in the legislation and in the literature on social service organisations. The investigation is based on a questionnaire sent to politicians, managers and social workers in Swedish municipalities.

The analysis shows a concordance between the actors' own perceptions of their influence, and the ‘real’ distribution of influence, as perceived by the same actor groups. The general picture is that the politicians feel they have a strong influence on policy, delegation and, partly, also on organisational issues, but it is noteworthy that the top managers feel they have a stronger influence over all these areas. Social workers' influence is limited to the choice of working methods and operational procedures. The results indicate that some core elements of the New Public Management (NPM) model of governance exist in Swedish municipalities and seem to be generally accepted among significant actors. However, the results raise important questions about who should be held accountable for neglect and mismanagement and for failure in implementation of reforms in the social services.     

Dilemmas between law and ethics in Czech social work

In many situations social workers face the necessity of making a decision. One of the most frequent scenarios of making a choice is the dilemma of whether to intervene or not. The choice itself is conditioned on the one hand by the obligation to comply with the relevant legal requirements and on the other by the necessity of respecting ethical values, rules and principles. One often encounters a situation when the legal requirements and ethical conduct appear in mutual contradiction. This essay will deal with the possible concept of the relationship between law and ethics giving examples of dilemmas between ‘confidentiality’ and the ′informing or reporting obligation′ in the context of Czech social work.     

高职CAD类课程教改与产品设计创新

随着我国成为位于全球前列的工业产品制造业市场,通过产品设计创新来提升产品的显性价值变得至关重要。PRO/E软件为CAD软件的主流软件之一,为培养满足企业所需的工业设计人才,文中以PRO/E课程教学为例,首先提出对传统教学必须进行改革,而改革就要对课程的教学目标、教学对象、教材、教学内容设计等进行分析;其次结合产品设计创新案例介绍了如何使创新教育走入课堂。     

Variance Reduction in Smoothing Splines

Abstract.  We develop a variance reduction method for smoothing splines. For a given point of estimation, we define a variance-reduced spline estimate as a linear combination of classical spline estimates at three nearby points. We first develop a variance reduction method for spline estimators in univariate regression models. We then develop an analogous variance reduction method for spline estimators in clustered/longitudinal models. Simulation studies are performed which demonstrate the efficacy of our variance reduction methods in finite sample settings. Finally, a real data analysis with the motorcycle data set is performed. Here we consider variance estimation and generate 95% pointwise confidence intervals for the unknown regression function.     

Variational Bayes for estimating the parameters of a hidden Potts model

Hidden Markov random field models provide an appealing representation of images and other spatial problems. The drawback is that inference is not straightforward for these models as the normalisation constant for the likelihood is generally intractable except for very small observation sets. Variational methods are an emerging tool for Bayesian inference and they have already been successfully applied in other contexts. Focusing on the particular case of a hidden Potts model with Gaussian noise, we show how variational Bayesian methods can be applied to hidden Markov random field inference. To tackle the obstacle of the intractable normalising constant for the likelihood, we explore alternative estimation approaches for incorporation into the variational Bayes algorithm. We consider a pseudo-likelihood approach as well as the more recent reduced dependence approximation of the normalisation constant. To illustrate the effectiveness of these approaches we present empirical results from the analysis of simulated datasets. We also analyse a real dataset and compare results with those of previous analyses as well as those obtained from the recently developed auxiliary variable MCMC method and the recursive MCMC method. Our results show that the variational Bayesian analyses can be carried out much faster than the MCMC analyses and produce good estimates of model parameters. We also found that the reduced dependence approximation of the normalisation constant outperformed the pseudo-likelihood approximation in our analysis of real and synthetic datasets.     

“美学”何以可能？——对鲍姆嘉通的“Aesthetica”及其相关概念的探析

我国自上个世纪80年代以来关于“美学”学科定位和研究对象等自身规定性的跨世纪之争,促使我们不得不追根溯源,追溯德国哲学家鲍姆嘉通（Baumgarten,Alexander Gottlieb）和由他首创的作为学科名的Aesthetica（埃斯赛迪卡）。如何认识和评估鲍姆嘉通对审美研究的贡献迄今仍在争论之中,这源于以下问题始终未能被澄清：鲍姆嘉通以Aesthetica的名义试图指代的究竟是怎样一个理论研究领域,这个领域的独立性和创新性体现在什么地方以至于它有资格成为一门独立的哲学学科？此学科所对应了生活实际的哪一个领域、指向了人类生存的哪一种维度？美学如何和艺术哲学以及文艺理论相区分？对这些问题的回答都必须考察鲍氏在埃斯赛迪卡暨“美学”学科建设上的始初意向,即在其博士论文和理论美学文本中对Aesthetica及其他相关概念所作的规定;以期厘清一些和“美学”自身规定性有关的理论问题。     

Proceed With Caution? Parents' Union Dissolution and Children's Educational Achievement

Using high‐quality Norwegian register data on 49,879 children from 23,655 families, the authors estimated sibling fixed‐effects models to explore whether children who are younger at the time of a parental union dissolution perform less well academically, as measured by their grades at age 16, than their older siblings who have spent more time living with both biological parents. Results from a baseline model suggest a positive age gradient that is consistent with findings in some of the extant family structure literature. Once birth order is taken into account, the gradient reverses. When analyses also control for grade inflation by adding year of birth to the model, only those children who experience a dissolution just prior to receiving their grades appear relatively disadvantaged. The results illustrate the need to specify and interpret sibling fixed‐effects model with great care.