Domestic violence screening and service acceptance among adult victims in a dependency court setting

Many child welfare systems are unable to effectively identify and address co-occurring domestic violence and child maltreatment. In response, the Dependency Court Intervention Program for Family Violence implemented a protocol to identify indicators of domestic violence in families involved with child protection proceedings. This article highlights data that demonstrate the ability of an outreach and screening process to identify adult victims of domestic violence in dependency court and to offer them appropriate intervention services.     

Foresight activities in the U.S.A.: Time for a re-assessment?

This article reports on a brief, informal, reconnaissance study of ‘foresight’ activities now being conducted in the private sector and the Federal government. Such activities include: external environmental assessment, internal organizational assessment, direction setting, definition, and selection of base and contingent plans, implementation, performance evaluation and feedback. The study involved the reading and analysis of the existing literature and discussions with over 50 people in diverse private and public sector organizations. The objective was to determine what foresight activities are being done, how, by whom, with what results, and what are the implications and options.     

Binge drinking: not the word of choice

Educators and researchers strive to use terms that reflect a replicable measure of behavior. A term commonly used to describe drinking of a problematic nature is binge drinking. Binge drinking defines behavior by a number of drinks of an alcoholic beverage consumed in a space of time. The authors argue that the term does not describe drinking behavior that students believe is problematic. They claim that students define problem drinking not in terms of quantity, but rather by the outcome (and occasionally by frequency), and attribute different negative connotations to the term binge. They suggest using a term that has shared meaning with students, such as dangerous drinking, to describe the drinking behavior that results in undesirable or unintended consequences.     

Making sense of visual management through affordance theory

Visual management is much used within operations management practice, particularly in association with process improvement initiatives in diverse areas such as production and healthcare. The practitioner literature abounds with suggested best practice. However, there is little attempt to theorise about why the design and use of ‘visual’ devices for such process improvement works in practice. Within this paper we describe a novel theory of operation which highlights the role that material and visual artefacts proposed by visual management practitioners play within particular ways of organising work. We develop an innovative way of employing the theory of affordances to explain how first- and second-order affordances, situated around the visual devices at the heart of visual management, connect three domains of action, which we refer to as articulation, communication and coordination. Our analysis of three cases from healthcare, clothing manufacturing and software production help ground the theorisation discussed.     

Modeling Exposure to Air Pollution from the WTC Disaster Based on Reports of Perceived Air Pollution

We examined the utility of a newly developed perceived air pollution (PAP) scale and of a modeled air pollution (MAP) scale derived from it for predicting previously observed birth outcomes of pregnant women enrolled following September 11, 2001. Women reported their home and work locations in the four weeks after September 11, 2001 and the PAP at each site on a four-point scale designed for this purpose. Locations were geocoded and their distance from the World Trade Center (WTC) site determined. PAP values were used to develop a model of air pollution for a 20-mile radius from the WTC site. MAP values were assigned to each geocoded location. We examined the relationship of PAP and MAP values to maternal characteristics and to distance of home and work sites from the WTC site. Both PAP and MAP values were highly correlated with distance from the WTC. Maternal characteristics that were associated with PAP values reported for home or work sites (race, demoralization, material hardship, first trimester on September 11) were not associated with modeled MAP values. Relationships of several birth outcomes to proximity to the WTC, which we previously reported using this data set, were also seen when MAP values were used as the measure of exposure, instead of proximity. MAP developed from reports of PAP may be useful to identify high-risk areas and predict health outcomes when there are multiple sources of pollution and a "distance from source" analysis is impossible.     

A comparison of models for clustered binary outcomes: analysis of a designed immunology experiment

The lymphocyte proliferative assay (LPA) of immune competence was conducted on 52 subjects, with up to 36 processing conditions per subject, to evaluate whether samples could be shipped or stored overnight, rather than being processed on fresh blood as currently required. The LPA study resulted in clustered binary data, with both cluster level and cluster-varying covariates. Two modelling strategies for the analysis of such clustered binary data are through the cluster-specific and population-averaged approaches. Whereas most research in this area has focused on the analysis of matched pairs data, in many situations, such as the LPA study, cluster sizes are naturally larger. Through considerations of interpretation and efficiency of these models when applied to large clusters, the mixed effect cluster-specific model was selected as most appropriate for the analysis of the LPA data. The model confirmed that the LPA response is significantly impaired in individuals infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The LPA response was found to be significantly lower for shipped and overnight samples than for fresh samples, and this effect was significantly stronger among HIV-infected individuals. Surprisingly, an anticoagulant effect was not detected.     

Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

This quarter's column features a report from the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference, held March 25–28, 2015, in Portland, OR; a couple of reports from the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians (OVGTSL) Conference, held May 18–20 in Terre Haute, IN; one report from NASIG, held May 27–30 in Washington, DC; and several reports from the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference, held June 25–30 in San Francisco, CA. Topics discussed range from scholarly publishing, copyright and authors’ rights—including as they relate to zines—privacy and analytics, and linked data.