Foster child health care supervision policy

Foster children represent a high-risk group for physical, emotional, and social health problems, yet few federal or state policies explicitly address foster child health. This article reviews foster child health and the legal background for policy, then discusses components of a comprehensive health care supervision program.     

Peer Support Groups for Child Welfare–Involved Families

Studies on risk factors and circumstances related to child maltreatment have continuously emphasized the important role of social support. As a result, peer support groups have been gaining attention and recognition in recent years in the field of child maltreatment prevention. However, little is known about the benefits that child welfare–involved parents receive in peer support groups, as well as the distinctive service elements that make these groups successful. By examining child welfare–involved parents’ experiences participating in peer support groups, this study provided a better understanding of the perceived beneficial aspects of peer support groups, specific types of supports offered to and by peers, and unique characteristics of these groups.     

Personality of social robots perceived through the appearance

Past research showed that people are able to perceive the personality of others at zero acquaintances. There are two main ways, verbal and non-verbal methods, which play an important role for one in perceiving personality of others. Extensive research was conducted in relating personality with verbal, paralinguistic and gestures cues. However, there are not much research, to our knowledge, that relates the appearance and perceived personality of robots. The main objective of this research is to relate individual design features with big five perceived personality of the robots. We used the results of rated perceptions across 100 pictorial images of robots and relate the results with the 40 individual design features using General Linear Model (GLM). The initial results of the GLM analysis showed that participants' rating of personality of robot fell along the dimension of perceived friendliness which is a common rotation of extroversion and agreeableness. Some relationships were found between humanlike design features and perceived friendliness of robots. Since participants are more familiar with humans, participants perceived robots with humanlike features friendlier than the others. Some other findings such as color and surface material were found related with participants' perceived friendliness as well. In the future, we will work on the analysis of the main and interaction effects of individual features on user's perceived friendliness.     

Corporate Reputation: Do Board Characteristics Matter?

Our study draws on institutional and signalling theories to postulate relationships between board characteristics and corporate reputation. Based on a sample of 324 firms featured in Fortune's list of most admired corporations in the USA, our findings indicate that board characteristics significantly influence the assessment of firm reputation by the business community. Specifically, we found that firms with a greater proportion of outside directors and those with larger boards exhibited better reputation than those with smaller boards and a higher proportion of insiders. In addition, we observed an inverted‐U relationship between the average tenure of outside directors and corporate reputation. However, contrary to expectations, our findings indicate a negative association between independent leadership structure (i.e. absence of duality) and corporate reputation.     

Ensemble preconditioning for Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation

We describe parallel Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that propagate a collective ensemble of paths, with local covariance information calculated from neighbouring replicas. The use of collective dynamics eliminates multiplicative noise and stabilizes the dynamics, thus providing a practical approach to difficult anisotropic sampling problems in high dimensions. Numerical experiments with model problems demonstrate that dramatic potential speedups, compared to various alternative schemes, are attainable.