Social Work, Sectarianism and Anti-sectarian Practice in Northern Ireland

Correspondence to Dr Jim Campbell, Department of Social Work, The Queen's University of Belfast, 7 Lennoxvale, Belfast BT9 5BY, Northern Ireland. Jim Campbell lectures in the Department of Social Work, The Queen's University of Belfast. His doctoral thesis was on the concept of violence in social and political thought. His current research interests include social policy in Northern Ireland and mental health social work Summary This paper addresses a subject relatively unknown to the Britishand international social work audience—that of trainingfor anti-sectarian practice. In doing so, it points to someof the complex, even dangerous issues raised by such trainingfor social work students and practitioners in Northern Ireland.The paper comments upon the limited but significant ways inwhich social work educators and practitioners have tried tochallenge sectarian discrimination in Northern Ireland, andproposes methods in train ing and research which might facilitatea better understanding of these processes.     

GENDER, EARNINGS, AND THE ENGLISH SKILL ACQUISITION OF HISPANIC WORKERS IN THE UNITED STATES

Using the 1980 and 1990 Public Use Microdata Samples, we find that labor market outcomes associated with English proficiency vary with respect to gender. For example, a synthetic cohort analysis provides evidence of gender-related differences in Hispanic workers' English skill acquisition. Moreover, we observe that Hispanic women face a lower English deficiency earnings penalty that rises more sharply with education than the penalty obtained by their otherwise similar male peers. Finally, English fluency appears to serve as a stronger occupational sorting mechanism for women than men. ( JEL J3, J1)     

GENDER MATCHING AND COMPETITIVENESS: EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

This paper experimentally investigates if and how people's competitiveness depends on their own gender and on the gender of people with whom they interact. Participants are given information about the gender of the co‐participant they are matched with, they then choose between a tournament or a piece rate payment scheme, and finally perform a real task. As already observed in the literature, we find that significantly more men than women choose the tournament. The gender of the co‐participant directly influences men's choices (men compete less against other men than against women), but only when the gender information is made sufficiently salient. A higher predicted competitiveness of women induces more competition. Giving stronger tournament incentives, or allowing the participants to choose the gender of their co‐participant, increases women's willingness to compete, but does not close the gender gap in competitiveness. (JEL C70, C91, J16, J24, J31, M52)     

Bringing About Changes to Corporate Social Policy through Shareholder Activism: Filers,Issues, Targets,and Success

We examine shareholder initiated social policy proposals' capacity to exert pressure on management to force it to adopt the suggested changes in policy. We show that social proposals, filed under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's Rule 14a‐8, have a more limited capacity to change corporate social policy than it has been previously reported. However, the capacity to exert pressure on firms can be substantially higher for some types of filers, notably pension funds and mutual funds. The analysis also suggests that the capacity to influence management is higher for some types of issues presented in the resolution, such as those related to board diversity, energy and environment, and international laborand human rights. We also provide suggestions explaining why shareholder activism is a persistent practice despite its limited results.     

Cosmopolitanization in action: connecting scales in international environmental organizations

In this article we analyse how professionals in two international environmental organizations (IEOs) concerned with biodiversity act as ‘entrepreneurs of cosmopolitanization’ by establishing connections between the various scales they mobilize in their daily work. Drawing on an empirical survey, we show that these professionals mobilize a range of activities to meet a twofold requirement. The first requirement is for universality, which corresponds to their status, their determination to adopt a scientific approach and to the scale at which they initially defined the problem of biodiversity loss. The second requirement is to embed in specific contexts. Tension between these two types of requirement is inevitable. It is inherent in the cosmopolitan perspective and leads to contextual arrangements between the global approach to environmental problems and the forging of alliances with national, regional or local institutions and actors, according to opportunities and requirements. Connecting the various scales of environmental action unavoidably remains a partially achieved objective.     

Semiparametric Estimation of a Two-component Mixture Model where One Component is known

Abstract.  We consider a two-component mixture model where one component distribution is known while the mixing proportion and the other component distribution are unknown. These kinds of models were first introduced in biology to study the differences in expression between genes. The various estimation methods proposed till now have all assumed that the unknown distribution belongs to a parametric family. In this paper, we show how this assumption can be relaxed. First, we note that generally the above model is not identifiable, but we show that under moment and symmetry conditions some 'almost everywhere' identifiability results can be obtained. Where such identifiability conditions are fulfilled we propose an estimation method for the unknown parameters which is shown to be strongly consistent under mild conditions. We discuss applications of our method to microarray data analysis and to the training data problem. We compare our method to the parametric approach using simulated data and, finally, we apply our method to real data from microarray experiments.     

Art,climate change and (other) eco materials: rethinking the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization with Ulrich Beck

Based on fieldwork in Japan and Hong Kong, I ask how methodological cosmopolitanism, as formulated by Ulrich Beck, may afford new and highly needed modes for grappling with climatically concerned art and aesthetic practices across geographical regions. I will argue that methodological cosmopolitanism serves as an important framework for approaching such art practices, and suggest that two overall intertwined strands concerning aesthetic practices engaged in global issues of climate change, emerge from this – the cosmopolitanization of aesthetics and, reversely, the aesthetics of cosmopolitanization. Departing from my fieldwork among farming artists in the Hong Kong countryside and in the Japanese satoyama – rural mountain – areas, I will, on the one hand, argue that art practices are ‘cosmopolitanized’ by the awareness of global risks, manifested in anticipation of the comprehensive climatic changes (in)discriminately affecting across nations and regions. At the same time, and importantly, art practices are actively attending to this ‘risky’ cosmopolitanization, giving aesthetic voice, form and ‘visuality’ to unfolding climatic issues and concerns and hereby practising what I will call an ‘aesthetics of cosmopolitanization’.     

Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling

Abstract. The Adaptive Multiple Importance Sampling algorithm is aimed at an optimal recycling of past simulations in an iterated importance sampling (IS) scheme. The difference with earlier adaptive IS implementations like Population Monte Carlo is that the importance weights of all simulated values, past as well as present, are recomputed at each iteration, following the technique of the deterministic multiple mixture estimator of Owen & Zhou (J. Amer. Statist. Assoc., 95, 2000, 135). Although the convergence properties of the algorithm cannot be investigated, we demonstrate through a challenging banana shape target distribution and a population genetics example that the improvement brought by this technique is substantial.