Child protection and justice systems processing of serious child abuse and neglect cases

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the trajectory of cases through four systems: child protection, law enforcement, the dependency courts, and the criminal courts. METHOD: This study focused on a county selected from a 41-county telephone survey conducted for the National Incidence Study of Child Abuse and Neglect (NIS-3). For this analysis prospective samples were drawn from law enforcement (n=225) and the county child protection (CPS) agency (n=225) and followed through in-depth case tracking across all agencies and through both the dependency and criminal court systems. RESULTS: The percentage of CPS cases opened in dependency court was similar to prior studies (29%), but the acceptance and prosecution rates were much higher--92% of the cases referred from CPS, including many cases of physical abuse. Compared to referrals from CPS to law enforcement (93%), few cases were referred from law enforcement to CPS (17%). Anecdotally, case referral patterns appeared to be influenced by communication patterns and mutual positive regard, regardless of the collaborative protocols in place. One of the most instructive findings was the degree of difficulty in tracking cases across organizations and the types of obstacles that impeded success. Disorganization was not an issue, rather internal structures set up to facilitate intra-organizational processing were the same structures that actually impeded cross-organizational case finding. CONCLUSIONS: It is not sufficient to rely on the existence of multi-disciplinary teams or Child Advocacy Centers to ensure collaboration. More attention to daily tasks and activities as well as the nature and quality of communication is warranted. On the technical side, use of common case identifiers on cases that are cross-referred is strongly recommended. Future studies should broaden the scope of inquiry to include the consequences of all case trajectories, rather than solely focusing on the justice system.     

Spelling consistency affects reading in young Dutch readers with and without dyslexia

Lexical-decision studies with experienced English and French readers have shown that visual-word identification is not only affected by pronunciation inconsistency of a word (i.e., multiple ways to pronounce a spelling body), but also by spelling inconsistency (i.e., multiple ways to spell a pronunciation rime). The aim of this study was to compare the reading behavior of young Dutch readers with dyslexia to the behavior of readers without dyslexia. All students participated in a lexical-decision task in which we presented pronunciation-consistent words and pseudowords. Half of the pronunciation-consistent stimuli were spelling consistent and the other half were spelling inconsistent. All three reader groups, that is, students with dyslexia, age-match students, and reading-match students, read spelling-consistent words faster than spelling-inconsistent words. Overall reading speed of students with dyslexia was similar to that of reading-match students, and was substantially slower than that of age-match students. The results suggest that reading in students with or without dyslexia is similarly affected by spelling inconsistency. Subtle qualitative differences emerged, however, with respect to pseudoword identification. The conclusion was that the findings were best interpreted in terms of a recurrent-feedback model.     

2035年全球开放存取事业回顾

本文总结了2005年全世界开放存取的发展特点大学支持开放存取、资助机构的开放存取政策过渡到实践阶段、作者积极参与开放存取、自存储不会影响期刊的发展、开放存取期刊快速发展、公共资助的研究成果强制性开放获取草案出台、科学数据开放存取、商业行为试图封杀开放存取未果、Wiki涉足开放存取、联机学术信息社会索引、开放存取图书大规模问世、开放存取面临的障碍、图书扫描和数字化、教科书价格危机与开放存取、"开放存取"使用面扩大.     

Ranking of library and information science researchers: Comparison of data sources for correlating citation data,and expert judgments

This paper studies the correlations between peer review and citation indicators when evaluating research quality in library and information science (LIS). Forty-two LIS experts provided judgments on a 5-point scale of the quality of research published by 101 scholars; the median rankings resulting from these judgments were then correlated with h-, g- and H-index values computed using three different sources of citation data: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus and Google Scholar (GS). The two variants of the basic h-index correlated more strongly with peer judgment than did the h-index itself; citation data from Scopus was more strongly correlated with the expert judgments than was data from GS, which in turn was more strongly correlated than data from WoS; correlations from a carefully cleaned version of GS data were little different from those obtained using swiftly gathered GS data; the indices from the citation databases resulted in broadly similar rankings of the LIS academics; GS disadvantaged researchers in bibliometrics compared to the other two citation database while WoS disadvantaged researchers in the more technical aspects of information retrieval; and experts from the UK and other European countries rated UK academics with higher scores than did experts from the USA.     

禾本科植物幼苗性状的聚类分析

本文用201种禾本科植物幼苗的60个形态和解剖性状进行了聚类分析，将禾本科植物分为四个大类(一级聚合单位)—狐茅类(Festucoid)、黍类(Panicoid)，竹类(Bambusoid)和画眉草类(Eragrostidoid)。这四类基本上与分类系统中的亚科相吻合，只是芦竹亚科植物的幼苗分散聚到了其它类中。推测芦竹亚科是一个比较原始的类群，狐茅亚科、黍亚科和画眉草亚科可能是在芦竹亚科的基础上进化而来的。  除个别种外，大多数同属的种在较低的聚合水平上聚在一起，超族在亚聚合单位中基本上能够反映出来。  研究证明禾本科植物的幼苗性状在禾本科植物分类中具有重要的分类学意义。     

The Virtual Library: Changing Roles and Ethical Challenges for Librarians

Since the 1930s, the Library Bill of Rights has acknowledged the ethical responsibility of librarians to provide access to information in all formats to all people. Librarians are charged with selecting, organizing, and instructing patrons on how to locate and use the resources, and preserving information regardless of format or technology. The information revolution and the pervasive thinking that everything is available on the Web have created new challenges to these traditional professional ethics. Acquiring and providing dependable access to electronic resources require librarians to learn and apply new skills such as negotiating license agreements and understanding evolving technologies. Print publications provide a degree of permanence, but e-information, if it is not properly managed, can be highly transient. Internet services provide large, uncontrolled, unregulated collection of resources. If the very nature of the Internet makes it nearly if not completely impossible to evaluate the content of web-sites, how does the librarian protect the integrity of the information the library provides? Along with traditional ethical conflicts, librarians in the virtual library are faced with new challenges to provide equitable access to usefully organized resources, to address petitions to deselect or filter, to negotiate less-restrictive licensing policies, and to maintain the anonymity of individual users within electronic transactions.     

Developing policies for inclusive education: a study of the role of local education authorities

In many parts of the world there is evidence of initiatives aimed at finding ways of creating forms of mainstream schooling that can respond to pupils with disabilities and others seen as having special educational needs (UNESCO 1995). There is also a growing research literature that throws light on how schools and classrooms can be developed in relation to this idea (e.g. Rouse and Florian 1996, Sebba and Sachdev 1997, Thomas et al. 1998, Ainscow 1999, Clark et al. 1999). However, few studies have considered the contributions and roles of local administrative arrangements to such developments, even though there is evidence that these can be highly influential in relation to policy implementation in general (Spillane 1998). Drawing on the evidence of a recent study carried out in England, this paper starts to fill this gap. Specifically, it addresses the question: in what ways do local administrative arrangements bear on attempts to develop more inclusive ways of working in schools? In considering the evidence and arguments presented it is important to recognize that the peculiarities of each national context mean that district level arrangements for the management of education in one country cannot be assumed to be similar to that in other countries. Consequently, transporting conclusions from one situation to another is impossible. Nevertheless, a detailed engagement with the experiences of particular countries can provide a useful basis for reflection on what happens elsewhere. Before considering this specific agenda, however, we summarize certain relevant international trends.