The risk of subsequent maltreatment allegations in families with substance-exposed infants

OBJECTIVE: This study seeks to: (1) assess the relationship between identified prenatal substance use and the risk of subsequent maltreatment allegations among families involved with child protective services; and (2) compare the types of safety threats encountered by children whose parents had substance-exposed infant (SEI) allegations to the types of safety threats faced by children whose parents had other types of allegations. METHOD: Survey data from a probability sample of parents were linked to state administrative data over a 33-month time frame. Cox regression models were conducted to assess the relative risk of subsequent allegations associated with parents whose child welfare case opened following an SEI allegation (the SEI group) compared to parents whose case opened following other types of allegations. RESULTS: The likelihood of subsequent allegations is greater among parents in the SEI group. However, the increased risk stems almost entirely from subsequent SEI-related allegations. Parents in the SEI group are not more likely to incur other types of allegations such as physical abuse or lack of supervision. CONCLUSIONS: An increased risk of subsequent maltreatment has been used to justify opening child protective cases on the basis of an SEI allegation alone. By looking closely at the types of subsequent allegations as well as the incidence of subsequent allegations, this research helps to clarify the maltreatment risks associated with SEI cases.     

Grouping Continuous Data in Discrete Intervals: Information Loss and Recovery

Information loss occurs when continuous data are grouped in discrete intervals. After calculating the squared correlation coefficients between continuous data and corresponding grouped data for four population distributions, the effects of population distribution, number of intervals, and interval width on information loss and recover), were examined.     

Why McNemar's Procedure Needs to be Included in the Business Statistics Curriculum

In business research situations it is often of interest to examine the differences in the responses in repeated measurements of the same subjects or from among matched or paired subjects. A simple and useful procedure for comparing differences between proportions in two related samples was devised by McNemar (1947) nearly 60 years ago. Although the technique has enjoyed widespread usage in both behavioral and medical research, it has unfortunately not received proper attention in marketing, advertising, consumer research, public relations, operations management, or organizational behavior endeavors—disciplines wherein it is particularly desirable to evaluate the significance of changes in attitudes, opinions, or beliefs regarding some campaign or strategy. Perhaps the major reason for this obscurity is simply a general lack of awareness as to its value and practical power. The McNemar test is generally not currently being taught to business statistics students. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate the usefulness and applicability of the McNemar procedure to these aforementioned disciplines so that it may be more appropriately employed as an important confirmatory data analysis tool within the basic business statistics curriculum.     

Potentiation of taste by another taste during compound aversion learning

Two experiments with rat subjects examined whether a saccharin taste could potentiate the conditioning of an aversion to a salty taste when the two stimuli were presented together prior to lithium-induced illness. In Experiment 1, a 0.1% (w/v) saccharin solution potentiated conditioning of a very dilute (0.03%) NaCl solution, but had no demonstrable effect on two stronger NaCl solutions (0.6% and 1.2%). In Experiment 2, the 0.1% saccharin solution again potentiated the 0.03% NaCl target, but weaker and stronger saccharin concentrations (0.033% and 0.3%) did not. The ability of a taste to potentiate a secondtaste is not consistent with theories that assume that potentiation is unique to compounds composed of tastes and other, functionally different, nontaste cues. Potentiation may occur when the target stimulus is weakly conditionable on its own and when the particular combination of target and potentiator facilitates perceptual integration of the compound.     

Writing film: making inferences when viewing and reading

This article discusses the ways in which short films on video might be integrated into the English curriculum. I argue that shorts can be used to scaffold writing, and further than this, that students can learn a great deal about narrative form by shuttling between the two media of print and film. The article focuses on a ‘worked example’, being an account of an INSET session using a short film called Father and Daughter.     

College tuition costs and early career socioeconomic achievement: do you get what you pay for?

The effects of college tuition costs on early career educational, occupational and economic achievements were estimated for a national sample of black and white college students. The findings suggest that attending a relatively high tuition college has a net positive influence on such outcomes as educational attainment, occupational status, income and women's entry into sex-atypical careers. These effects remained significant even when controls were made for student background characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic origins, secondary school achievement, educational and occupational aspirations); the academic selectivity, private/public control, size and graduate orientation of the college attended; and one's specific college experiences (e.g., academic major, academic achievement and social involvement). The findings are discussed in terms of several plausible causal mechanisms.     

给大脑充电

大脑是一个“电力器官”，利用脉冲磁场激活大脑神经线路，可以缓解压力、增进认知，甚至克服疲劳。