Quality Rating and Improvement Systems: Considerations for Children from Immigrant Families

As the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. has steadily increased over the last forty years, it is not surprising to find that many children in the U.S. are now born to at least one foreign-born parent or are immigrants themselves. As the U.S. becomes more minority majority, cultural and linguistic diversity will become a key issue when developing goals, policies, and practices to meet the needs of children and families.However, questions remain about whether Quality Rating and Improvement Systems and other quality initiatives are considering the needs of immigrant families and children. This issue of Making the Link discusses some of these concerns and recommendations that can improve systems for immigrant children

Housing Ranking: a model of equilibrium between buyers and sellers expectations

The equilibrium set of housing units (alternatives) can be characterized from the standpoint of both the demander and the supplier. The current work describes an application of the multicriteria single price model to the ranking of alternatives. By a generalization of the single price model and from both viewpoints an efficiency index can be calculated. We demonstrate how, in equilibrium, the two viewpoints result inevitably in inverse orders of ranking. The model is illustrated by a sample of housing units in the city of Valencia, Spain.

Immigrant population, public space and housing in Barcelona

Demographic change occurred in the last decade by the arrival of immigrant population has produced significant social and physical transformations in the Spanish cities. This article is part of a research on the residential and urban conditions of immigrant population in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona. In this study we have analyzed through case studies the relation between immigration and city through the study of the use of public space and housing characteristics. The immigrant population is generally a very diverse collective. We propose that points in common can be drawn from analyses that take into account other major characteristics, beyond country of origin, such as gender, economic situation and education level. Through observation of groups in public spaces, especially squares, it is possible to identify aspects related both to social status and to gender roles assigned by their original and adopted cultures. This paper focuses on Metropolitan Region of Barcelona, and analyzes its reality based on concrete data and specific in case studies, to verify and compare the initial proposal. To be able to determine parameters for comparison, we have worked with a methodological strategy based of several quantitative and qualitative tools to get an insight on residential and urban conditions of the immigrant population. The main technique used was the participant observation, involving direct observation and presence in different interaction spaces: streets, squares and public facilities. The observations involve two dimensions to make the analysis and the comparison between different fields of study easier: Physical dimension and Social dimension. This made it possible for us to become aware of the different uses made by immigrants and by the Spanish population based on their activities, gender, age, and interaction with other persons.

A Multidisciplinary Attempt at Understanding the Violence in Mexico

Mexico has been living with a level of violence that was unimaginable only a short time ago. Why and how has Mexico arrived at this dramatic increase in violence? The goal of this study is to reflect on this question through several disciplines. The idea is to collect and contrast sufficient information from the most varied fields of knowledge, including culture and art, as well as social sciences. This is done with the ambition that all these factors will help us to understand the reasons for this terrible and complex Mexican reality.Â

Heavy Ion Physics with CMS

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will produce heavy ion collisions at the nucleon-nucleon center of mass energy of 5.5 TeV, the highest energy ever available in a controlled environment. This represents an opportunity to study nuclear matter in systems with unprecedented energy densities. Due to the high incident energy, semi-hard and hard processes will be a dominant feature at the LHC. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) heavy-ion program is ideally suited to study the physics of these probes, addressing open questions in the field of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). In this paper an overview of the heavy-ion physics capabilities of the CMS detector is presented

Path Diagram of the Reputation of Faculties of Social Work in Central Mexico

Corporate governance as a knowledge management system has been approached from the organizational reputation as a result of alliances with institutions. In the health sector, the demand for a quality service has led to a system of professional practices and deregulated social service in which the image of the universities and health centers involved is questioned. The objective of the present work was to contrast a model for the study of the phenomenon with the intention of specifying the relationships between variables. A non-experimental exploratory and cross-sectional study was conducted with a non-probabilistic and intentional sample of 1018 administrative, professional and students of the health sector. It was found that the follow-up factor of cases reflected the image of the universities as trainers of intellectual capital by competences. In relation to the literature consulted, research lines are proposed to specify the model

The Geographic Concentration of Population and Income in Europe: Results for the Period 1984-1999

In this paper we use the Gini index to analyze the spatial concentration of income and population across European Union regions over the period 1984-1999. The results of our analysis show an slow but increasing pattern of geographic concentration of population and income. The critical threshold where the effects of the geographic concentration become remarkable is when we reach the 45-50% band of the richest population.EU regions

ENTREPRENEURIAL WOMEN, DIFFERENTIAL BEHAVIOURS AND BUSINESS INNOVATION

The participation of women in entrepreneurial activity forty years ago was virtually an exception. However, nowadays this is an important economic and social phenomenon, with an outstanding impact on the dynamics of both advanced and emerging economies. This is significant not only from a quantitative viewpoint. The fact that female personal features, motives and managerial methods differ from those of men gives a new and interesting perspective –which is still subject to debate- to the analysis regarding training and consolidation of enterprises. Gender-related differences can be the vehicle to introduce innovative aspects that could be influential in the uncertain and changing economic environment after the current crises, particularly in those fields where business output is related to the quality of life. Adopting a previous regional model as a basis of study, we analyse in this work the characteristics that differentiate entrepreneurial women in Spain on the grounds of data collected from an own drafted survey regarding the entrepreneurial activity (607 complete questionnaires) carried out in 2009. The results obtained indicate the coexistence of two different types of entrepreneurial women. The first group gathers those women whose enterprises show, generally speaking, a similar sectoral distribution to that of the whole productive fabric, although with a slight tendency to be more present in services activities. Their characteristics and attitudes are, in general, quite similar to those registered among entrepreneurial men and many of these women come from entrepreneurial families. The second group is mainly made up of entrepreneurial women –frequently with family burdens and low qualified- devoted to services, particularly personal services and retail trade. Technological and managerial characteristics of companies managed by the entrepreneurial women belonging to this group differ substantially from the average of the economy, with a much more traditional and less innovative profile.

An experiment on subjective game valuations

We report experimental results on a prisoners' dilemma implemented in a way which allows us to elicit incentive-compatible valuations of the game. We test the hypothesis that players'' valuations coincide with their Nash equilibrium earnings. Our results offer significantly less support for this hypothesis than for the prediction of Dominant Strategy (DS) play.