Urban Institute: CHA Families and the Plan for Transformation

The Urban Institute provides high-quality research on economic and social policy, addressing topics such as education, employment, crime, and governance. This clutch of documents looks at the transformation of the Chicago Housing Authority and the provision of public housing in the city. The five briefs “describe key successes and challenges faced by CHA and its residents.” Titles address topics like “How Chicago’s Public Housing Transformation Can Inform Federal Policy?” and “Chronic Violence: Beyond the Developments.” Along with these insightful documents, you can also look over the Previous Briefs area. Here you will find “The Health Crisis for CHA Families,” “CHA After Wells-Where are the Residents Now?” and a dozen other briefs.

[Source: Scout Report, Volume 19, Number 17, April 26, 2013]

OECD Working Papers Series
The mantra of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is “Better Policies for Better Lives.” OECD’s work spans the world and features a team of economists, sociologists, and others working on problems as diverse as higher education, access to clean water, and energy policy. The OECD Working Papers Series spans 19 crucial areas, including agriculture, development, environment, finance, and health care. You should definitely check out the Tourism papers, as they include the compelling work “Green Innovation in Tourism Services.” The Local Economic and Employment (LEED) papers are quite good as well, covering timely topics like urban governance and regional policy decision making. You can sign up to receive updates about new papers as they are released to the site.

[Source: Scout Report, Volume 19, Number 18, May 3, 2013]

Race and Social Problems provides an international and multidisciplinary forum for issues germane to race and its enduring relationship to psychological, socioeconomic, political, and cultural problems. The journal publishes original empirical studies, reviews of past research, theoretical studies, and invited essays that advance the understanding of the complexities of race and its relationship to social problems. Coverage includes anthropology, communications, criminology, economics, history, law, political science, psychology, public health, social work, and sociology.

You can download and save these free articles to your computer, iPad or mobile device:

• Measuring the Economic Racial Divide Across the Course of American Lives - M.R. Rank
• Racial Formation in Theory and Practice: The Case of Mexicans in the United States - D.S. Massey
• Hispanic Fertility, Immigration, and Race in the Twenty-First Century - E.A. Parrado and C.A. Flippen
• Racial Disparities in Early Criminal Justice Involvement - R.D. Crutchfield, M.L. Skinner, K.P. Haggerty, A. McGlynn and R.F. Catalano
• Goal-Striving Stress and Racial Differences in Mental Health - H.W. Neighbors, S. L. Sellers, Rong Zhang and J.S. Jackson

HKUL users can continue to access the journal via http://library.hku.hk/record=b4288839

Safari Books Online will be down for maintenance for approximately two to three hours on Saturday April 6th and Saturday April 13th at the time below:

Saturday, April 6th:
Malaysia/China Standard Time at 14:00 for up to three hours

Saturday, April 13th:
Malaysia/China Standard Time at 14:00 for up to three hours

Demography presents the highest quality original research of scholars in a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, psychology, public health, sociology, and statistics. The journal encompasses a wide variety of methodological approaches to population research. Its geographic focus is global, with articles addressing demographic matters from around the planet. Its temporal scope is broad, as represented by research that explores demographic phenomena spanning the ages from the past to the present, and reaching toward the future.

2011 Impact Factor: 1.931

Top cited papers from Demography:

• Paternal Incarceration and Support for Children in Fragile Families - Geller, Amanda; Garfinkel, Irwin; Western, Bruce
• The Protective Effect of Marriage for Survival: A Review and Update - Rendall, Michael S.; Weden, Margaret M.; Favreault, Melissa M.; et al.
• Beyond Absenteeism: Father Incarceration and Child Development - Geller, Amanda; Cooper, Carey E.; Garfinkel, Irwin; et al.
• Child Underreporting, Fertility, and Sex Ratio Imbalance in China - Goodkind, Daniel
• The Evolution of Family Complexity from the Perspective of Nonmarital Children - Cancian, Maria; Meyer, Daniel R.; Cook, Steven T.

You may click here to view the most downloaded articles which are downloaded live and in real-time Demography.

HKUL users can continue to access the journal via http://library.hku.hk/record=b1391568

[Source: SpringerLink]

There will be scheduled maintenance at the vendor’s data center for March 31, 2013, 11:00 pm to April 1, 2013, 1:00 am

There will be an estimated downtime of two hours for all Alexander Street products.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Reuters 3000Xtra is an economic and finance database to provide global coverage of current and historical data on stocks, warrants, options, futures, indices, bonds, and economic indicators.

Thomson Reuters has announced that 3000Xtra will no longer be available on 22 March 2013 (Friday). Our subscription will be upgraded to Eikon accordingly:

Thomson Reuters Eikon [electronic resource]

http://library.hku.hk/record=b4191007

HKU current staff and students who wish to access Eikon may need to download and install the new application from the above Dragon Record.

More information about Eikon can be found at www.thomsonreuters.com/eikon

You are also cordially invited to attend the following Eikon training:

Date:       25 March 2013 (Monday)

Time:       4:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Venue:     e-Learning Lab, Room G-02, G/F., Main Library

Interested users should register online at

http://obelix.lib.hku.hk/cgi-bin/course/list_gp_m.cgi?category=8

It’s hard to conceive of a topic of more broad and personal interest than the study of the mind. In addition to its traditional investigation by the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, the mind has also been a focus of study in the fields of philosophy, economics, anthropology, linguistics, computer science, molecular biology, education, and literature. In all these approaches, there is an almost universal fascination with how the mind works and how it affects our lives and our behavior. Studies of the mind and brain have crossed many exciting thresholds in recent years, and the study of mind now represents a thoroughly cross-disciplinary effort. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines seek answers to such questions as: What is mind? How does it operate? What is consciousness?The Encyclopedia of the Mind brings together scholars from the entire range of mind-related academic disciplines from across the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and computer science and engineering to explore the multidimensional nature of the human mind.

Click here to access the free trial to the online version which expires on April 30, 2013.

A six (6) hour maintenance window is needed to install enhancements to the ProQuest and ProQuest Dialog platforms. The window will take place from Sunday, March 10, 2013, at 11:00. During this time all databases on the two platforms will not be available.

Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM) is a multidisciplinary journal serving researchers and practitioners in academia and industry. It is the main venue for a wide range of researchers and readers from computer science, network science, social sciences, mathematical sciences, medical and biological sciences, financial, management and political sciences. We solicit experimental and theoretical work on social network analysis and mining using a wide range of techniques from social sciences, mathematics, statistics, physics, network science and computer science.

Read, download and save these articles online. They are available online for free until April 15, 2013:

• Social networks and online environments: when science and practice co-evolve - Devan Rosen, George A. Barnett, Jang Hyun Kim
• Social network analysis: developments, advances, and prospects - John Scott
• Supervised methods for multi-relational link prediction - Darcy Davis, Ryan Lichtenwalter, Nitesh V. Chawla
• Trends in science networks: understanding structures and statistics of scientific networks - Miray Kas, Kathleen M. Carley, L. Richard Carley
• Modeling blogger influence in a community - Nitin Agarwal, Huan Liu, Lei Tang, Philip S. Yu

RiskMetrics (through ISS Governance Services) provides corporate governance data and we subscribe their Directors Data through WRDS:

RiskMetrics. Directors data request [electrionic resource].

http://library.hku.hk/record=b4187090

You may also wish to find that they provide the following free Webinar now:

Optimizing ESG Factors in Portfolio Construction

Date: THURSDAY, MARCH 21, 2013

Time: 8:00AM PDT / 11:00AM EDT / 3:00PM GMT / 4:00PM CET / 7:00PM GST

Note: Hong Kong Time – March 21, 2013 (Thursday) 11:00PM

For the last two decades, institutional investors have debated whether considering Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors can lead to better financial returns.

We will examine how MSCI ESG Intangible Value Assessment (IVA) ratings by MSCI ESG Research can be combined with the Barra Global Equity Model (GEM3) to build optimized portfolios with improved ESG ratings. The risk model allows us to separate systematic sources of active return - that is, common factor contributions - from asset specific return sources associated with IVA scores. While our study was designed primarily as an enhanced indexing exercise, focused on achieving benchmark returns comparable to the MSCI World Index, we also found three possible strategies during the observed period that can raise ESG ratings and improve active returns with minimal effects on benchmark tracking error. The currently available dataset allowed us to compare these three strategies over the volatile market cycle from February 2007 through December 2012.

Which of these strategies attained the best performance results and how did they compare?

• ESG worst-in-class exclusion
• ESG best-in-class overweighting
• ESG momentum toward ratings improvements

Please join us for an interactive webinar on ‘Optimizing ESG Factors in Portfolio Construction.’ Our experts from MSCI ESG Research, MSCI Risk Management Analytics (RMA) and MSCI Portfolio Management Analytics (PMA) will outline how under- and overweighting ESG ratings in portfolio construction can lead to better, risk-adjusted returns through application of MSCI’s risk management analysis tool, BarraOne, and portfolio management tool, Barra Portfolio Manager.

Read the latest MSCI Applied Research paper on ‘Optimizing ESG Factors in Portfolio Construction’.

REGISTER HERE!

Please use a valid e-mail address which you check regularly.