Stair-ascent performance in elderly women: effect of explosive strength training

Explosive-type strength training may alter kinetics and neuromuscular activity during stair ascent in elderly women. This may improve functional ability. Nineteen women (69.7 ± 3.4 yr) were randomly allocated to strength training (TG; twice per wk, 12 wk) or a control group (CG). Stair ascent was assessed at self-chosen (AFV), standardized (ASV), and maximal velocity (AMV) pre- and posttraining. Ground-reaction force (GRF) and EMG quantified kinetics and neuromuscular activity. After training, TG increased AMV and AFV velocity by 8% (p = .02) and 17% (p= .007), respectively (TG vs. CG; p< .05). This was accompanied by elevated rectus femoris EMG (from 21% to 48%, p< .047). At AFV, TG increased GRF first peak force 4% (p= .047), and CG increased second peak force 5% (p = .036). Muscle coactivation remained unaltered in both groups. Explosive-type strength training led to enhanced stair-climbing performance at maximal and self-chosen speed, reflecting an improved functional ability.     

Optimal Policies for Recovering the Value of Consumer Returns

This study characterizes the class of Pareto optimal returns policies between a manufacturer and a retailer who receives consumer returns. The manufacturer may take a costly hidden action that reduces the expected number of products returned by consumers, which when realized is hidden information known only to the retailer. When faced with consumer returns, the retailer must decide whether to send the product back to the manufacturer, who harvests a low salvage value, or to engage in costly refurbishment that permits the returned product to be resold to consumers. We find that the optimal returns policies may be implemented through the payment by the manufacturer of a full refund to the retailer of the wholesale price for any returns as well as a bonus paid to the retailer that is decreasing in the number of returns to the manufacturer.     

Assessing Crew Response Probability for a Sequence of Actions with an Overall Time Constraint

The following situation has been considered: during an accident sequence, a crew has to do a proper set of actions within a finite time window in order to achieve a specific goal. The operator actions are considered independent, they are lined up in series, and a single failure leads to mission failure. This paper proposes a general methodology for assessing the crew response (or success) probability, through a convolution integral formulation. This method is general and can be applied to any response probability model; an application to the Human Cognitive Reliability model is given.     

“Whom should We Help First?” Transnational Helping Practices in Ecuadorian Migration

Collective remittances, in the framework of migrant transnationalism, have been recently dealt with in some empirical research, especially on the Mexican‐US migration system. Far less studied is their significance in different migration flows, including their real contribution – as desirable as this may be – to local development. The article is concerned with a bottom up analysis of a migration flow where collective remittances – as the only way for emigrants to keep helping their local communities, well beyond their own families – are still in their infancy. It explores, through a translocal ethnography of Ecuadorian migration to Italy, the underlying attitudes, personal meanings and expectations – as well as the structural opportunities and constraints – accounting for helping practices at a distance. Charitable transfers to communities of origin are reconstructed as to their motivations, their main aims and beneficiaries, their embeddedness in mutual networks among immigrant co‐nationals. How is it that some of them decide to help “people in need” in their own communities overseas, or in their home towns, or in both? Is this an expression of communal belonging, or a matter of social status maintenance, or something else? Further reflections on the dilemmas inherent in transnational helping practices are then developed. Concluding remarks emphasize the relatively poor scope for such initiatives, in a recent and first‐generation flow over a long distance. While co‐ethnic solidarity overseas is a precondition for transnational helping practices, the latter are also affected by the developments of public policies in the countries of origin and of destination. Overall, an effective integration overseas is necessary for collective remittances to have some currency and impact.     

POLITICIANS AT WORK: THE PRIVATE RETURNS AND SOCIAL COSTS OF POLITICAL CONNECTIONS

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer–employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments over the period 1985–1997. According to our results, the revenue premium granted by political connections amounts to 5.7% on average, it is obtained through changes in domestic sales but not in exports, and it is not related to improvements in firm productivity. The connection premium is positive for upstream producers for the public administration only, and larger (up to 22%) in areas characterized by high public expenditure and high levels of corruption. These findings suggest that the gains in market power derive from public demand shifts towards politically connected firms. We estimate that such shifts reduce the provision of public goods by approximately 20%.     

Differences in fertility behavior and uncertainty: an economic theory of the minority status hypothesis

We revisit the question of why fertility behaviors and educational decisions appear to vary systematically across ethnic groups. We assess the possibility that differences in fertility across groups remain even though their socio-economic characteristics are similar. More specifically, we consider that parents’ fertility decisions are affected by the uncertainty concerning the future economic status of their offspring. We assume that this uncertainty varies across groups and is linked to the size of the group one belongs to. We find theoretical support for the minority status hypothesis according to which members of large minorities usually have a higher fertility than those in the majority facing low potential for social mobility while small minorities have lower fertility.     

Cultivating Hustlers: The Agrarian Ethos of Soninke Migration

Sedentariness has been disregarded in migration studies. Although recent scholarship pays greater heed to immobility, the latter is often narrowly conceptualised as the exact opposite of mobility. This article attempts to overcome such dichotomies by focusing on agrarian life and activities in one of the most migratory rural contexts in West Africa, namely the Soninke villages of the Upper Gambia River valley. It shows how young men—normally the most mobile group in Soninke society—are trained to embody an agrarian ethos in order for them to be able to pursue not only agricultural livelihoods but also migratory ones. Physical, social and moral virtues cultivated in farm fields are thought to make the young man fit and adaptable to life and work abroad. The article further suggests that this agrarian ethos is reproduced through migratory dynamics, such as the integration of West African migrants as unqualified labourers in the stratified labour market of Europe and North America. As a synthesis or symbiosis between mobile and immobile cultural practices, the Soninke agrarian ethos provides us with ways of rethinking the relation between migration and sedentariness, thus bridging the dichotomy between the two.     

The Strategy and Management Control Systems relationship as emerging dynamic process

In this paper we discuss the Management Control Systems (MCSs)–strategy relationship in the light of an empirical analysis. We debate the attention to the fit of MCS and strategy at given moments in time which is typical of a contingency approach, and we search for an understanding of the dynamic evolution of the company over a continuous span of time. We deploy a diachronic analysis which involves a vertical and a horizontal conception of dynamics. We show that instantaneous fit between formal MCS and deliberate strategy is not helpful in illustrating evolution, nor is able to explain success. Conversely, the fit is to be played continuously on MCS and strategies at the level of practices. We also show the role of misfit between MCS and strategy: ambiguity implies the definition of blurred constraints for action which is freed. In this sense, we conclude that in the design of the MCS or strategy, attention does not have to be focused on the reciprocal fit, but rather on the ability of both (MCS and strategy) to support the exploration of new directions of evolution. Our case offers the intuition that identities, beyond practices, account for success in this case, as they embed both practices but also a way of being that, as a set of basic principles, directs behaviour when practices are missing, i.e., in the face of the new.