Mainstreaming Nutrition for Better Development Outcomes

Even though the millennium development goals (MDGs) tackle the main economic and social problems in developing countries, nutrition is not addressed adequately despite its important role in achieving the MDGs. It is therefore crucial to mainstream nutrition by strengthening public-private partnerships, increased political and technical capacity and by achieving food security. The paper aims to discuss how strong partnerships bringing public and private efforts together are important to the success of increasing nutritional programs by providing a redesign and marketing of products and services, other services, and funding. The report explores the need to assess the setting of pertinent nutritional policies and to increase technical capacity. The study found that the relation between agriculture and nutrition is a key component for achieving food safety in order to mainstream nutrition into the MDGs. The three main topics considered in this analysis are biotechnology, food trade policies, and bioenergy products as they have a strong impact on prices. Mainstreaming Nutrition for better development outcomes.

A journey around decision-making: Searching for the “big picture” across disciplines

This paper carries out an interdisciplinary literature review to develop an updated framework that integrates all aspects of decision-making. It proposes a framework that combines the evolutionary perspective with the complexity theory to integrate the ontological communalities between the examined disciplines (operational research, psychology and management). Decision-making is regarded as a systemic, multi-tiered information-based process, founded on the interaction of the decision-maker with the environment in a sort of learning path which co-evolves through variation–selection–retention mechanisms nourished by environmental feedback.Such a complex-coevolutionary perspective provides valuable insights concerning some as-yet-unexplored aspects of decision-making, such as inter- and intra-individual differences in decision-making, as well as the interaction of ‘rational’ and ‘intuitive’ processes or some contradictory evidence (regarding ‘fractionated expertise’ and ‘escalation of commitment’).Practical implications on management education are highlighted, as well as methodological limitations and needs for further studies. The journey is not yet over and probably never will be, but, from an evolutionary perspective, it is the journey, not the arrival, that matters.     

Contingency Planning and Early Crisis Management: Italy and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Public Organization Review - This study examines the level of preparedness exhibited through strategy, planning and organization to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. A comparative analysis...     

Direct Management of COVID-19 at National and Subnational Level: The Case of the Western Amazon Countries

Public Organization Review - This paper analyses direct management of COVID-19 in Brazil, Colombia and Peru, the three largest countries in the Western Amazon region. Using information gathered...     

HIV/AIDS stigma manifestations during clinical interactions with MSM in Puerto Rico

HIV/AIDS stigma can have detrimental effects on physician/patient interactions when manifested by health professionals. Unfortunately, HIV/AIDS stigma is usually manifested in an intersectional manner with other preexisting stigmas, including stigma toward men who have sex with men (MSM). Therefore, our study aimed to examine the behavioral manifestations of HIV/AIDS stigma among physicians in training during simulated clinical interactions with MSM, and explore the interrelation between HIV/AIDS stigma attitudes and behaviors. We implemented an experimental design using Standardized Patient simulations with a sample of 100 physicians in training in Puerto Rico. Results show a significant difference in the two groups’ means (p?<?.001), with a higher number of stigma behaviors in the HIV MSM patient condition (M?=?6.39) than the common cold control condition (M?=?5.20). Results evidence that stigma manifestations toward MSM with HIV may continue to be an obstacle for public health in Puerto Rico, and that medical training to prevent stigma is still needed.     

Use of quantitative ultrasound as bone mineral density evaluation in an Italian female population living with HIV: A real-life experience

This is a multicenter cross-sectional study where we aimed to detect the rate of osteopenia/osteoporosis in an HIV female population (WLWHIV) by means of “heel quantitative ultrasound” (QUS) measurement. We enrolled 273 patients, mean age 48.1 years, 36% menopausal, 96% on combination antiretroviral therapy (cART). Calcaneal measure of bone mass index by QUS revealed osteopenia and osteoporosis in 76 (27.8%) and 16 (5.9%) WLWHIV. Our data underline the correlation between low QUS parameters and traditional risk factors for osteoporosis rather than with cART exposure, thus suggesting the crucial importance of detection and correction of traditional risk factors for osteoporosis in WLWHIV.     

A multidimensional view on poverty in the European Union by partial order theory

Poverty can be seen as a multidimensional phenomenon described by a set of indicators, the poverty components. A one-dimensional measure of poverty serving as a ranking index can be obtained by combining the component indicators via aggregation techniques. Ranking indices are thought of as supporting political decisions. This paper proposes an alternative to aggregation based on simple concepts of partial order theory and illustrates the pros and cons of this approach taking as case study a multidimensional measure of poverty comprising three components – absolute poverty, relative poverty and income – computed for the European Union regions. The analysis enables one to highlight conflicts across the components with some regions detected as controversial, with, for example, low levels of relative poverty and high levels of monetary poverty. The partial order approach enables one to point to the regions with the most severe data conflicts and to the component indicators that cause these conflicts.     

FAMILY TIES AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

We establish an inverse relationship between family ties and political participation, such that the more individuals rely on the family as a provider of services, insurance, and transfer of resources, the lower is one's civic engagement and political participation. We also show that strong family ties appear to be a substitute for generalized trust, rather than a complement to it. These three constructs—civic engagement, political participation, and trust—are part of what is known as social capital; therefore, in this paper, we contribute to the investigation of the origin and evolution of social capital. We establish these results using within‐country evidence and looking at the behavior of immigrants from various countries in 32 different destination places.     

Principal component analysis with interval imputed missing values

In this paper some statistical properties of Interval Imputation are derived in the context of Principal Component Analysis. Interval Imputation is a recent proposal for the treatment of missing values, consisting of replacing blanks with intervals and then analyzing the resulting data matrix using Symbolic Data Analysis techniques. The most noticeable virtue of this method is that it does not require a single-valued imputation, so it allows us to take into account that incomplete observations are affected by a degree of uncertainty. Illustrative examples and simulation studies are carried out in order to illustrate the functioning of the technique.