Measurement of attitudes toward bisexual men and women among South African university students: the validation of an instrument

Research was conducted investigating university students' prejudicial attitudes toward bisexual men and women in South Africa. The combined male and female Attitudes Regarding Bisexuality Scale (ARBS) showed unacceptable internal consistency reliabilities, especially for the Black-African participants. An expert focus group was convened in order to elaborate on and clarify the low reliability coefficients. The ARBS was then adapted for the South African population and resulted in two separate instruments designed to measure attitudes regarding bisexual men and bisexual women separately. Five hundred eighty seven university students completed these scales. The results indicated that the attitudes of heterosexual, homosexual, and asexual students toward bisexual men and women are more negative than the attitudes of bisexual students.     

Employment Adjustment at the Firm Level. A Theoretical Model and an Empirical Investigation for West German Manufacturing Firms

In this paper, employment adjustment at the firm level is estimated with a large panel of business survey data from West German manufacturing. The specification is based on a framework of monopolistic competition in the product market. Special emphasis is devoted to the analysis of the impact of demand uncertainty, capacity constraints, technological change and competition. The empirical results reveal that demand uncertainty and capacity constraints significantly affect employment adjustment. Innovative firms are more successful; they increase employment and exhibit a higher utilization of capacities. Employment adjustment also depends on competition. In monopolistic markets, the volatility of employment is higher.     

The Kazakhs of Western Mongolia: transnational migration from 1990–2008

The Kazakhs are the largest minority group in Mongolia, a relatively homogenous country dominated by Khalkh Mongols. Since 1991, Mongolia has transitioned politically and economically and witnessed significant changes in internal and international migration flows. The large-scale movement of ethnic Kazakhs from Western Mongolia to Kazakhstan represents one such emerging international flow. This migration is influenced by economic motivations, historical cultural ties to Kazakhstan, and immigration policies of both countries. This paper assesses the local and national circumstances that shape migration decision-making in Western Mongolia during the transition years and highlights changes in the characteristics and directions of migration flows during this time. We identify three periods of migration with each period characterized by changing economies and national policies in Mongolia and Kazakhstan, as well as changes in communications technologies and extensiveness of social networks among prospective migrants. These periods illustrate how transnational migration flows evolve through time and are affected by national, local, and individual circumstances.     

Multiplicity and flexibility in clinical trials

Flexible designs offer a large amount of flexibility in clinical trials with control of the type I error rate. This allows the combination of trials from different clinical phases of a drug development process. Such combinations require designs where hypotheses are selected and/or added at interim analysis without knowing the selection rule in advance so that both flexibility and multiplicity issues arise. The paper reviews the basic principles and some of the common methods for reaching flexibility while controlling the family-wise error rate in the strong sense. Flexible designs have been criticized because they may lead to different weights for the patients from the different stages when reassessing sample sizes. Analyzing the data in a conventional way avoids such unequal weighting but may inflate the multiple type I error rate. In cases where the conditional type I error rates of the new design (and conventional analysis) are below the conditional type I error rates of the initial design the conventional analysis may, however, be done without inflating the type I error rate. Focusing on a parallel group design with two treatments and a common control, we use this principle to investigate when we can select one treatment, reassess sample sizes and test the corresponding null hypotheses by the conventional level alpha z-test without compromising on the multiple type I error rate.     

Human factors methods to reduce medication error: using task analysis in a pediatric and adult pharmacy

Medication error is an issue that no hospital is immune from, leading to 7,000 deaths and 1.3 million patient injuries each year. The purpose of this study was to decrease the risk and occurrence of medication errors by analyzing the hospital pharmacy. Task analyses were performed and it was found that communication, expectation, and procedural issues were leading to the occurrence of the most common type of medication error in the pharmacy. Recommendations were made to improve the process and reduce the occurrence of this type of error.     

More on the distribution of the sum of uniform random variables

The paper provides a simplified derivation of the density of the sum of independent non-identically distributed uniform random variables via an inverse Fourier transform. We also provide examples illustrating the quality of the Normal approximation and corresponding MATHEMATICA code.     

Evolutionarily Stable Co-operative Commitments

If contracts cannot be fully specified Pareto optimal results may be closed off because individuals cannot rationally trust each other's promises. This paper assumes that human individuals can become internally committed not to act opportunistically and that others can detect to a certain extent whether they are dealing with an uncommitted (untrustworthy) or a committed (trustworthy) partner. Adopting an `indirect evolutionary approach' we show that co-operative commitments can survive in evolutionary competition even if conventional mechanisms like repetition, reputation, contract or promising are lacking. If detection of uncommitted individuals is neither too costly nor too unreliable there will in general be a `niche' for both committed and uncommitted actors even in one off large numbers' interactions.     

Detecting fuzzy periodic patterns in futures spreads

This paper extends an optimal frequency domain test for the detection of synchronous patterns in multiple time series to the case of fuzzy patterns, which are not confined to single frequencies or narrow frequency bands. Applying this extension to corn futures with different delivery dates, we obtain significant results only for the spreads between the different contracts but not for the original contracts, which is an indication that spread trading has the advantage of increased predictability.