The bidirectional relationship between gambling and addictive substances

This study aims to analyse the co-occurrence of gambling activity and the consumption of addictive substances, such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs. By using a sample of 709 gamblers in Sardinia (Italy), a multivariate probit approach is proposed since it allows simultaneous study of the extent of correlation between the consumption of different substances.

Our findings document that, on the one hand, betting more money leads to an increase in the propensity to consume tobacco in the middle of the game, and, on the other hand, the simultaneous co-occurrence of smoking, alcohol and drugs drives up the probability of getting more involved in gambling activity. Knowing the positive reinforcing effects of addictive substances is the first step towards implementing the most effective prevention and treatment modalities for problem/pathological gamblers.     

What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.     

Inherent Costs and Interdependent Impacts of Infrastructure Network Resilience

Recent studies in system resilience have proposed metrics to understand the ability of systems to recover from a disruptive event, often offering a qualitative treatment of resilience. This work provides a quantitative treatment of resilience and focuses specifically on measuring resilience in infrastructure networks. Inherent cost metrics are introduced: loss of service cost and total network restoration cost. Further, “costs” of network resilience are often shared across multiple infrastructures and industries that rely upon those networks, particularly when such networks become inoperable in the face of disruptive events. As such, this work integrates the quantitative resilience approach with a model describing the regional, multi‐industry impacts of a disruptive event to measure the interdependent impacts of network resilience. The approaches discussed in this article are deployed in a case study of an inland waterway transportation network, the Mississippi River Navigation System.     

Robust Inference in Generalized Linear Models

Robust inference on the parameters in generalized linear models is performed using the weighted likelihood method. Two cases are considered: a case with replicated observations and a case with a single observation of the dependent variable for each combination of the explanatory variables. The first case is common in the design of experiments, while the second case arises in observational studies. Theoretical and computational results on real datasets are presented and compared with other existing techniques.     

Weighted likelihood mixture modeling and model-based clustering

Statistics and Computing - A weighted likelihood approach for robust fitting of a mixture of multivariate Gaussian components is developed in this work. Two approaches have been proposed that are...     

The 2007 financial crisis: strategic actors and processes of construction of a concrete system

The recent financial and economic crisis, defined “a once in a century credit tsunami” by former President of Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, has produced relevant damages in all economic sectors, making many people much poorer. For this reason, many scientific contributions have addressed the causes of the crisis, focusing mostly on the ‘bad practices’ in lending and credit securitization procedures as well as in corporate governance mechanisms ruling the banking system. Our work is based on an organizational perspective and it reviews the crisis under a theoretical model that combines the political and new institutionalist studies, in order to show evidence of the intense network of relationships and interests underlying the financial system government. In doing so, we identify the key players acting as institutional entrepreneurs that, levering on their resources and power, have contributed to construct and reshape the institutional framework—normative and symbolic—ruling the so called Great Moderation period.     

Zero-Lifting for Integer Block Structured Problems

This paper deals with the relations between the polyhedron described by the inequalities of a block structured problem and the polyhedra described by the inequalities of the single blocks. In particular, classes of block structured problems are described for which zero-lifting of facet inducing inequalities of a single block yields facet inducing inequalities for the whole problem. Some applications are discussed.     

Evaluation of weighted rankings using expected significance level

The use of weighted rankings to analyze complete blocks designs (Quade, 1979) is a practical way of recovering between-block information. A family of old and new test statistics can be generated by this procedure. Selection among these statistics and comparison with parametric and nonparametric competitors are based on expected significance level [ESL] in small designs (3 to 6 blocks, 3 to 5 treatments).