Market Rationality Inside Voluntary Sector: An Analysis of Five Organizations in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

What we now understand as rational and logical in today’s world provides a mental scheme to take action, based on a framework of premises and values. These rules aim to maximize the utility of consequences, despite of any subjective value. Weber (Economy and Society, 1978) classified this scheme as an “instrumental rationality”, characterized by being guided by the goals, means, and consequence of the action. On the other hand, he also defined “substantive rationality”, postulated on the values of the subject, and not guided by any consequences of action. This study acknowledges that NGOs (non-governmental organizations) must belong to a field other than that of economic businesses, because they are based on different rationalities, especially when they encompass the observation in organizations that work for social transformation. A field study was made with five nonprofit organizations whose stated goals were social transformation, seeking to identify influences that the adoption of instrumental rationality imposes on accomplishing the expected objectives for these organizations. Contingencies were found that benefit from using instrumentality in such organizations, such as the need for self-subsistence, the area where they work, size of the organization, influence of the leader and so on. The conclusion is that the lack of consciousness of the market’s influence on them very often causes them to uncritically and bluntly absorb the typical organizational dynamics of economic business, which has strong potential to corrupt their conceptual motivations, when guiding them strategically through the consequences of actions.     

A framework for supporting health capability-based planning: Identifying and structuring health capabilities

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that health security systems must be redesigned, in a way that they are better prepared and ready to cope with multiple and diverse health threats, from predictable and well-known epidemics to unexpected and challenging pandemics. A powerful way of accomplishing this goal is to focus the planning on health capabilities. This focus may enhance the ability to respond to and recover from health threats and emergencies, while helping to identify the level of resources required to maintain and build up those capabilities that are critical in ensuring the preparedness of health security systems. However, current attempts for defining and organizing health capabilities have some important limitations. First, such attempts were not designed to consider diverse scenarios and multiple health threats. Second, they provide a limited representation of capabilities and lack a systemic perspective. Third, they struggle to identify capability and resource gaps. In this article, we thus propose a new framework for identifying and structuring health capabilities and support health capability planning. The suggested framework has three main potential benefits. First, the framework may help policymakers in planning under high levels of uncertainty, by considering multiple realistic and stressful scenarios. Second, it can provide risk analysts with a more comprehensive representation of health capabilities and their complex relationships. Third, it can support planners in identifying resource and capability gaps. We illustrate the use of the framework in practice considering an outbreak scenario caused by three different health threats (COVID-19, Ebola, and Influenza viruses).     

What family dimensions are important for health-related quality of life in adolescence?

Adolescence is a relevant life stage in which to study a global well-being measure, health-related quality of life, in order to analyse the impact of important determinants in adolescents' health-related quality of life (e.g., the quality of family relationships). This study aimed to examine the impact of several family dimensions (parental affection, parental promotion of autonomy, family activities, adolescent disclosure, parental solicitation and parental knowledge) on adolescents' health-related quality of life. Additionally, this study investigated whether demographic variables (adolescents' gender and age) influenced health-related quality of life and moderated the relationship between family dimensions and health-related quality of life. The sample was composed of 14,825 adolescents, aged 13–14, 15–16, and 17–18, from the 2006 edition of Spain's Health Behaviour in School-aged Children study. The results showed that parental promotion of autonomy, family activities and especially parental affection were the most important dimensions influencing health-related quality of life. Boys reported higher health-related quality of life than girls, and younger adolescents reported higher health-related quality of life than older adolescents. The discussion explains how the aforementioned family dimensions encourage better health-related quality of life in adolescents.     

Shortcomings and/or Missed Opportunities of the Global Compacts for the Protection of Forced Migrants

The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) and the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) are norm‐creating exercises, in the sense of being international legal documents for a new framework that reinforces existing structures and attempt to renew migration governance globally. They were expected to further develop the protection of all migrants. However, despite some progress, there are shortcomings and/or missed opportunities in what they were able to achieve, especially in the case of the protection of forced migrants. Understanding these shortcomings and/or missed opportunities as being conceptual and institutional in nature, and to assess both these sets, this article presents the idea of forced migration and the lack of international protection of forced migrants (part 1), describes the protection of forced migrants achieved by the Compacts (part 2), and ends by assessing the shortcomings and/or missed opportunities in both Compacts (part 3).     

A new geometric INAR(1) process based on counting series with deflation or inflation of zeros

In this paper, we introduce a new non-negative integer-valued autoregressive time series model based on a new thinning operator, so called generalized zero-modified geometric (GZMG) thinning operator. The first part of the paper is devoted to the distribution, GZMG distribution, which is obtained as the convolution of the zero-modified geometric (ZMG) distributed random variables. Some properties of this distribution are derived. Then, we construct a thinning operator based on the counting processes with ZMG distribution. Finally, an INAR(1) time series model is introduced and its properties including estimation issues are derived and discussed. A small Monte Carlo experiment is conducted to evaluate the performance of maximum likelihood estimators in finite samples. At the end of the paper, we consider an empirical illustration of the introduced INAR(1) model.     

The inverse weighted Lindley distribution: Properties,estimation and an application on a failure time data

In this paper a new distribution is proposed. This new model provides more flexibility to modeling data with upside-down bathtub hazard rate function. A significant account of mathematical properties of the new distribution is presented. The maximum likelihood estimators for the parameters in the presence of complete and censored data are presented. Two corrective approaches are considered to derive modified estimators that are bias-free to second order. A numerical simulation is carried out to examine the efficiency of the bias correction. Finally, an application using a real data set is presented in order to illustrate our proposed distribution.     

Laplace approximation and natural gradient for Gaussian process regression with heteroscedastic student-t model

Statistics and Computing - We propose the Laplace method to derive approximate inference for Gaussian process (GP) regression in the location and scale parameters of the student- $$ {t}$$...     

Unit root tests and dramatic shifts with infinite variance processes

A model which explains data that is subject to sudden structural changes of unspecified nature is presented. The structural shifts are generated by a random walk component whose innovations belong to the normal domain of attraction of a symmetric stable law. To test the model against the stationarity case, several non-parametric, and regression-based statistics are studied. The non-parametric tests are a generalization of the variance ratio test to innovations with heavy-tailed distributions. The tests are consistent and shown to have good finite sample size and power properties and are applied to a set of economic variables.     

Avalanche! Coming! Now! Close to the borders of unpredictability

Earthquakes, evolution, avalanches—even something as simple as grains of sand tumbling down a pile: so many phenomena of nature seem to resist prediction. We still cannot tell when geological stresses will release themselves in a major quake or when the last extra grain of sand will make half the heap avalanche down. But have statisticians been looking in the wrong place? Or are these critical phenomena really inherently unpredictable? They are close to the borders, but still in predictable land, says Osvanny Ramos , one of the authors of an experiment to prove it.     

Extending Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation to a Class of Near‐Gaussian Latent Models

This work extends the integrated nested Laplace approximation (INLA) method to latent models outside the scope of latent Gaussian models, where independent components of the latent field can have a near‐Gaussian distribution. The proposed methodology is an essential component of a bigger project that aims to extend the R package INLA in order to allow the user to add flexibility and challenge the Gaussian assumptions of some of the model components in a straightforward and intuitive way. Our approach is applied to two examples, and the results are compared with that obtained by Markov chain Monte Carlo, showing similar accuracy with only a small fraction of computational time. Implementation of the proposed extension is available in the R‐INLA package.