Comparison of efficiencies of some symmetry tests around an unknown centre

In this paper, some recent and classical tests of symmetry are modified for the case of an unknown centre. The unknown centre is estimated with its α-trimmed mean estimator. The asymptotic behaviour of the new tests is explored. The local approximate Bahadur efficiency is used to compare the tests to each other as well as to some other tests.     

Pareto improving transition from a pay-as-you-go to a fully funded pension system in a model of endogenous growth

In this paper we investigate the possibility of Pareto improving social security reforms within a framework of endogenous growth. Belan et al. (1998) propose a transition from a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system to a system of savings–subsidization. We follow this approach and prove that a Pareto improving conversion from the PAYG system to a fully funded one is possible. Finally, we compare the subsidy system with the fully funded system and discuss the problem of implementing the transition to the fully funded system. Received: 07 March 1999/Accepted: 13 December 1999     

Associations between stress at work and attitudes towards retirement in hospital physicians

There is a need to understand the associations between attitudes towards retirement in specific occupations and various psychosocial and work-related factors. This study identified correlates of retirement thoughts and retirement preference in hospital physicians. The sample comprised 447 (251 male and 196 female) physicians from three hospital districts in Finland. After adjustment for gender, age and salary, minor psychiatric morbidity increased likelihood of retirement thoughts and retirement preference. Retirement thoughts and retirement preference were more common in doctors reporting low job control, poor teamwork and unjust supervision than in doctors perceiving their working conditions more favorably. Work preference was associated with high overwork. The associations of work characteristics with retirement thoughts and retirement preference largely persisted after control for indicators of health and social circumstances. In conclusion, in addition to demographic and financial factors and health, retirement attitudes in hospital physicians seem to be related to organizational and managerial factors that are potentially amendable to intervention. This has implications for retaining hospital physicians who might otherwise retire.     

Expectation management for public sector organizations

Transparency and collecting stakeholder feedback are becoming the norm also in the public sector. Though much of feedback is related to stakeholder experiences, we propose that it is more beneficial to study expectations than experiences, as expectations affect future satisfaction. This study reports a process of collecting and analyzing stakeholder expectations in one health-care oriented public sector organization in Finland, and reports how these expectations and their implications were assessed by the organization's top management. The study suggests that to ensure stakeholder satisfaction and organizational success, top management should be guided to work through the feedback. We propose a “fix or fit” approach where expectations are first grouped and then analyzed as either something that requires changing of organizational functions, or as something that requires guiding of stakeholders’ expectations to fit existing functions.     

‘Mile vs Transition’—a Perfect Informant in the Slushy Swamp of Serbian Politics?

When it launched a TV series ‘Mile vs Transition’ in 2003, Radio B92 intended its hero, Mile from Cubura, to be taken ironically. Fighting a relentless rearguard campaign against transition (from the introduction of Euros and seat-belts to good manners and work ethic), and embracing the stereotypical backwardness of the Serbian character, Mile was projected as what Serbian citizens should not be. Instead, Mile became a popular hero whose anti-modern, anti-European tendencies were widely embraced, seemingly without any irony. I argue that as a composite photo-robot of the Serbian Everyman (thus a perfect informant), and a moral chameleon, Mile emerged as an ambiguous hero not just because of the content of what he does and says, but because of the ironic play he affords. It is precisely this ambiguity, this indeterminate irony that makes him such an icon of Serbia's current predicaments—not just a symptom, but also an apt figure, a hieroglyph for post-Milosevic, post-Djindjic Serbia's inchoately felt conundrums.     

The REBMIX Algorithm for the Multivariate Finite Mixture Estimation

The article extends the REBMIX to multivariate data. Random variables may follow normal, lognormal, or Weibull parametric families and should be independent within components. The initial weights and component parameters are not required. Preprocessing of observations folows the histogram, Parzen window, or k-nearest neighbor approach. The number of components, weights, and component parameters are gained iteratively by using information measures of the distance, such as the total of positive relative deviations and the information criterion. The number of classes or the number of the nearest neighbors can be optimized, as well. The REBMIX software is available on http://www.fs.uni-lj.si/lavek.     

Job demands and job control as correlates of early retirement thoughts in Finnish social and health care employees

Given the ageing workforce, there is an increasing interest in understanding the retirement process. This study examined whether early retirement thoughts can be explained by job demands, job control and their interaction, a hypothesis derived from the job demand-control model of Karasek (). The moderated hierarchical regression analyses of early retirement thoughts were based on a sample of 274 male and 2798 female employees aged 20 to 65 years in Finnish social and health care. Our results suggest that job demands and job control are independent predictors of early retirement thoughts even when adjusted for age, gender, educational level and self-rated health. Furthermore, our results offered support for the interaction effect of job demands and job control on early retirement thoughts. Among people over 45 years old, these associations were even stronger, compared to the whole sample. This indicates that one way to reduce the number of people taking early retirement would be to put the emphasis on psychosocial factors, such as job control, affecting the older workers.     

Intake Fraction Variability Between Air Pollution Emission Sources Inside an Urban Area

The cost‐effective mitigation of adverse health effects caused by air pollution requires information on the contribution of different emission sources to exposure. In urban areas the exposure potential of different sources may vary significantly depending on emission height, population density, and other factors. In this study, we quantified this intraurban variability by predicting intake fraction (iF) for 3,066 emission sources in Warsaw, Poland. iF describes the fraction of the pollutant that is inhaled by people in the study area. We considered the following seven pollutants: particulate matter (PM), nitrogen oxides (NO_x), sulfur dioxide (SO₂), benzo[a] pyrene (BaP), nickel (Ni), cadmium (Cd), and lead (Pb). Emissions for these pollutants were grouped into four emission source categories (Mobile, Area, High Point, and Other Point sources). The dispersion of the pollutants was predicted with the CALPUFF dispersion model using the year 2005 emission rate data and meteorological records. The resulting annual average concentrations were combined with population data to predict the contribution of each individual source to population exposure. The iFs for different pollutant‐source category combinations varied between 51 per million (PM from Mobile sources) and 0.013 per million (sulfate PM from High Point sources). The intraurban iF variability for Mobile sources primary PM emission was from 4 per million to 100 per million with the emission‐weighted iF of 44 per million. These results propose that exposure due to intraurban air pollution emissions could be decreased more effectively by specifically targeting sources with high exposure potency rather than all sources.     

What Really Happens in Kobylians’ka’s Land,and Why It Matters

Since the publication of OlTia Kobylians’ka’s novel Zemlia (Land, 1902), the consensus of Ukrainian critics and scholars, both non-Soviet and Soviet, has held that the novel’s central event, and the element of the plot offering the main challenge to interpretation, is the murder of a young peasant by his brother. Attentive reading, however, reveals that the murder is constructed in the novel as a deed whose perpetrator remains unknown. Readings of the novel as an illustration of social or psychological causation in human affairs corresponded to the predispositions of populist critics of various periods. Readings more respectful of the text, and more in keeping with Kobylians’ka’s oeuvre as a whole, need to acknowledge that the world-view consistent with the novel is one that despairs of demonstrable causes. Narrative voice and implied readership in Land are managed so as to exclude the construct of an omniscient narrator authorizing a final, knowable version of past events. Instead, the novel may be seen as reflecting upon the irrationality of diverse models for explaining human behaviour. Common-sense social and psychological notions of causality are found inadequate to explain the murder in Land, as are racial determinism, accident, divine intervention, and the Nietzsche-inspired model of humankind as divided into strong and weak, free and enslaved.