Mood's test for dispersion as a counting of triplets

The well-known equivalence of Wilcoxon and Mann-Whitney location statistics is herein extended to dispersion tests. Mood (1954) statistic is related to a statistic based on “triplets”. The triplet version of Mood statistic is useful for proving the asymptotic normality (under alternatives) of the test.     

Foreign Scientists at the National Institutes of Health: Ramifications of U.S. Immigration and Labor Policies1

This article describes the findings of a study undertaken to shed light on some of the factors that determine the employment of foreign biomedical scientists in the United States by examining their presence at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). NIH was selected as the focus of the study for its unique combination of characteristics. It is a federal agency with the ambiance of academe that carries out biomedical research and training internally while supporting like activities externally through grant‐ and contract‐based linkages with a host of academic institutions and biotechnology firms in the United States and abroad. Over a two‐year period, in‐depth interviews were conducted with more than 200 stakeholders at the NIH campus and elsewhere, as well as ethnographic observations. The study identified several hitherto unreported important functions that NIH plays in facilitating the inflow of talented foreign scientists to meet its manpower needs and those of the broader national economy.     

Optimal Maintenance Time for Repairable Systems Under Two Types of Failures

Determination of preventive maintenance is an important issue for systems under degradation. A typical maintenance policy calls for complete preventive repair actions at pre-scheduled times and minimal repair actions whenever a failure occurs. Under minimal repair, failures are modeled according to a non homogeneous Poisson process. A perfect preventive maintenance restores the system to the as good as new condition. The motivation for this article was a maintenance data set related to power switch disconnectors. Two different types of failures could be observed for these systems according to their causes. The major difference between these types of failures is their costs. Assuming that the system will be in operation for an infinite time, we find the expected cost per unit of time for each preventive maintenance policy and hence obtain the optimal strategy as a function of the processes intensities. Assuming a parametrical form for the intensity function, large sample estimates for the optimal maintenance check points are obtained and discussed.     

Emergy Measures of Carrying Capacity to Evaluate Economic Investments

This paper outlines a method for determining carrying capacity for economic investments based on an emergy evaluation of the environmental resources of a region. Using data from tourism development in Mexico and Papua New Guinea, the concept of carrying capacity is related to intensity of development, environmental support area, and the fit of economic development in local environments and economies.Emergy, a unit of resource use and work potential, is used to quantitatively evaluate intensity of development. Emergy evaluation is briefly described and the evaluations of tourism used to further explain the methodology. The total annual resource use for the tourist resorts and the economies in which they are embedded (including inputs of renewable and nonrenewable resources and purchased goods and services) was calculated and converted to emergy units. The renewable resource base and an Environmental Loading Ratio (ELR), are proposed as a means for determining both long term and short term carrying capacity respectively. The concept of sustainable development is related to the net emergy benefits that result from development. Expressed as a ratio of the amount of emergy received by the local economy to the amount that is exported (embodied in tourists), sustainability is suggested to result from a positive emergy trade balance.     

Asymptotic results for hybrids of empirical and partial sums processes

The present paper is devoted to the study of the hybrids of empirical and partial sums processes. In the first part, we present a synthesis of results related to these processes and their connection with the empirical and compound process. We obtain new results on the precise asymptotics in the law of the logarithm related to complete convergence and a.s. convergence, under some mild conditions, for the hybrids of empirical and partial sums processes. Finally, the weighted bootstrap processes and general hybrid processes are also discussed.     

Social attitudes in southern Spain to shape EU agricultural policy

The Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) is one of the most important European policies. Since its inception, the CAP has been reformed in response to high budgetary costs, international trade pressures and socio-economic changes. Despite the reforms, this policy did not always serve the best interests of farmers and provoked social criticisms. In anticipation of the post 2013 design, it is widely agreed that the forthcoming CAP should be more understandable to taxpayers. In this study, the social preferences towards the budgetary allocation of this policy, its equity, and its co-financing are investigated by means of the Choice experiment methodology to shed light on how to shape the future CAP to gain social legitimacy. Results reveal that the CAP post 2013 proposal is more in line with public preferences, although alternative measures are needed to tailor it effectively to regional needs.     

Inapproximability results for the lateral gene transfer problem

This paper concerns the Lateral Gene Transfer Problem. This minimization problem, defined by Hallett and Lagergren (2001), is that of finding the most parsimonious lateral gene transfer scenario for a given pair of gene and species trees. Our main results are the following: