Bayesian space-time modeling of malaria incidence in Sucre state, Venezuela

Malaria is a parasitic infectious tropical disease that causes high mortality rates in the tropical belt. In Venezuela, Sucre state is considered the third state with most disease prevalence. This paper presents a hierarchical regression log-Poisson space-time model within a Bayesian approach to represent the incidence of malaria in Sucre state, Venezuela, during the period 1990–2002 in 15 municipalities of the state. Several additive models for the logarithm of the relative risk of the disease for each district were considered. These models differ in their structure by including different combinations of social-economic and climatic covariates in a multiple regression term. A random effect that captures the spatial heterogeneity in the study region, and a CAR (Conditionally Autoregressive) component that recognizes the effect of nearby municipalities in the transmission of the disease each year, are also included in the model. A simpler version without including the CAR component was also fitted to the data. Model estimation and predictive inference was carried out through the implementation of a computer code in the WinBUGS software, which makes use of Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. For model selection the criterion of minimum posterior predictive loss (D) was used. The Moran I statistic was calculated to test the independence of the residuals of the resulting model. Finally, we verify the model fit by using the Bayesian p-value, and in most cases the selected model captures the spatial structure of the relative risks among the neighboring municipalities each year. For years with a poor model fit, the t-Student distribution is used as an alternative model for the spatial local random effect with better fit to the tail behavior of the data probability distribution.     

Correction to: Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability

Social Indicators Research - The article Vertical and Horizontal Inequality in Ecuador: The Lack of Sustainability, written Ivan Gachet, Diego F. Grijalva, Paúl A. Ponce and Damián...     

Development and validation of a lean supply chain management measurement instrument

It is widely argued that to be competitive, a company not only needs to focus on internal aspects but on the entire supply chain. Lean supply chain management has become a means of enhancing competitiveness by improving efficiency and increasing flexibility at all stages of the supply chain. This research develops and validates a lean supply chain management measurement instrument. A two-phase approach is used for scale development and refinement. In the first phase, a literature review is conducted to identify definitions of lean supply chain management and agile supply chain management and their corresponding measurement items. In the second phase, the lean supply chain management measurement instrument is validated using survey data based on scales developed in the first phase by 59 scholars with experience in lean management and/or supply chain management. The results provide a structured and comprehensive measure of lean supply chain management indicating that there are two differentiated dimensions in the measurement instrument: one related to the operational aspects of lean supply chain strategy implementation and the second related to lean supply chain planning.     

Species composition,abundance and diet of a squamate assemblage from the Carnaval stream headwaters (Buenos Aires,Argentina)

Urban Ecosystems - The present work summarizes 10 years of field observations of an exurban squamate assemblage occupying a 1200 ha patch in the suburbs of La Plata City (Los...     

Cemeteries and biodiversity conservation in cities: how do landscape and patch-level attributes influence bird diversity in urban park cemeteries?

Urban Ecosystems - Cemeteries can help conserve biodiversity in urban landscapes, but their capacity to support native species is likely to be influenced by variables at different spatial scales....     

Child language brokering: challenges in Spanish intercultural education

Globalisation has resulted in multicultural and multilingual societies where individuals, who often do not speak the official language, need to communicate with different services offered by public institutions in the host country. School plays a vital role as an education and training institution, and must guarantee that every student receives equal opportunities, and, in accordance with the principles of intercultural education, facilitate the integration of foreign students both into society and the educational context. However, linguistic and cultural barriers may sometimes prevent communication between foreign students, their families and the education centre.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse survey responses and interview talk about communication between teachers and immigrant users who do not speak or barely know the host country language, especially the methods employed and the resources available to Spanish education centres to communicate with students and families who lack the necessary host language skills. A case study will be used as example of the situation in which both educators and families very frequently have to turn to child language brokering, using methodology based on qualitative analysis of surveys and interviews carried out in two primary schools in the Madrid area.     

A Ecological Model of Well-Being in Child Welfare Referred Children

Despite its social, political and economic relevance, child well-being remains a challenging construct to define and measure accurately. This holds true especially for children growing up in at-risk families, where their development is hindered by many adverse circumstances. Typically, the well-being of child welfare (CW) referred children has been conceptualized as the absence of negative outcomes, and the study of its determinants has been limited to children’s micro-systems. In this study, we aimed to obtain a suitable indicator of child well-being and to test a model of the determinants of CW referred children’s well-being including parental, family and wider contextual variables. The sample included 249 parents and 46 case managers from Portuguese and Spanish CW services. A three-domain solution from selected items of the Child Well-Being Scales (Physical, Academic and Socioemotional) was tested and confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of structural equation modeling for each domain revealed that risk factors nested in the wider context and those related to material disadvantage were the most powerful predictors of physical well-being, while parenting and family functioning variables predicted better both academic and socio-emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that different risk and protective factors matter for different outcomes and that most of these factors are associated with each other. Therefore, interventions with at-risk children must take this specificity into account when targeting each domain of well-being, and efforts could be allocated to a few modifiable dimensions, which would in turn positively affect other parental and family factors.     

Comments on “The power of monitoring: how to make the most of a contaminated multivariate sample”

These are comments on the invited paper “The power of monitoring: How to make the most of a contaminated multivariate sample” by Andrea Cerioli, Marco Riani, Anthony Atkinson and Aldo Corbellini.