Reliability,Population Classification and Weighting in Multidimensional Poverty Measurement: A Monte Carlo Study

Social Indicators Research - In poverty measurement, differential weighting aims to take into account the unequal importance of the diverse dimensions and aspects of poverty and to add valuable...     

Diaspora as aesthetic formation: community sports events and the making of a Somali diaspora

This paper uses the concept of aesthetic formation to examine the practices through which diasporic imaginations become tangible and experienced as ‘real’. The authors interpret sport as an embodied aesthetic practice through which diasporas materialise, with important implications for identification and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork on a transnational community-based sports event, the Amsterdam Futsal Tournament, the paper discusses how articulations of Somali diasporism become tangible and embodied in subjects who participate in this event. The authors conclude that these materialisation practices can simultaneously elicit multiple forms and levels of belonging that also foster a sense of integration and belonging to the nation.     

谈中药知识产权保护的现状与对策

中国加入WTO之后,中国民族医药产业将面临着机遇和挑战,加强中药知识产权的保护工作意义尤其重大。作者在详尽分析了我国中药知识产权方面的现状之后,进一步提出了我国在中药知识产权保护方面的对策。     

Internet Technology in Service of Personal Health Care Management: Patient Perspective

Internet technology has become an informational resource for most health care consumers. Online information, discussion, and support groups, in the form of message boards, listservs, and chat rooms are emerging as parts of virtual self-health-care network. This paper examines the extent to which participation in online health discussion groups was reported to be helpful in increasing medical knowledge and in enhancing the participatory patient role of health care consumers in interaction with health care service professionals. Data for this study was collected from 350 patients who participated in Internet discussion groups for cancer patients. The findings of the study indicated the important impact of Internet health discussion groups on health care management practices as perceived by health care consumers, including empowerment through knowledge and proactive participation in cancer care management. This research contributes to understanding the patient perspective and assesses the perceived importance of Internet groups by health care consumers.     

CEO burnout,managerial discretion,and firm performance: The role of CEO locus of control,structural power,and organizational factors

Despite the possibility of burnout resulting from dynamics in firms' upper echelons, little if any work has focused on chief executive officer's (CEO's) burnout and firm performance. Drawing on managerial discretion theory, this article analyzes the influence of CEO burnout on firm performance and the moderating roles of the individual (CEO locus of control), structural power (CEO duality and CEO tenure), and organizational characteristics (size, age, and resource availability) related to managerial discretion. Using a sample of 156 CEOs in Swedish firms, we find a negative association between CEOs who report higher burnout and firm performance. Our results confirm that CEO duality and resource availability ameliorate and firm size exacerbates the negative association between CEO burnout and firm performance. Contrary to our expectations, CEO locus of control, CEO tenure, and firm age do not influence this relationship. We discuss the implications of our research for upper echelons theory and strategic leadership theory.     

A feasibility approach for constructing combinatorial designs of circulant type

In this work, we propose an optimization approach for constructing various classes of circulant combinatorial designs that can be defined in terms of autocorrelation. The problem is formulated as a so-called feasibility problem having three sets, to which the Douglas–Rachford projection algorithm is applied. The approach is illustrated on three different classes of circulant combinatorial designs: circulant weighing matrices, D-optimal matrices of circulant type, and Hadamard matrices with two circulant cores. Furthermore, we explicitly construct two new circulant weighing matrices, a CW(126, 64) and a CW(198, 100), whose existence was previously marked as unresolved in the most recent version of Strassler’s table.     

‘What Was I Thinking?!’ Rhetorical Questions as a Technique to Identify and Explore Impasses in Therapy

Rhetorical questions emerging spontaneously in consultations can be used as a tool for developing self‐reflexivity and exploring the therapeutic alliance in the process of therapy with couples and families. This paper presents a technique based on the enunciation of rhetorical questions, which can point to an impasse in the process of therapy and contain a key to its resolution. The technique focuses on the distinctive feature of rhetorical questions as convening a paradoxical injunction: a question not intended as a question, while uttered as such. The technique in four steps is illustrated by examples from therapy, supervision, consultation, and self‐supervision. Its focus is the interlink between the therapeutic relationship and the process of therapy and it is informed by a second‐order cybernetics approach, dialogical practice, and the systemic literature on emotion. The technique can help develop curiosity in working with families, lead to unforeseen developments, and touch on prejudices not made explicit in previous therapeutic encounters. Whether we are acting as supervisors, therapists, or clients, the creation of a ‘secure enough’ context for rhetorical questions becomes critical to allow freeform exploration.     

Link-tracing sampling with an initial sequential sample of sites: Estimating the size of a hidden human population

We proposed a modification to the variant of link-tracing sampling suggested by Félix-Medina and Thompson [M.H. Félix-Medina, S.K. Thompson, Combining cluster sampling and link-tracing sampling to estimate the size of hidden populations, Journal of Official Statistics 20 (2004) 19–38] that allows the researcher to have certain control of the final sample size, precision of the estimates or other characteristics of the sample that the researcher is interested in controlling. We achieve this goal by selecting an initial sequential sample of sites instead of an initial simple random sample of sites as those authors suggested. We estimate the population size by means of the maximum likelihood estimators suggested by the above-mentioned authors or by the Bayesian estimators proposed by Félix-Medina and Monjardin [M.H. Félix-Medina, P.E. Monjardin, Combining link-tracing sampling and cluster sampling to estimate the size of hidden populations: A Bayesian-assisted approach, Survey Methodology 32 (2006) 187–195]. Variances are estimated by means of jackknife and bootstrap estimators as well as by the delta estimators proposed in the two above-mentioned papers. Interval estimates of the population size are obtained by means of Wald and bootstrap confidence intervals. The results of an exploratory simulation study indicate good performance of the proposed sampling strategy.     

Bayesian robustness of the compound Poisson distribution under bidimensional prior: an application to the collective risk model

The distribution of the aggregate claims in one year plays an important role in Actuarial Statistics for computing, for example, insurance premiums when both the number and size of the claims must be implemented into the model. When the number of claims follows a Poisson distribution the aggregated distribution is called the compound Poisson distribution. In this article we assume that the claim size follows an exponential distribution and later we make an extensive study of this model by assuming a bidimensional prior distribution for the parameters of the Poisson and exponential distribution with marginal gamma. This study carries us to obtain expressions for net premiums, marginal and posterior distributions in terms of some well-known special functions used in statistics. Later, a Bayesian robustness study of this model is made. Bayesian robustness on bidimensional models was deeply treated in the 1990s, producing numerous results, but few applications dealing with this problem can be found in the literature.