The impact of short-term exposure to ambient air pollution on test scores in Iran

Population and Environment - Air pollution in urban centers has become a key public concern around the world. Apart from its adverse health effects, air pollution could impact less visible outcomes...     

Prioritization of corporate goals in Saudi Arabia: An exploratory investigation

This paper tries to fill partially the informational gap in the area of organizational goals. Data provided by four Saudi Arabian industries-namely: petrochemicals, packaging, electric & electronics, and food processing, indicate that goal-setting processes may be influenced by several factors. Profitability, growth, and social responsibility were ranked among the top four goals in all four industries. The nature of the industry and environmental factors have a strong influence on these processes. This study highlights the importance of culture for joint ventures and its impact on goal-setting in Saudi Arabia.     

Some new classes of multivariate survival distribution functions

The concept of the univariate mean remaining life (m.r.l.) function is generalized to the multivariate case. The multivariate mean remaining life (m.m.r.l.) function is utilized to introduce four new classes of multivariate survival distribution functions (s.d.f.'s). Each of these classes is a new generalization of the univariate decreasing mean remaining life (DMRL) class of s.d.f.'s. The duals of these classes are introduced. Some properties, physical interpretation, and relationships among these classes are investigated. Also for each case, the class of s.d.f.'s common in a class and its dual is characterized.     

Euthanasia and the medical profession: an Australian study

Advances in medical knowledge and technology are enabling more people to live longer in modern societies. This situation has also created dilemmas for medical practitioners in treating severely or chronically ill patients where the harm caused to them by treatment appears to outweigh the benefits. After reviewing some of the major legal and ethical issues confronting medical practitioners in Australia, this paper reports findings of a survey of Australian doctors' attitudes towards euthanasia. The findings show that a significant number of doctors receive requests from either the patients or their families to hasten death through active or passive euthanasia. A large majority of them also regard some form of passive euthanasia as an acceptable medical decision concerning the end of life. Twenty per cent of general practitioners and 17 per cent of specialists surveyed have taken active steps in the past to hasten the death of a patient. This paper explores the circumstances in which doctors are prepared to perform euthanasia and concludes with a discussion of the legal, ethical and professional issues raised by the survey's findings.     

Toward re-engineering models and algorithms of facility layout

Models and algorithms are continuously being developed for the facility layout problem in various manufacturing settings. However, there could be practices and obstacles that weaken them and adversely impact the effectiveness of the layout. Thus, they should be obliterated in order to advance the layout problem. This paper suggests a set of guidelines that are directed at the process inherent in developing layout models, algorithms, expert systems, and software applications to assist in improving them and developing better layouts. Such guidelines are lacking in the literature of facility layout. Examples on the suitability and applicability of the suggested guidelines are given.     

Impact of temporal aggregation on stock control performance of intermittent demand estimators: Empirical analysis

Intermittent demand is characterized by occasional demand arrivals interspersed by time intervals during which no demand occurs. These demand patterns pose considerable difficulties in terms of forecasting and stock control due to their compound nature, which implies variability both in terms of demand arrivals and demand sizes. An intuitively appealing strategy to deal with such patterns from a forecasting and stock control perspective is to aggregate demand in lower-frequency ‘time buckets’, thereby reducing the presence of zero observations. In this paper, we investigate the impact of forecasting aggregation on the stock control performance of intermittent demand patterns. The benefit of the forecasting aggregation approach is empirically assessed by means of analysis on a large demand dataset from the Royal Air Force (UK). The results show that the aggregation forecasting approach results in higher achieved service levels as compared to the classical forecasting approach. Moreover, when the combined service-cost performance is considered, the results also show that the former approach is more efficient than the latter, especially for high target service levels.     

A First-Order Spatial Integer-Valued Autoregressive SINAR(1, 1) Model

Binomial thinning operator has a major role in modeling one-dimensional integer-valued autoregressive time series models. The purpose of this article is to extend the use of such operator to define a new stationary first-order spatial non negative, integer-valued autoregressive SINAR(1, 1) model. We study some properties of this model like the mean, variance and autocorrelation function. Yule-Walker estimator of the model parameters is also obtained. Some numerical results of the model are presented and, moreover, this model is applied to a real data set.     

Is Tourism Marriage of Young Girls in Egypt a Form of Child Sexual Abuse? A Family Exploitation Perspective

Tourism marriage in Egypt is considered a part of the child marriage phenomenon, as parents following false interpretations of Islamic teachings offer up their daughters for short-term sexual relationships in return for money from tourists. This exploratory study used qualitative methods to interview 42 parents who reside in the city of Darasa, Giza, Egypt, whose daughters were persuaded to engage in tourism marriage. Eight social work students utilized an interview guide that contained 10 questions exploring how parents strike deals with tourists and avoid all legal and traditional procedures of marriage in Egypt. The findings of this study were summarized in six distinct themes, which show evidence of family exploitation of young women. This experience likely increases the child’s vulnerability to psychological, social, and physical consequences.     

Confidence intervals for the closed population size under inverse sampling without replacement

Inverse sampling is an appropriate design for the second phase of capture-recapture experiments which provides an exactly unbiased estimator of the population size. However, the sampling distribution of the resulting estimator tends to be highly right skewed for small recapture samples, so, the traditional Wald-type confidence intervals appear to be inappropriate. The objective of this paper is to study the performance of interval estimators for the population size under inverse recapture sampling without replacement. To this aim, we consider the Wald-type, the logarithmic transformation-based, the Wilson score, the likelihood ratio and the exact methods. Also, we propose some bootstrap confidence intervals for the population size, including the with-replacement bootstrap (BWR), the without replacement bootstrap (BWO), and the Rao–Wu’s rescaling method. A Monte Carlo simulation is employed to evaluate the performance of suggested methods in terms of the coverage probability, error rates and standardized average length. Our results show that the likelihood ratio and exact confidence intervals are preferred to other competitors, having the coverage probabilities close to the desired nominal level for any sample size, with more balanced error rate for exact method and shorter length for likelihood ratio method. It is notable that the BWO and Rao–Wu’s rescaling methods also may provide good intervals for some situations, however, those coverage probabilities are not invariant with respect to the population arguments, so one must be careful to use them.     

Balancing fidelity,contextualisation, and innovation: learning from an adaption of SASA! to prevent violence against women in the Dadaab refugee camp

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on SASA!, a community mobilisation approach that was developed in Uganda by Raising Voices, with the aim of preventing violence against women. SASA! proved effective in reducing intimate partner violence against women, and has since been used in over 25 countries worldwide. In this article, we draw on recent research into the International Refugee Committee’s implementation of SASA! in Dadaab, Kenya. In particular, we focus on how the refugee camp setting shapes the adaptation and delivery of the SASA! programme and explore the balance to be struck between fidelity to the SASA! methodology, and adaptations to make it suitable for use in this specific humanitarian context.