A cast of 40: population and family planning agencies at work in the Philippines

This is a compilation of 42 agencies, both government and private, participating in the Philippine population program. Each listing includes: the purpose of the organization; a summary of its activities for fiscal year 1974-1975; the name of the project director; and the address. A large number of these agencies are engaged primarily in population or family planning work. Others, such as the medical schools at the University of the Philippines and the University of Santo Tomas, have family planning programs as part of a broader effort.     

Gender differences in psychosocial predictors of self-perceived health status in the elderly: Evidence from a Brazilian community study

ABSTRACT

This article aims to identify the psychosocial factors associated with self-perceived health status in the Brazilian elderly population and to present differences related to gender. The data were collected by questionnaire, including sociodemographic and behavioral questions, and scales for psychological dimensions. Self-perceived health status is related to level of education, physical activity, and self-efficacy in the total population. Regarding gender differences, self-rated health status among men is related to education level and self-efficacy and in women to level of education, physical activity, social support, and self-efficacy. These results can inform future health promotion interventions.     

Estimation of distribution algorithms using Gaussian Bayesian networks to solve industrial optimization problems constrained by environment variables

Many real-world optimization problems involve two different subsets of variables: decision variables, and those variables which are not present in the cost function but constrain the solutions, and thus, must be considered during optimization. Thus, dependencies between and within both subsets of variables must be considered. In this paper, an estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) is implemented to solve this type of complex optimization problems. A Gaussian Bayesian network is used to build an abstraction model of the search space in each iteration to identify patterns among the variables. As the algorithm is initialized from data, we introduce a new hyper-parameter to control the influence of the initial data in the decisions made during the EDA execution. The results show that our algorithm improves the cost function more than the expert knowledge does.

     

Vacant Shops in a Crisis Period – A Morphological Analysis in Portuguese Medium-Sized Cities

Vacant shops are an important problem affecting urban areas today, particularly in the wake of the economic crisis. Most strategies to analyse and deal with this issue are related to economic and financial variables. However, the amount of research associating store geography and performance with urban morphology has increased over the past decade. Thus, this research tests the hypothesis that specific morphological features characterize vacant retail sites. Using four Portuguese cities as test-beds and Kernel density analysis to plot spatial patterns, vacant shops were for example positively correlated with low segment betweenness and negatively correlated with block area.     

A Note on the Equilibrium Existence Problem in Discontinuous Games

In this note, we prove an equilibrium existence theorem for games with discontinuous payoffs and convex and compact strategy spaces. It generalizes the classical result of Reny (1999), as well as the recent paper of McLennan, Monteiro, and Tourky (2011). Our conditions are simple and easy to verify. Importantly, examples of spatial location models show that our conditions allow for economically meaningful payoff discontinuities, that are not covered by other conditions in the literature.     

Destructive weighted Poisson cure rate models

In this paper, we develop a flexible cure rate survival model by assuming the number of competing causes of the event of interest to follow a compound weighted Poisson distribution. This model is more flexible in terms of dispersion than the promotion time cure model. Moreover, it gives an interesting and realistic interpretation of the biological mechanism of the occurrence of event of interest as it includes a destructive process of the initial risk factors in a competitive scenario. In other words, what is recorded is only from the undamaged portion of the original number of risk factors.