Perceived morbidity, utilisation of health services and factors affecting it in a rural area

A survey of perceived morbidity was carried out in rural population in eight villages and four wards of Saoner town, covering a total population of 8,876. The nature of illness was assessed by weekly visits to the families. History regarding treatment taken for disease and its source was taken. The overall incidence of perceived morbidity was 176.35 spells of sickness per 1000 population per month. Health care agency was contacted for 36.7 per cent spells of sickness. Utilisation of health services was found to be affected significantly by factors like age (chi 2 = 138.36), literacy (chi 2 = 14.123), type of occupation (chi 2 = 433.74), nature of illness (chi 2 = 83.578) and accessibility of health services. A health behaviour model of the population has also been discussed in this paper.     

On some characteristics of China's population--analysis of the ten percent sampling tabulation of the 1982 third national population census

Advance results from the 1982 census of China are presented based on a 10 percent sample. Sections are included on age distribution, centenarians, marriage patterns, educational status, and the labor force. Several characteristics of China's population are described in this article, based on a 10% sampling tabulation of the production teams and resident groups of the whole country. Data are included for 100,380,000 people. The proportion of the population aged 0-14 is 33.60%, which marks a decline from figures in the 1964 census (40%). This decline is attributed to family planning and population control efforts. The median age is 22.91 years, which is 2.71 years older than that in the 1964 census. The % of the population aged 15-64 rose from 55.7% in 1964 to 61.5%. The dependency ratio dropped from 79.4% (1964) to 62.6%. There were 3,765 centenarians as of July, 1982; the overwhelming majority live in villages, and most (94.77%) are illiterate or semiliterate. The number of female centenarians is 2.4 times that of males. Marriages are comparatively stable in China. 63.6% of the population aged 15 and over are married, and .59% are divorced. The % of the population remaining single after age 50 is .21% for females, 2.97% for males. The average 1st marriage age is 22.80 years for females and 25.49 years for males. 60.35% of the people have had primary education or above; .44% are college graduates. In 1964, 33.58% of the population illiterate or semiliterate. At present, among people aged 12 and over, 31.90% are illiterate or semiliterate. The rural illiteracy rate is more than twice the urban rate. 51.94% of the total population is employed. Of these, 92.08% are engaged in manual labor. Males exceed females in all professions and occupations. The median age of the employed population is 30.84 years. The level of education among the employed is relatively low: 28.26% are illiterate or semiliterate, and 34.35% have had primary education only.     

Risk Modeling, Assessment, and Management of Lahar Flow Threat

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines is considered one of the most violent and destructive volcanic activities in the 20th century. Lahar is the Indonesian term for volcanic ash, and lahar flows resulting from the massive amount of volcanic materials deposited on the mountain's slope posed continued post-eruption threats to the surrounding areas, destroying lives, homes, agricultural products, and infrastructures. Risks of lahar flows were identified immediately after the eruption, with scientific data provided by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other research institutions. However, competing political, economic, and social agendas subordinated the importance of scientific information to policy making. Using systemic risk analysis and management, this article addresses the issues of multiple objectives and the effective integration of scientific techniques into the decision-making process. It provides a modeling framework for identifying, prioritizing, and evaluating policies for managing risk. The major considerations are: (1) applying a holistic approach to risk analysis through hierarchical holographic modeling, (2) applying statistical methods to gain insight into the problem of uncertainty in risk assessment, (3) using multiobjective trade-off analysis to address the issue of multiple decisionmakers and stakeholders in the decision-making process, (4) using the conditional expected value of extreme events to complement and supplement the expected value in quantifying risk, and (5) assessing the impacts of multistage decisions. Numerical examples based on ex post data are formulated to illustrate applications to various problems. The resulting framework from this study can serve as a general baseline model for assessing and managing risks of natural disasters, which the Philippines' lead agency-the National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC)-and other related organizations can use for their decision-making processes.     

One-dimensional optimal bounded-shape partitions for Schur convex sum objective functions

Consider the problem of partitioning n nonnegative numbers into p parts, where part i can be assigned n_i numbers with n_i lying in a given range. The goal is to maximize a Schur convex function F whose ith argument is the sum of numbers assigned to part i. The shape of a partition is the vector consisting of the sizes of its parts, further, a shape (without referring to a particular partition) is a vector of nonnegative integers (n₁,..., n_p) which sum to n. A partition is called size-consecutive if there is a ranking of the parts which is consistent with their sizes, and all elements in a higher-ranked part exceed all elements in the lower-ranked part. We demonstrate that one can restrict attention to size-consecutive partitions with shapes that are nonmajorized, we study these shapes, bound their numbers and develop algorithms to enumerate them. Our study extends the analysis of a previous paper by Hwang and Rothblum which discussed the above problem assuming the existence of a majorizing shape. This research is partially supported by ROC National Science grant NSC 92-2115-M-009-014.     

论群体传播时代的莅临

一个"人人都能发声,传播无处不在"的群体传播时代已经到来。产能过剩是群体传播时代的基本经济特征,也是其兴起的社会土壤。互联网为群体传播提供了无时不在的"物理空间"。群体传播在一定程度上消解了大众传播的意义传递和媒介垄断,又为个体、群体、企业和机构参与传播竞争,提供了机会和平台。大众传播、组织传播与群体传播,既存博弈又有合作,只有相互借力才能共赢。在网络推广、文化营销中,充分利用群体传播能够实现"四两拨千斤"的效果。值得注意的是,微博等群体传播与人际传播的交织,却是谣言产生影响力的根源。     

洛必答法则使用技巧及注意事项浅析

洛必答法则是求解极限的一个非常重要的方法,一般教材的编写,只是着重例题类型的分类专门讨论,在技巧的讨论上着墨较少,文章则从洛必答法则使用技巧以及注意事项方面针对一些实例做出浅析.     

Flood Catastrophe Model for Designing Optimal Flood Insurance Program: Estimating Location‐Specific Premiums in the Netherlands

As flood risks grow worldwide, a well‐designed insurance program engaging various stakeholders becomes a vital instrument in flood risk management. The main challenge concerns the applicability of standard approaches for calculating insurance premiums of rare catastrophic losses. This article focuses on the design of a flood‐loss‐sharing program involving private insurance based on location‐specific exposures. The analysis is guided by a developed integrated catastrophe risk management (ICRM) model consisting of a GIS‐based flood model and a stochastic optimization procedure with respect to location‐specific risk exposures. To achieve the stability and robustness of the program towards floods with various recurrences, the ICRM uses stochastic optimization procedure, which relies on quantile‐related risk functions of a systemic insolvency involving overpayments and underpayments of the stakeholders. Two alternative ways of calculating insurance premiums are compared: the robust derived with the ICRM and the traditional average annual loss approach. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated in a case study of a Rotterdam area outside the main flood protection system in the Netherlands. Our numerical experiments demonstrate essential advantages of the robust premiums, namely, that they: (1) guarantee the program's solvency under all relevant flood scenarios rather than one average event; (2) establish a tradeoff between the security of the program and the welfare of locations; and (3) decrease the need for other risk transfer and risk reduction measures.     

Convergence rates for uniform confidence intervals based on local polynomial regression estimators

We investigate the convergence rates of uniform bias-corrected confidence intervals for a smooth curve using local polynomial regression for both the interior and boundary region. We discuss the cases when the degree of the polynomial is odd and even. The uniform confidence intervals are based on the volume-of-tube formula modified for biased estimators. We empirically show that the proposed uniform confidence intervals attain, at least approximately, nominal coverage. Finally, we investigate the performance of the volume-of-tube based confidence intervals for independent non-Gaussian errors.