“Something More”: The Meanings of Marriage for Religious Couples in America

This study focused on how couples’ beliefs about marriage and religion shape the meanings they find in their marriage. Interviews about connections between religion and marriage were conducted with 57 Christian, Jewish, and Muslim couples in New England and northern California. Qualitative analyses found the major theme, common across faith traditions, was that marriage is a sacred union that is “something more": more than the self, more than the couple, and more than the family unit. To these couples marriage is divine and institutional and a vital support for their relationship. Our findings raise an interesting counterpoint to the current scholarly discourse about the deinstitutionalization and individualization of contemporary marriage. Institutionalized features of marriage may retain their strength in contemporary society as many religious couples, and perhaps many other couples as well, believe marriage is something more than the deinstitutionalized, private relationship that many scholars now see.     

In-house capability and supply chain decisions

This study considers an internal production option for a contractor and analyzes its effect on the supply chain decisions when the contractor has innovated and the subcontractor has an incentive for opportunistic behavior. In contrast to the single disclosure threshold in the benchmark scenario where the contractor lacks in-house capability, we find two thresholds in the referred scenario. When information misappropriation is possible and the contractor has in-house capability, the contractor will organize a coordinated supply chain only when innovations fall between the two thresholds. Compared to the benchmark scenario, in-house capability has a positive effect on the contractor's incentive to innovate and an ambiguous effect on the subcontractor's incentive to invest in the production process. When the contractor needs to incur an extra cost to build in-house capability, the contractor keeps the same levels of investment compared to the case of no additional in-house capability cost, whereas the subcontractor increases the levels of investment. Furthermore, we find that in the presence of potential misappropriation on the part of the subcontractor, the higher the level of in-house capability, the less likely the contractor will be to outsource innovative products that generate higher profitability. This study can explain why firms strategically outsource low-end products and produce high-end products themselves. This study provides new results on the effects of in-house capability on the strategic interactions of parties in supply chains and, hence, on supply chain efficiency.     

An operative extension of the likelihood ratio test from fuzzy data

In the present paper we are going to extend the likelihood ratio test to the case in which the available experimental information involves fuzzy imprecision (more precisely, the observable events associated with the random experiment concerning the test may be characterized as fuzzy subsets of the sample space, as intended by Zadeh, 1965). In addition, we will approximate the immediate intractable extension, which is based on Zadeh’s probabilistic definition, by using the minimum inaccuracy principle of estimation from fuzzy data, that has been introduced in previous papers as an operative extension of the maximum likelihood method.     

Spiritual Gatekeepers: Time and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults

This article addresses the process of initiation into the Catholic Church by analyzing in‐depth interviews with parish‐based professional initiation coordinators. The formal title given to this process of initiation by the Church since Vatican II is the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). Since the RCIA's promulgation, the Church has hired a host of lay and religious professionals to coordinate its implementation at the parish level. Our analysis focuses on the temporal sequencing and the problem of duration of initiation. The data show that both city and suburban coordinators adapted the Church's mandated length of time for initiation in different ways as they negotiated covenantal and contractual social relations among RCIA participants.     

我国林业工程项目管理研究

以大工程带动大发展是我国实现林业跨越式发展的重大战略决策。林业项目单位是工程的主要参与者 ,其管理水平高下直接关系到项目成败。该文通过总结现代项目管理理念 ,结合林业工程项目管理的现状和特点 ,提出林业工程项目管理系统 ,并指出了现代项目管理理念和方法是提高林业项目管理水平的有效途径。     

On the outer-connected domination in graphs

A set S of vertices of a graph G is an outer-connected dominating set if every vertex not in S is adjacent to some vertex in S and the subgraph induced by V?S is connected. The outer-connected domination number $\widetilde{\gamma}_{c}(G)$ is the minimum size of such a set. We prove that if δ(G)≥2 and diam?(G)≤2, then $\widetilde{\gamma}_{c}(G)\le (n+1)/2$ , and we study the behavior of $\widetilde{\gamma}_{c}(G)$ under an edge addition.     

The total domination subdivision number in graphs with no induced 3-cycle and 5-cycle

A set S of vertices of a graph G=(V,E) without isolated vertex is a total dominating set if every vertex of V(G) is adjacent to some vertex in S. The total domination number γ _t (G) is the minimum cardinality of a total dominating set of G. The total domination subdivision number $\mathrm{sd}_{\gamma_{t}}(G)$ is the minimum number of edges that must be subdivided (each edge in G can be subdivided at most once) in order to increase the total domination number. Favaron, Karami, Khoeilar and Sheikholeslami (J. Comb. Optim. 20:76–84, 2010a) conjectured that: For any connected graph G of order n≥3, $\mathrm{sd}_{\gamma_{t}}(G)\le \gamma_{t}(G)+1$ . In this paper we use matching to prove this conjecture for graphs with no 3-cycle and 5-cycle. In particular this proves the conjecture for bipartite graphs.