Developing inclusive educational practices for refugee children in the Czech Republic

All children in the Czech Republic have the legal right to primary education, regardless of nationality and legal status. This article is based on a study of refugee children and their educational situation. The study reveals that refugee students in the Czech Republic are not benefiting fully from this fundamental right and that their educational future is in jeopardy. The study identified six major barriers to full participation and educational benefits. Finally, a plan of action to overcome barriers is put forward. Key ingredients are effective information transfer among state agencies, non‐governmental organizations, parents, children and schools.     

Csiszar’s ϕ-divergences for testing the order in a Markov chain

x ₁, ..., x _n+r can be treated as the sample values of a Markov chain of order r or less (chain in which the dependence extends over r+1 consecutive variables only), and consider the problem of testing the hypothesis H ₀ that a chain of order r− 1 will be sufficient on the basis of the tools given by the Statistical Information Theory: _ϕ-Divergences. More precisely, if p _{a 1 ....., a r}: _{a r +1} denotes the transition probability for a r ^th order Markov chain, the hypothesis to be tested is H ₀:p _{a 1 ....., a r}: _{a r +1} = p _{a 2 ....., a r}: _{a r +1}, a _i ∈{1, ..., s}, i = 1, ..., r + 1 The tests given in this paper, for the first time, will have as a particular case the likelihood ratio test and the test based on the chi-squared statistic. Received: August 3, 1998; revised version: November 25, 1999     

Continuity of utility functions representing fuzzy preferences

In a previous paper, we established necessary and sufficient conditions for a given binary fuzzy relation to be representable by a utility function. In this article, we construct a crisp order topology associated to a given weakly complete fuzzy pre-order and introduce the notion of “continuous fuzzy pre-order.” We show that this new condition and the conditions introduced in the previous paper are together necessary and sufficient for a numerical representation of a given weakly complete fuzzy pre-order by a continuous utility function.     

The game Grundy number of graphs

Given a graph G=(V,E), two players, Alice and Bob, alternate their turns in choosing uncoloured vertices to be coloured. Whenever an uncoloured vertex is chosen, it is coloured by the least positive integer not used by any of its coloured neighbours. Alice’s goal is to minimise the total number of colours used in the game, and Bob’s goal is to maximise it. The game Grundy number of G is the number of colours used in the game when both players use optimal strategies. It is proved in this paper that the maximum game Grundy number of forests is 3, and the game Grundy number of any partial 2-tree is at most 7.     

Modeling heavy-tailed,skewed and peaked uncertainty phenomena with bounded support

A prevalence of heavy-tailed, peaked and skewed uncertainty phenomena have been cited in literature dealing with economic, physics, and engineering data. This fact has invigorated the search for continuous distributions of this nature. In this paper we shall generalize the two-sided framework presented in Kotz and van Dorp (Beyond beta: other continuous families of distributions with bounded support and applications. World Scientific Press, Singapore, 2004) for the construction of families of distributions with bounded support via a mixture technique utilizing two generating densities instead of one. The family of Elevated Two-Sided Power (ETSP) distributions is studied as an instance of this generalized framework. Through a moment ratio diagram comparison, we demonstrate that the ETSP family allows for a remarkable flexibility when modeling heavy-tailed and peaked, but skewed, uncertainty phenomena. We shall demonstrate its applicability via an illustrative example utilizing 2008 US income data.     

Generation of multivariate distributions by vertical density representation

Troutt (1991,1993) proposed the idea of the vertical density representation (VDR) based on Box-Millar method. Kotz, Fang and Liang (1997) provided a systematic study on the multivariate vertical density representation (MVDR). Suppose that we want to generate a random vector X[d]Rⁿthat has a density function ?(x). The key point of using the MVDR is to generate the uniform distribution on [D]_?(v) = {x :?(x) = v} for any v > 0 which is the surface in RⁿIn this paper we use the conditional distribution method to generate the uniform distribution on a domain or on some surface and based on it we proposed an alternative version of the MVDR(type 2 MVDR), by which one can transfer the problem of generating a random vector X with given density f to one of generating (X, X_n+i) that follows the uniform distribution on a region in Rⁿ⁺¹defined by ?. Several examples indicate that the proposed method is quite practical.     

Inégalités et mondialisation financière: le rapport qui tombe à pic

Cette note présente la nouvelle publication annuelle de l'Institut international d'études sociales de l'OIT, le Rapport mondial sur le travail 2008, dont le thème est les inégalités de revenu à l'épreuve de la mondialisation financière. Cette publication tombe à point nommé au moment où l'on s'inquiète de l'ampleur, de la durée et des conséquences économiques et sociales de la crise financière. Le rapport traite des déterminants de l'accroissement des inégalités de revenu, et de ses liens avec la mon‐dialisation financière, les institutions du marché du travail, les emplois – création et caractéristiques –, et les politiques de redistribution.     

The minimal overlap rule revisited

This paper provides an analysis of the Minimal Overlap Rule, a solution for bankruptcy problems introduced by O’Neill (1982). We point out that this rule can be understood as a composition of Ibn Ezra’s proposal and the recommendation given by the Constrained Equal Loss Rule. Following an interpretation of bankruptcy problems in terms of TU games, we show that the Minimal Overlap Value is the unique solution for bankruptcy games which satisfies Anonymity and Core Transition Responsiveness.     

Mixing and Matching the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access—Take 2

Three years ago, the Gold and Green Roads to Open Access were viewed as complementary strategies, with repositories having the potential of gradually behaving more like journals, and vice versa. Since then, repositories and journals have been progressing on parallel tracks. Re-examining the situation, the reasoning suggested in 2004 appears still valid. Simultaneously, a knowledge economy has made of science a strategic resource. The developing world is essentially invited to contribute to world science with little or no regard to the development of an autonomous scientific capacity. Open Access, in this context, takes a new meaning with one objective to help development of local and autonomous scientific capacity. However, to do so, mixing and matching repositories with journals is needed. Brazil exemplifies this type of development and shows how the Green and Gold roads can mix and match.