Negotiation of identity and internal contradictions: the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways compared

This study explores the Terengganu and Kelantan Peranakan Chinese foodways with special reference to two types of foods: daily and ancestral prayer foods. The principal focus is to illustrate the negotiation of identity through foodways as well as internal contradictions arising from this process of identity negotiation. These two groups of Peranakan Chinese are largely the product of acculturation by the local Malays through socio-cultural interactions, though the Kelantan Peranakan Chinese are also acculturated by the local Thai community. Their daily and ancestral prayer foods display contrasting identities that stem from the negotiating of their acculturated and primordial identities. The former displays a strong local cultural influence, while the latter displays a strong Chinese cultural influence. However, despite the pervasive influence of localisation in their daily foods, elements of hybridisation are visible in some occasionally prepared food items. Meanwhile, localised and hybrid food items are included in their ancestral prayer foods, which are supposed to express their primordial Chinese identity. These internal contractions illustrate the complexity of the negotiation of identity through foodways within a cross-cultural context.     

Foreign Remittances and Regional Poverty: Evidence from Household Data

This study examines the association between foreign remittances and poverty (incidence and severity) in the Punjab province of Pakistan. Logit regression is used to deal with binary headcount ratio, while the instrumental variable approach is employed to avoid possible endogeneity. Household-based data, covering more than 40,000 household units in Punjab, are used for the empirical estimations. After controlling for several variables, such as the number of dependents of households, age, gender, and education of the household head, the results indicate that foreign remittances’ inflow reduces the incidence and severity of poverty in all three regions of the Punjab province, North Punjab, South Punjab and Central Punjab. The South Punjab, however, is found to be poorer based on headcount poverty and severity of poverty as compared to the other two regions.     

Shifting strategy for geometric graphs without?geometry

We give a simple framework which is an alternative to the celebrated and widely used shifting strategy of Hochbaum and Maass (J. ACM 32(1):103?C136, 1985) which has yielded efficient algorithms with good approximation bounds for numerous optimization problems in low-dimensional Euclidean space. Our framework does not require the input graph/metric to have a geometric realization??it only requires that the input graph satisfy some weak property referred to as growth boundedness. Growth bounded graphs form an important graph class that has been used to model wireless networks. We show how to apply the framework to obtain a polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the maximum (weighted) independent set problem on this important graph class; the problem is W[1]-complete. Via a more sophisticated application of our framework, we show how to obtain a PTAS for the maximum (weighted) independent set for intersection graphs of (low-dimensional) fat objects that are expressed without geometry. Erlebach et al. (SIAM J. Comput. 34(6):1302?C1323, 2005) and Chan (J. Algorithms 46(2):178?C189, 2003) independently gave a PTAS for maximum weighted independent set problem for intersection graphs of fat geometric objects, say ball graphs, which required a geometric representation of the input. Our result gives a positive answer to a question of Erlebach et al. (SIAM J. Comput. 34(6):1302?C1323, 2005) who asked if a PTAS for this problem can be obtained without access to a geometric representation.     

Building resilience in SMEs of perishable product supply chains: enablers,barriers and risks

SMEs of perishable product supply chains (PPSCs) are critical to sustaining fresh food supply and global economy. However, they face immense challenges given the nature of their operations. Surprisingly, the literature lacks research on the distinct intra- and inter-organisational factors intertwined to build resilience in these firms. From the semi-structured interviews conducted with 30 managers of a PPSC in Australia, we developed a holistic framework to build resilience in SMEs of PPSCs. The findings offer novel insights into research and practice including an optimal portfolio of enablers, barriers and risks towards building resilience. The analysis reveals that most risks stem from the factors that are internal to the supply chain, thus necessitating a strong supply chain collaboration. The level of resilience, barriers and risks varies considerably within SMEs depending on their size (small vs. medium) and location of nodes in the supply chain. Interestingly, the SMEs with consortium support demonstrate better resilience and performance.     

Pena's statistic for the Liu regression

In fitting regression model, one or more observations may have substantial effects on estimators. These unusual observations are precisely detected by a new diagnostic measure, Pena's statistic. In this article, we introduce a type of Pena's statistic for each point in Liu regression. Using the forecast change property, we simplify the Pena's statistic in a numerical sense. It is found that the simplified Pena's statistic behaves quite well as far as detection of influential observations is concerned. We express Pena's statistic in terms of the Liu leverages and residuals. The normality of this statistic is also discussed and it is demonstrated that it can identify a subset of high Liu leverage outliers. For numerical evaluation, simulated studies are given and a real data set has been analysed for illustration.     

TEAM INCENTIVES: EVIDENCE FROM A FIRM LEVEL EXPERIMENT

Many organizations rely on teamwork, and yet field evidence on the impacts of team‐based incentives remains scarce. Compared to individual incentives, team incentives can affect productivity by changing both workers’ effort and team composition. We present evidence from a field experiment designed to evaluate the impact of rank incentives and tournaments on the productivity and composition of teams. Strengthening incentives, either through rankings or tournaments, makes workers more likely to form teams with others of similar ability instead of with their friends. Introducing rank incentives however reduces average productivity by 14%, whereas introducing a tournament increases it by 24%. Both effects are heterogeneous: rank incentives only reduce the productivity of teams at the bottom of the productivity distribution, and monetary prize tournaments only increase the productivity of teams at the top. We interpret these results through a theoretical framework that makes precise when the provision of team‐based incentives crowds out the productivity‐enhancing effect of social connections under team production.     

Asymmetric impact of inflation and unemployment on poverty in Pakistan: new evidence from asymmetric ARDL cointegration

The current study is intended to examine the asymmetric impact of inflation and unemployment on the poverty of Pakistan over the period of 1970 to 2016 by applying asymmetric Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) cointegration approach. The results revealed the presence of long-run asymmetries among inflation, unemployment and poverty. These findings also confirmed the atypical reaction of poverty to negative and positive shocks in unemployment and inflation. Furthermore, findings also confirmed negative and significant association among health expenditures (HE), population growth and poverty. The findings of the study have relevant implications for policymakers interested in the asymmetric relationship among inflation, unemployment and poverty in Pakistan.     

Circular balanced repeated measurement designs in periods of three different sizes

Abstract

Repeated measurement designs are widely used in medicine, pharmacology, animal sciences and psychology. If there is a restriction on the total number of treatments, some experimental units can receive on the total length of time while some experimental units can remain in the trial, then repeated measurements designs with unequal period sizes should be used. In this article, some infinite series are developed to generate the minimal balanced repeated measurement designs in periods of three different sizes p₁, p₂ and p₃, where 2?≤?p₃?<?p₂ ≤ 10 and p₂?<?p₁.     

On the readability of monotone Boolean formulae

Golumbic et al. (Discrete Appl. Math. 154:1465–1477, 2006) defined the readability of a monotone Boolean function f to be the minimum integer k such that there exists an ∧−∨-formula equivalent to f in which each variable appears at most k times. They asked whether there exists a polynomial-time algorithm, which given a monotone Boolean function f, in CNF or DNF form, checks whether f is a read-k function, for a fixed k. In this paper, we partially answer this question already for k=2 by showing that it is NP-hard to decide if a given monotone formula represents a read-twice function. It follows also from our reduction that it is NP-hard to approximate the readability of a given monotone Boolean function f:{0,1} ⁿ →{0,1} within a factor of O(n)\mathcal{O}(n) . We also give tight sublinear upper bounds on the readability of a monotone Boolean function given in CNF (or DNF) form, parameterized by the number of terms in the CNF and the maximum size in each term, or more generally the maximum number of variables in the intersection of any constant number of terms. When the variables of the DNF can be ordered so that each term consists of a set of consecutive variables, we give much tighter logarithmic bounds on the readability.