An Interview with Ben Brown,Co-founder of So New Media and Publisher of Words! Words! Words!

Abstract

With this installment of “They Might Be Giants,” Michael Brown talks with Ben Brown (no relation) about publishing books (ten so far!) and magazines (issue 3 of Words! Words! Words! is about to be released), while at the same time working nine-to-five at a really boring tech job. It's a do-it-yourselfer's dream come true. Serials Review 2002; 28:344–348.     

Investigating important interactions between water and food security for child health in Burkina Faso

Failures in either water systems or food systems, or a combination of system failures, could provide the underlying explanation for continued high levels of malnutrition in many regions. We focus on child health and offer the first spatially explicit analysis of the interaction between water source and food insecurity on children’s health in Burkina Faso, an African nation that continues to struggle with poor children’s health. We combine data from the 2010 Demographic and Health Survey, a small USAID water quality survey collected from community wells, and remotely sensed imagery. Results suggest that, in a few cases, reliable and clean water sources are positively correlated to children’s linear growth and weight gain, although in many regions, the interaction with community-level food production is critical to understanding health outcomes. The results also suggest that maternal health and nutrition during pregnancy and breastfeeding are foundational to the healthy development of young children. In all, the findings provide evidence of the importance of multi-sectoral interventions targeted at improving children’s health.     

天地之间：东汉官员的双重责任

自秦朝至清朝,朝廷任命的地方官员不仅对其上级负有义务,而且代表地方利益。这样的结构性特征被称为“双重责任”。对上负责可以在韦伯的官僚科层框架中得到理解,但无法解释官员对地方利益的维护。本文通过研究东汉时期地方官员的双重责任,分析官员如何维护地方利益。基于对东汉时期政府结构、政治思想和晋升制度的考查,本文提出三种解释：实际需求、儒家意识形态和声誉机制。此观点在实证中得到一定支持。运用东汉时期的官方档案和古代碑刻等原始资料,本文对韦伯有关中华帝国治理制度的分析提出质疑,并对存在了2000多年的“低效率”机制背后潜在的社会合理性提出了新的见解。     

个人减少温室气体排放的伦理责任探究

仅仅重视国家应对气候变化的责任而忽视个人的伦理责任,是全球温室气体减排失败的原因之一。由于每个人都在增加全球性问题,而且每个人都有不伤害他人的义务,所以每个人都有义务不超过其公平安全排放份额。无论身处发达国家还是发展中国家,所有高排放的个体都有责任和义务将自己的温室气体排放量减少到其公平安全排放份额之内。     

An Interview with Stanford M. Forrester,Editor and Publisher of bottle rockets

Abstract

Opened in 1946, the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, Missouri, is world renowned for its collections in science, engineering, and technology. Just as well known is the strong user orientation of its dedicated staff. While the library certainly collects all types of materials, including books, patent specifications, engineering standards, maps, and more, a particularly strong emphasis is placed on the collection of current journals. The library, a privately funded public library, is situated on fourteen acres surrounded by the University of Missouri-Kansas City, although there is no affiliation with that institution. Serials Review made a visit on a lovely spring day in June, as the day lilies and other flowers were in full riot.     

EBSCO Publishing

Abstract

EBSCO Publishing is an innovative company that has its roots in paper publishing. It now produces hundreds of online resources in a state-of-the-art facility located along the banks of the Ipswich River in Massachusetts. Considerable work occurs behind the scenes in Ipswich (and around the world) to produce the online databases in EBSCOhost that appear to the user at the click of a mouse. Jennifer Carroll toured the headquarters in Ipswich to learn about the processes that make these valuable resources available.     

Life in the Trenches of Print and Web Publishing: An Interview with Jessamyn West

Abstract

From Picas to Pixels has a peek into the life of librarian.net's founder and publisher, Jessamyn West. We talk about everything from library school to Colin Powell, from shell commands to the Internet community's recent infatuation with tagging (or what we catalogers like to call subject analysis). I tried to lead Jessamyn to admit that we need more catalogers in the mix on projects that are using tagging extensively, like Flickr.com and the Missouri Botanical Garden's new “tagswarming” project, but she did not take the bait.     

Mixed ranked set sampling design

The main focus of agricultural, ecological and environmental studies is to develop well designed, cost-effective and efficient sampling designs. Ranked set sampling (RSS) is one method that leads to accomplish such objectives by incorporating expert knowledge to its advantage. In this paper, we propose an efficient sampling scheme, named mixed RSS (MxRSS), for estimation of the population mean and median. The MxRSS scheme is a suitable mixture of both simple random sampling (SRS) and RSS schemes. The MxRSS scheme provides an unbiased estimator of the population mean, and its variance is always less than the variance of sample mean based on SRS. For both symmetric and asymmetric populations, the mean and median estimators based on SRS, partial RSS (PRSS) and MxRSS schemes are compared. It turns out that the mean and median estimates under MxRSS scheme are more precise than those based on SRS scheme. Moreover, when estimating the mean of symmetric and some asymmetric populations, the mean estimates under MxRSS scheme are found to be more efficient than the mean estimates with PRSS scheme. An application to real data is also provided to illustrate the implementation of the proposed sampling scheme.