Measuring disparities in access to water based on the normative content of the human right

Measuring access to water in the Sustainable Development Goals era involves taking into account the human rights framework. Therefore, its content should be considered to conceptualize the level of service through adequate indicators and to follow-up inequities reduction at global, national and local level. This research develops and tests a methodology to measure intra-community disparities based on human right to water normative criteria through a stratified sampling, splitting households served by community based organizations and those self-provided. This approach implies considering much reduced populations, thus special care needs to be taken with sample sizes and uncertainty of estimators. The proposed methodology is practical to locate and accurately characterize minority sectors within rural communities and allows moving beyond central-tendency estimators. It implies higher costs for field data collection than traditional approaches, but this can be assumed given the relevance of the approach from a human rights perspective, which calls for adequate tools for equity-oriented policy making at local level. The research point out how results might be used to shape decision-making processes.     

SCHEDULING PARALLEL PROCESSORS WITH SETUP COSTS AND RESOURCE LIMITATIONS

An integer linear programming model is presented for the scheduling of n products on m identical machines. The particular problem studied is one that occurs frequently in the fiberglass and textile industries. The model incorporates setup costs, lost production costs, and overtime costs. Due to the structure of the model, integer solutions can be obtained by explicitly restricting only a small number of the integer variables. This allows those responsible for scheduling to solve realistically sized problems in an efficient manner. Computational results are provided for a set of generated test problems.     

Thinking Through Affect and Psychoanalysis: Introducing Papers from the Conference “Worldings,Tensions, Futures”

This is an introduction to the panel of papers collected from the affect theory conference “Worldings, Tensions, Futures,” comprising the stream focusing on psychoanalysis, affect and time.     

New Price,New Hope? An Examination of the Effects of Doubling the Ticket Price in UK Lotto

The UK Lotto game was introduced in November 1994 with a standard 6/49 format and an entry fee of £1 per ticket. After several years, revenue began to fall despite extensive publicity and a variety of inducements. By 2013, nominal weekly revenue was less than half the 1995 level. In October 2013, the operator doubled the price of a ticket to £2 and made a number of changes to the pay-out structure of smaller prizes. The intent of the changes was to reverse the long downward trend in game revenue by encouraging higher jackpots and offering more pay-out opportunities for each ticket. We use draw by draw revenue and other data to evaluate how players responded to these changes and find that, while ticket sales fell dramatically, total revenue rose following the changes. Primarily this appears to have been the consequence of increased frequency of rollovers (and therefore of more frequent high jackpot draws) rather than ticket price inelasticity. However, although there was a short-term gain in revenue, the changes did not arrest, and indeed seem to have accentuated, the long-run trend decrease in the revenue generated by the game.     

The Moderating Effect of Living with a Child Before Incarceration on Postrelease Outcomes Related to a Prison-Based Parent Management Training Program

ABSTRACT

With the rapid growth in incarceration in the United States over the past few decades came dramatic growth in the number of the incarcerated parents with at least one minor child. Parental incarceration places extra stresses and strains on families and children. Almost all of those incarcerated will eventually be released. However, the majority of those released from prison will be rearrested within a year. Finding interventions that can decrease the likelihood of returning to crime and to incarceration are of utmost importance. Using a social bond theory framework, the authors examine the moderating effect of living with a child before incarceration on program outcomes related to a prison-based parent management training program. A significant effect was found. Implications for these findings are discussed for future research and practice.     

<Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">MAD-STEC</Emphasis>: a method for multiple automatic detection of space-time emerging clusters

Crime or disease surveillance commonly rely in space-time clustering methods to identify emerging patterns. The goal is to detect spatial-temporal clusters as soon as possible after its occurrence and to control the rate of false alarms. With this in mind, a spatio-temporal multiple cluster detection method was developed as an extension of a previous proposal based on a spatial version of the Shiryaev–Roberts statistic. Besides the capability of multiple cluster detection, the method have less input parameter than the previous proposal making its use more intuitive to practitioners. To evaluate the new methodology a simulation study is performed in several scenarios and enlighten many advantages of the proposed method. Finally, we present a case study to a crime data-set in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.