Planners’ Perspectives on Governing and Producing Sustainable Cities in Malaysia

Since the mid-1990s, sustainable principles have been embedded in Malaysia’s development plans. The assumption has been that policies, programs, and plans that promote good communities—requiring a mix of housing types, uses, and densities—will produce sustainability. This study examines planning policies and interviews data with local planners to understand the challenges in interpreting and implementing a sustainability agenda in practice. The findings of the study suggest that although planners use various strategies and mechanisms to achieve sustainable cities, problems and barriers limit efforts to produce sustainable cities. Planners have reached a consensus on the need to improve current practice in producing sustainable cities and find effective solutions to deliver good governance practices. The weak commitment of different agencies and leadership, and limited staff resources and unnecessary political intervention, mean that planners in Malaysia face increasing challenges when implementing sustainable cities.

     

Multidimensional Child Poverty: From Complex Weighting to Simple Representation

Within the debates on poverty measurement among experts as well as the discussions about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) an interesting shift has taken place in recent years, away from uni-dimensional measurements (based on a poverty line) and towards multi-dimensional approaches. Any multi-dimensional approach is, by definition, dealing with the complexity of poverty across a range of aspects which need to be assessed separately before they can be combined (weighted) to produce an overall, synthetic measure. This measure, in turn, if it is going to be more than a theoretical curiosum, must be translated for and presented to the public at large and decision-makers in order to impact programs and policies to reduce and eliminate poverty. In this paper, all the steps involved in the last two sentences are explored. This is done in the context of the measurement of Child Poverty that was initiated over a decade ago by UNICEF. After a brief review of the history and evolution of the measurement of Child Poverty, three consecutive sections dealing with the issues raised above are introduced. First, based on the experience of over 70 countries from all developing continents, the selection of indicators is discussed. This is followed by a simple simulation showing the pitfalls of endogenous weights. The third of these sections explores the challenges in presenting these results to a wide, lay audience which are shown to be less intractable than the issues faced by weighted composite indexes and the “dollar-a-day” uni-dimensional metric. An additional section deals with the problem of embedding the Child Poverty measurement within the larger poverty picture of the country (i.e. comparing and complementing metrics of adult and overall poverty). The final section summarizes the main results and conclusions of the paper.     

Credibility premium for rate-making systems

Credibility formula has been developed in many fields of actuarial sciences. Based upon Payandeh (2010 Payandeh, A.T. (2010). A new approach to the credibility formula. Insur.: Math. Econ. 46(2):334–338.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), this article extends concept of credibility formula to relatively premium of a given rate-making system. More precisely, it calculates Payandeh’s (2010 Payandeh, A.T. (2010). A new approach to the credibility formula. Insur.: Math. Econ. 46(2):334–338.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) credibility factor for zero-inflated Poisson gamma distributions with respect to several loss functions. A comparison study has been given.     

Adaptive c-chart with estimated parameter

In the design of control charts, it is usually assumed that process parameters are known. However, in many practical applications the values of these parameters are unknown and should be estimated using historical in-control process observations. In this study, the performance of adaptive c-chart with estimated parameter is evaluated. It is demonstrated that by increasing the size and the number of samples in estimating the process parameter, the performance of the chart converges to that of the known parameter case. Finally the best phase I sampling scenarios are presented to make the chart with the estimated parameter perform as well as the chart with the known parameter.     

Quality of Life in College Students with and without Social Phobia

Prior studies demonstrating quality of life impairment in phobia and anxiety disorders have relied upon epidemiological samples or clinical data. Using the same quality of life scale, the Short Form 36-item Health Survey (SF-36), in Iranian college students allowed us to study the impact of social phobia (SP) on quality of life among the college students. This report summarizes findings from a cross sectional study on Iranian students with social phobia studying at Shahed University. Quality of life was measured using the Short Form 36-item Health Survey (SF-36) which is a widely used and valid questionnaire to measure quality of life in cross-sectional and longitudinal studies. Three standard instruments were used to measure social phobia severity, namely Social Phobia Inventory, Social Interaction Anxiety Scale, and Brief version of the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale. The sample consisted of 202 college students, 72 with SP and 130 without SP. The main finding of this study was that students with social phobia reported significantly lower quality of life, particularly in general health (P = 0.02), vitality (P < 0.0001), social functioning (P < 0.0001), role functioning—emotional (P < 0.0001), and Mental health (P = 0.001) dimensions. Standardized summed scores for mental health components of the SF-36 showed that 36.2% of all the s with SP were severely impaired while 16.0% of the students in control croup were severely impaired. Findings demonstrated that Iranian socially anxious college students reported extensive functional disability, and lower well-being compared to those without SP. These findings should encourage education officers to implement systematic efforts to prevent and treat social anxiety among students.     

Fragile Families in Quebec and the Rest of Canada: A Comparison of Parental Work-Life Balance Satisfaction

Population Research and Policy Review - We address how social policies and cultural context impact the association of marital status with parental work-life balance satisfaction. To accomplish this...     

Examining the Reliability and Validity of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale: The Persian Version

This study was an attempt to determine the factor structure, reliability, validity, and adaptation of the Fisher Divorce Adjustment Scale (FDAS) for Iranian divorced individuals. The primary rationale for this study was the lack of such an instrument in an Iranian context to help researchers and therapists determine postdivorce adjustment and distinguish those in need of receiving psychological help. Participants of this study were 486 individuals (49.5% men, 50.5% women) who were divorced and were selected from the available population. Participants were asked to complete a sociodemographic questionnaire, the FDAS (Fisher, 1978), the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985), and the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ; Ghanbarnejad & Turki, 2013). The results showed that the internal consistency of FDAS using Cronbach’s alpha was .93 and the split-half coefficient was .89, indicating fine consistency. Also, the internal consistency of FDAS subscales measuring self-worth, disentanglement from the ex-partner, anger, grief, social trust, and social self-worth was .81, .86, .89, .88, .86, and .69, respectively, using Cronbach’s alpha. Data analysis shows an adequate convergent validity with the SWLS and GHQ. It can be concluded that the FDAS has an acceptable factor structure, reliability, and validity, and can be used in Iran and other Persian-speaking countries.