The impact of emigration on national development in the Arab region: the case of the Yemen Arab Republic

"The focus of this article is the impact of emigration on national development in labor sending countries experiencing wide-scale emigration, the main contention being that, due to the characteristics of contemporary labor movements among Arab countries, there obtains a contradiction between short term benefits and long term adverse effects. The article briefly defines development, then presents empirical evidence from the Yemen Arab Republic of the negative impact of labor emigration."     

An innovative approach to selecting an executive director

As a guide for how to select a new executive director, a family agency adopted the search committee process from higher education. The approach included clarifying agency goals and the director's qualifications, a board-staff screening, and interviews held jointly with public representatives before final board selection.     

On the limiting properties of social indicators

Characteristics of the population and economic measures that constitute traditional social indicators are compared with more recent “quality of life” measures to demonstrate that social indicators are always value statements at the policy level. The possibility of alternative perspectives is illustrated. It is suggested that an awareness of the assumptions implicit in any given indicator is as important as the data they provide.     

PSYCHOLOGICAL DETERMINANTS OF BOUNDED RATIONALITY: IMPLICATIONS FOR DECISION-MAKING STRATEGIES

In this paper the implications of cognitive strain for decision-making effectiveness are explored. Literature concerning the psychological processes of decisionmakers which underlie the operation of cognitive strain and which predispose them to the effects of cognitive strain, is reviewed. Next, the impact of cognitive strain on narrowly constraining or “bounding” rational decision-making is examined, and the choice strategies of satisficing and incrementalizing are criticized as failing to broaden the bounds of rational decision-making. Finally, elements of an eclectic choice strategy designed to assist decision-makers handle the informational demands of complex decision problems are discussed.     

Designing and integrating composite networks for monitoring multivariate gaussian pollution fields

Networks of ambient monitoring stations are used to monitor environmental pollution fields such as those for acid rain and air pollution. Such stations provide regular measurements of pollutant concentrations. The networks are established for a variety of purposes at various times so often several stations measuring different subsets of pollutant concentrations can be found in compact geographical regions. The problem of statistically combining these disparate information sources into a single 'network' then arises. Capitalizing on the efficiencies so achieved can then lead to the secondary problem of extending this network. The subject of this paper is a set of 31 air pollution monitoring stations in southern Ontario. Each of these regularly measures a particular subset of ionic sulphate, sulphite, nitrite and ozone. However, this subset varies from station to station. For example only two stations measure all four. Some measure just one. We describe a Bayesian framework for integrating the measurements of these stations to yield a spatial predictive distribution for unmonitored sites and unmeasured concentrations at existing stations. Furthermore we show how this network can be extended by using an entropy maximization criterion. The methods assume that the multivariate response field being measured has a joint Gaussian distribution conditional on its mean and covariance function. A conjugate prior is used for these parameters, some of its hyperparameters being fitted empirically.     

Factors influencing Soay sheep survival

We present a survival analysis of Soay sheep mark recapture and recovery data. Unlike previous conditional analyses, it is not necessary to assume equality of recovery and recapture probabilities; instead these are estimated by maximum likelihood. Male and female sheep are treated separately, with the higher numbers and survival probabilities of the females resulting in a more complex model than that used for the males. In both cases, however, age and time aspects need to be included and there is a strong indication of a reduction in survival for sheep aged 7 years or more. Time variation in survival is related to the size of the population and selected weather variables, by using logistic regression. The size of the population significantly affects the survival probabilities of male and female lambs, and of female sheep aged 7 or more years. March rainfall and a measure of the North Atlantic oscillation are found to influence survival significantly for all age groups considered, for both males and females. Either of these weather variables can be used in a model. Several phenotypic and genotypic individual covariates are also fitted. The only covariate which is found to influence survival significantly is the type of horn of first-year female sheep. There is a substantial variation in the recovery probabilities over time, reflecting in part the increased effort when a population crash was expected. The goodness of fit of the model is checked by using graphical procedures.     

Binary probability maps using a hidden conditional autoregressive Gaussian process with an application to Finnish common toad data

The Finnish common toad data of Heikkinen and Hogmander are reanalysed using an alternative fully Bayesian model that does not require a pseudolikelihood approximation and an alternative prior distribution for the true presence or absence status of toads in each 10 km×10 km square. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to obtain posterior probability estimates of the square-specific presences of the common toad and these are presented as a map. The results are different from those of Heikkinen and Hogmander and we offer an explanation in terms of the prior used for square-specific presence of the toads. We suggest that our approach is more faithful to the data and avoids unnecessary confounding of effects. We demonstrate how to extend our model efficiently with square-specific covariates and illustrate this by introducing deterministic spatial changes.