“A La Recherche Du” Quality of Life

This essay examines the stages of inquiry when we seek to formulate quality of life in an era before our own. There arises the question of the extent to which today’s formulation of quality of life can be applied to an era far removed from our own. Implicitly, there is the nature of the time interval, T₁···T_n, and the causal significance of intervening events. Data of a numerical sort can be hard to retrieve due to fires, wars, and mishandling. Quantitative data can be found in censuses and military records. Information in its raw form is referred to here as protodata. Figure 1 provides a schematic overview of the search for quality of life by subjective and objective modes of inquiry.     

INSIGHTS ON SERVICE SYSTEM DESIGN FROM A NORMAL APPROXIMATION TO ERLANG'S DELAY FORMULA

We show how a simple normal approximation to Erlang's delay formula can be used to analyze capacity and staffing problems in service systems that can be modeled as M/M/s queues. The numbers of servers, s, needed in an M/M/s queueing system to assure a probability of delay of, at most, p can be well approximated by s ≅ p + z_***I-p+, where z_1-p, is the (1 - p)th percentile of the standard normal distribution and ρ, the presented load on the system, is the ratio of Λ, the customer arrival rate, to μ, the service rate. We examine the accuracy of this approximation over a set of parameters typical of service operations ranging from police patrol, through telemarketing to automatic teller machines, and we demonstrate that it tends to slightly underestimate the number of servers actually needed to hit the delay probability target—adding one server to the number suggested by the above formula typically gives the exact result. More importantly, the structure of the approximation promotes operational insight by explicitly linking the number of servers with server utilization and the customer service level. Using a scenario based on an actual teleservicing operation, we show how operations managers and designers can quickly obtain insights about the trade-offs between system size, system utilization and customer service. We argue that this little used approach deserves a prominent role in the operations analyst's and operations manager's toolbags.     

The Rise of Supermarkets in Africa: Implications for Agrifood Systems and the Rural Poor

The rise of supermarkets in Africa since the mid‐1990s is transforming the food retail sector. Supermarkets have spread fast in Southern and Eastern Africa, already proliferating beyond middle‐class big‐city markets into smaller towns and poorer areas. Supplying supermarkets presents both potentially large opportunities and big challenges for producers. Supermarkets' procurement systems involve purchase consolidation, a shift to specialised wholesalers, and tough quality and safety standards. To meet these requirements, producers have to make investments and adopt new practices. This is hardest for small producers, who risk exclusion from dynamic urban markets increasingly dominated by supermarkets. There is thus an urgent need for development programmes and policies to assist them in adopting the new practices that these procurement systems demand.     

The origin of semilingualism: Nils-Erik Hansegård and the cult of the mother tongue

‘Semilingualism’ is one of the most questionable theories produced in the language sciences. Yet, little is known about its origins. We present a critical account of the history of semilingualism, tracing its roots in the work of Nils Erik Hansegård, (1918–2002), inaugural chair of Sámi at Umeå University (1975–1979), who developed a theory of semilingualism (halvspråkighet) in the 1960s. We show how Hansegård theorized semilingualism using ideas from Nazi German linguistics, producing an unforgiving theory of linguistic pathology directed at minoritized bilinguals in Sweden's far north.     

What motivates adolescent bystanders to intervene when immigrant youth are bullied?

Pathways to bystander responses were examined in both generalized and bias-based bullying incidents involving immigrant-origin victims. Participants were 168 (M_age = 14.54, 57% female) adolescents of immigrant (37.5%) and nonimmigrant backgrounds, who responded to their likelihood of intervening on behalf of either an Arab or Latine victim. Models tested whether contact with immigrants and one's desires for social contact with immigrant-origin peers mediated the effects of individual (shared immigrant background, and discriminatory tendencies) and situational (inclusive peer norms) intergroup factors on active bystander responses. Findings indicated that desires for social contact reliably mediated effects across both victims; however, contact with immigrant peers was only associated with responses to Latine victims. Implications for how to promote bystander intervention are discussed.     

Dimensions of Identity Development Scale: Confirmatory factor analysis,gender invariance,and external validity of the Persian version

The present study was conducted to examine the psychometric properties and gender invariance of the Iranian version of the Dimensions of Identity Development Scale (DIDS). A total of 1453 adolescents (50.8% female; 14–18 years old, mean = 15.48) participated in a cross-sectional study and completed the DIDS and the Youth Self-Report of behavior problems. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis supported the six-factor model of the DIDS, echoing past studies showing the original 5th factor (Exploration in Depth) being divided into Exploration in Depth and Reconsidering the Commitment. The invariance testing showed comparable measurement properties of the DIDS across males and females (strict measurement invariance). Further, behavior problems were associated positively with Ruminative Exploration and negatively with Commitment Making, Identification with Commitments, Exploration in Depth, and Reconsideration of Commitments, whereas the opposite was true for academic performance. A six-factor DIDS was shown to be a valid and reliable measure for the assessment of identity development dimensions among Iranian adolescents. Future studies in the Iranian context evaluating the identity clusters derived from identity dimensions and their gender differences are warranted.     

Moderating Effects of School Ethnic Composition of Acculturative Stress and Academic Outcomes in Latinx Youth

Acculturative stress has demonstrated significant negative relationships with Latinx students' academic outcomes. Framed through interpersonal contact theory, we examined the moderating roles of school ethnic representation (proportion of same-ethnic peers) and school ethnic diversity (proportion of different ethnic groups in student body) in the relationship between acculturative stress and both academic self-efficacy and school belonging. A sample of 190 Latinx youth (14–18 years old) completed measures of acculturative stress and school functioning, and they provided the name and location of their high school to facilitate calculation of school ethnic composition. Both ethnic representation and ethnic diversity moderated relationships between English Competency Pressure (ECP), a specific form of acculturative stress, and academic-self efficacy. School ethnic diversity also interacted with ECP to predict school belonging. Negative relationships between ECP and academic self-efficacy or school belonging only emerged for students in schools with very low ethnic diversity. In contrast, ECP was significantly negatively related to academic self-efficacy only for students in schools with the highest ethnic representation. These findings add complexity to the discussion of how school context matters for Latinx students' academic performance.     

The geometry of Gaussian double Markovian distributions

Gaussian double Markovian models consist of covariance matrices constrained by a pair of graphs specifying zeros simultaneously in the matrix and its inverse. We study the semi-algebraic geometry of these models, in particular their dimension, smoothness, and connectedness as well as algebraic and combinatorial properties.     

Remove unwanted variation retrieves unknown experimental designs

Remove unwanted variation (RUV) is an estimation and normalization system in which the underlying correlation structure of a multivariate dataset is estimated from negative control measurements, typically gene expression values, which are assumed to stay constant across experimental conditions. In this paper we derive the weight matrix which is estimated and incorporated into the generalized least squares estimates of RUV-inverse, and show that this weight matrix estimates the average covariance matrix across negative control measurements. RUV-inverse can thus be viewed as an estimation method adjusting for an unknown experimental design. We show that for a balanced incomplete block design (BIBD), RUV-inverse recovers intra- and interblock estimates of the relevant parameters and combines them as a weighted sum just like the best linear unbiased estimator (BLUE), except that the weights are globally estimated from the negative control measurements instead of being individually optimized to each measurement as in the classical, single measurement BIBD BLUE.     

Female executives and the glass ceiling in Spain

This paper examines the findings of a survey of the personal, educational and professional profiles of a sample of male and female senior executives of companies operating in Spain. The women were found to be younger; they had fewer children, resorted to more domestic help, and earned less than the men, although they often had higher qualifications. Yet cultural patterns and institutional barriers still prevent them from making full use of their capabilities. In spite of recent legislative efforts to promote gender equity at work, more than nine out of ten senior executives are still men.