Cancer Screening Barriers for Community-based Older Hispanics and Caucasians

Despite advances in screening and early detection, ethnic minority populations, ages 65 and older, are less likely than Caucasians to participate in cancer screening services. Empirical research indicates that older ethnic minorities have cultural values that influence their behaviors. Addressing culturally relevant communication to better understand those values may increase participation in cancer screening. The study reported is a secondary analysis of qualitative data gathered from focus groups. Utilizing an interdisciplinary analytical lens, we compared older Hispanic and Caucasian's cultural values and their screening behaviors. Suggested psychosocial interventions are discussed to assist providers in their ongoing efforts to promote cancer screening.     

Mother‐to‐Child Transmission of HIV in China and the USA: A Comparative Analysis

This paper analyzes and compares the existing policies and programs for the prevention of mother‐to‐child transmission of HIV existing in China and in the USA. The implementation of these is still imperfect and there needs to be improvements in the education (the spreading of information) and in the general health care system of China. Particular attention will be drawn to the existing barriers to the effective implementation of prevention of mother‐to‐child‐transmission. The recommendations aim to solve similar barriers in both countries and some specifically dealing with problems in China. Since HIV infection in children is caused almost entirely by prenatal transmission, it is important that the governments, in partnership with civic society organizations, make all the necessary efforts to save the lives of their newborn citizens.     

Aligning supply chain collaboration using Analytic Hierarchy Process

The significance of collaboration among supply chain members has been sufficiently stressed in the recent literature as a powerful tool for increasing accuracy of demand forecasts and for consequent cost reductions. Since it has been recognized that naïve forecasting is no longer cost efficient, Supply Chain (SC) members have found it very important to exchange relevant information that will help improve accuracy of demand forecasting. This information differs widely in terms of their characteristics. For example, some information (e.g. historic sales data) that is cheap to exchange may not contribute to a great increase in forecast accuracy. Similarly, some information may not be very reliable (e.g. demand forecast by individual SC members). In general, there is a trade-off in the kind of information required and the kind of information exchanged. This study analyses these trade-offs using an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model. The model is then implemented based on case studies conducted in two manufacturing firms. The AHP model ranks available information in terms of their contributions to improve forecast accuracy, and can provide vital clues to SC partners for preparing exchangeable data. From the case studies using AHP model, it was proved that using the preferred SC data, the firms could enhance forecasts accuracy. This in turn can help the firms to make decisions on SC collaborative arrangements for information exchange.     

Collaboration experience in the supply chain of knowledge and patent development

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at understanding the role of collaboration experience in supply chains of knowledge (SCoK). The SCoK of a company is its supply chain not related to the flow of physical goods but to the flow of R&D commodities. R&D commodities are for example patents, technologies, research services, studies, and projects, and, in high-tech industries, their development and commercialisation are considered as important as real products. To accomplish our aim in this paper, we fulfil the following research objectives: (1) investigate the relationship between the collaboration experience in SCoK and the propensity of the firm to develop new patents; (2) examine how the structural embeddedness of the firm within its SCoK mediates this relationship. We ground our conceptual model on the supply chain, open innovation and social capital literatures and empirically test our hypotheses on a cross-sectional data-set of 208 biotech companies that have signed 612 SCoK agreements in the years 2006–2010. The key findings of this study are: first, accumulating experience in SCoK collaborations facilitates the development of new patents; second, being central and bridging structural holes within the SCoK are two means by which the experience in SCoK collaborations is translated into new patents.     

Learning About the Market’s Periphery: IBM’s WebFountain

The web can provide valuable information to an organisation on upcoming trends, competitors’ movements and customers’ gripes. More important, the information is within reach of every organisation. The problem is that there is so much of it. This paper describes how IBM set up and utilised WebFountain—a tool to help it extract trends and detect patterns from the vast amounts of raw data available. Still, the authors argue, any organisation needs to do more to use to its full potential such a system for extracting analytic solutions from the web: the most important being to ask the right questions in the first place.     

Economic design of quick switching sampling system for resubmitted lots

This paper proposes a quick switching sampling system for the inspection of attributes quality characteristics for resubmitted lots. The optimal parameters for both fraction non conforming items and fraction non conformities of the proposed sampling system are determined using an optimization procedure so that producer’s risk and consumer’s risk are simultaneously satisfied. Tables are also constructed for the selection of parameters for specified AQL and LQL. The advantage of the proposed plan over the existing plan is discussed and illustrate. An economic design of the proposed sampling system is also discussed and shown that the proposed sampling system has minimum total cost and average total inspection compared to other existing sampling plans.     

Childhood nutrition and later fertility: Pathways through education and pre-pregnant nutritional status

Better childhood nutrition is associated with earlier physical maturation during adolescence and increased schooling attainment. However, as earlier onset of puberty and increased schooling can have opposing effects on fertility, the net effect of improvements in childhood nutrition on a woman’s fertility are uncertain. Using path analysis, we estimate the strength of the pathways between childhood growth and subsequent fertility outcomes in Guatemalan women studied prospectively since birth. Height for age z score at 24 months was positively related to body mass index (BMI kg/m²) and height (cm) in adolescence and to schooling attainment. BMI was negatively associated (−0.23 ± 0.09 years per kg/m²; p < . 05) and schooling was positively associated (0.38 ± 0.06 years per grade; p < .001) with age at first birth. Total associations with the number of children born were positive from BMI (0.07 ± 0.02 per kg/m²; p < .05) and negative from schooling (−0.18 ± 0.02 per grade; p < .01). Height was not related to age at first birth or the number of children born. Taken together, childhood nutrition, as reflected by height at 2 years, was positively associated with delayed age at first birth and fewer children born. If schooling is available for girls, increased growth during childhood will most likely result in a net decrease infertility.     

Designing of a mixed-chain sampling plan based on the process capability index with chain sampling as the attributes plan

In this article, we propose a new mixed chain sampling plan based on the process capability index C_pk, where the quality characteristic of interest having double specification limits and follows the normal distribution with unknown mean and variance. In the proposed mixed plan, the chain sampling inspection plan is used for the inspection of attribute quality characteristics. The advantages of this proposed mixed sampling plan are also discussed. Tables are constructed to determine the optimal parameters for practical applications by formulating the problem as a non linear programming in which the objective function to be minimized is the average sample number and the constraints are related to lot acceptance probabilities at acceptable quality level and limiting quality level under the operating characteristic curve. The practical application of the proposed mixed sampling plan is explained with an illustrative example. Comparison of the proposed sampling plan is also made with other existing sampling plans.     

Optimal Designing of Variables Sampling Plan for Resubmitted Lots

This article proposes a variables sampling plan that can be applied for sampling inspection of resubmitted lots when the quality characteristic of interest follows the normal distribution. Resubmission of lots for inspection is allowed in some situations where the original inspection results are suspected or when the supplier or producer is allowed to opt for resampling as per the provisions of the contract, etc. The advantages of this proposed variables sampling plan over the existing single sampling variables plan are discussed. Tables are also constructed for the selection of optimal parameters of known and unknown standard deviation variables resampling scheme for specified two points on the operating characteristic curve, namely, the acceptable quality level and the limiting quality level along with the producer and consumer's risks. The optimization problem is formulated as a nonlinear programming where the objective function to be minimized is the average sample number and the constraints are related to lot acceptance probabilities at acceptable quality level and limiting quality level under the operating characteristic curve.