Evaluation of two school-based HIV prevention interventions in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico

This research project examined the individual and combined effectiveness of an HIV prevention workshop and a free condom distribution program in four high schools in Tijuana, Mexico. Adolescents (N = 320) completed baseline measures on sexual practices and theoretical correlates and participated in a two-part study. In Study 1, students were randomly assigned to an HIV prevention workshop or a control condition, with a 3-month follow-up assessment. Results indicate three significant workshop benefits regarding HIV transmission by altering sexual initiation, access to condoms, and traditional beliefs regarding condoms. In Study 2, we set up a condom distribution program at two of the participating schools, and students completed a 6-month follow-up assessment. Results indicate that exposure to the workshop followed by access to the condom distribution program yielded two beneficial results for reducing HIV transmission: moderating sexual initiation and increasing condom acquisition. Access to the condom distribution program alone had no effects on behavioral and psychosocial correlates of HIV transmission. We discuss implications of these results.     

Digital natives and social media

Digital natives (also known as “Generation Y” and “Millennials”), a generation born during of after introduction of digital technologies, 1980s and after, have mixed preferences for media use in personal and professional lives. A study by Friedl and Tkalac Ver?i? (2011) showed that even though digital natives prefer digital media in their personal lives, this is not necessarily reflected in their business lives. This study addressing preferences of “traditional” vs. “the new media” in a university setting found an opposite result.     

Supporting the allocation of software development work in distributed teams with multi-criteria decision analysis

In the fast moving software industry, projects have been increasingly developed by distributed teams, which are located in geographically remote offices and collaborate using information communication technologies. In such environments, project distribution presents specific challenges, as work in distributed teams increases project technical complexity, communication lines multiply and stakeholders’ interests may be divergent. Despite the importance and complexity of this type of problem, it seems that there is a lack of reports, in the literature, of systems that could support these decisions. This paper presents a real-world case study, where we developed a multi-criteria model for supporting the distributed team work allocation decision for a major global software company. It was developed with a group of software development project managers, using decision conferencing and multi-attribute value analysis. The model deals not only with software engineering attributes, but also “soft” and strategic issues, like team satisfaction and training opportunities. We also discuss some issues and challenges faced during this modelling process.     

A Spatial-temporal Model for Temperature with Seasonal Variance

We propose a spatial-temporal stochastic model for daily average surface temperature data. First, we build a model for a single spatial location, independently on the spatial information. The model includes trend, seasonality, and mean reversion, together with a seasonally dependent variance of the residuals. The spatial dependency is modelled by a Gaussian random field. Empirical fitting to data collected in 16 measurement stations in Lithuania over more than 40 years shows that our model captures the seasonality in the autocorrelation of the squared residuals, a property of temperature data already observed by other authors. We demonstrate through examples that our spatial-temporal model is applicable for prediction and classification.     

Child care outcomes: economic perspectives and issues

Economics starts with the observation of widespread scarcity and the consequent need for choices about resource allocation. Common criteria for such choices are economy, effectiveness, efficiency and equity. This paper defines these criteria and locates them within a conceptual framework (the ‘production of welfare’). It also examines some of the reasons for the growth in interest in them. The main modes of evaluation—cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility and cost-consequences analyses—are described and illustrated. Few such evaluations have been conducted in child care, and the paper ends with speculation as to why this is so.     

World Culture,Uncoupling, Institutional Logics,and Recoupling: Practices and Self‐Identification as Institutional Microfoundations of Political Violence

This study proposes a micro‐institutional theory of political violence, according to which citizens' participation in political violence is partially an outcome of tight coupling of persons' practices and self‐identifications with institutional logics opposed to dominant logics associated with world culture, such as the nation‐state and gender equality. The study focuses on two types of institutional carriers through which persons adopt institutional logics: routine practices and self‐identifications associated with three institutional logics: the familial, the ethnic, and the religious logics. Using a 15‐country survey data from early twenty‐first‐century sub‐Saharan Africa, the study finds evidence in support of the theory. Reported participation in political violence is associated with practices and self‐identifications uncoupled from dominant world‐culture logics but tightly coupled with the patriarchal familial logic, with an oppositional ethnic logic, and with a politicized oppositional religious logic.     

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEBT LEVEL AND FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY IN ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT COUNTRIES

In this article we unify the traditional approaches to testing for fiscal sustainability considering the stock‐flow system that fiscal variables configure. Our approach encompasses previous ways of testing for sustainability. The results obtained for a group of 17 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries point to weak fiscal sustainability, as well as to the existence of cointegration between deficit and debt, confirming the relevance of the stock‐flow approach. Allowing for structural breaks and multicointegration turns out to be of critical importance to assess whether the fiscal authorities apply their policies looking for sustainability and whether, simultaneously, they try to stabilize real debt target levels. (JEL H62, E62, C22)     

Goodness-of-fit tests for Pareto distribution based on a characterization and their asymptotics

In this paper we present a new characterization of the Pareto distribution and consider goodness-of-fit tests based on it. We provide an integral and Kolmogorov–Smirnov-type statistics based on U-statistics and we calculate Bahadur efficiency for various alternatives. We find locally optimal alternatives for those tests. For small sample sizes, we compare the power of those tests with some common goodness-of-fit tests.