The specification of personalised insoles using additive manufacturing

Research has been conducted to explore a process that delivers insoles for personalised footwear for the high street using additive manufacturing (AM) and to evaluate the use of such insoles in terms of discomfort. Therefore, the footwear personalisation process was first identified: (1) foot capture; (2) anthropometric measurements; (3) insole design; and (4) additive manufacturing. In order to explore and evaluate this process, recreational runners were recruited. They had both feet scanned and 15 anthropometric measurements taken. Personalised insoles were designed from the scans and manufactured using AM. Participants were fitted with footwear under two experimental conditions: personalised and control, which were compared in terms of discomfort. The mean ratings for discomfort variables were generally low for both conditions and no significant differences were detected between conditions. In general, the personalisation process showed promise in terms of the scan data, although the foot capture position may not be considered 'gold standard'. Polyamide, the material used for the insoles, demonstrated positive attributes: visual inspection revealed no signs of breaking. The footwear personalisation process described and explored in this study shows potential and can be considered a good starting point for designer and researchers.     

State of the (net)work address Developing criteria for applying social networking to the work environment

In an increasingly faster paced innovative world, maintaining the ability to innovate in spite of an aging work force will become every company's strongest leverage for success. Tapping the latent knowledge resources and creativity of overlooked employees and persisting crucial information for business conduct are promising results for social networking sites (SNS) in a working context. Usability and usefulness are exponential factors in creating a successful SNS. In order to make a SNS usable for a heterogeneous user group, analyses of user diversity in regard to social media need to be done. Furthermore differences in communication medium and frequency in regard to age, content, hierarchy position, departmental thresholds and company size need to be analyzed. For analysis purposes both qualitative and quantitative research methods were applied. Strong effects of age and communication content were found in survey with 194 participants.     

Some notes on poisson limits for empirical point processes

The authors define the scaled empirical point process. They obtain the weak limit of these point processes through a novel use of a dimension‐free method based on the convergence of compensators of multiparameter martingales. The method extends previous results in several directions. They obtain limits at points where the density may be zero, but has regular variation. The joint limit of the empirical process evaluated at distinct points is given by independent Poisson processes. They provide applications both to nearest‐neighbour density estimation in high dimensions, and to the asymptotic behaviour of multivariate extremes such as those arising from bivariate normal copulas. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 37: 347–360; 2009 © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

Mother’s,Household, and Community U.S. Migration Experience and Infant Mortality in Rural and Urban Mexico

This study explores rural and urban differences in the relationship between U.S. migration experience measured at the individual, household, and community levels and individual-level infant mortality outcomes in a national sample of recent births in Mexico. Using 2000 Mexican Census data and multi-level regression models, we find that women’s own U.S. migration experience is associated with lower odds of infant mortality in both rural and urban Mexico, possibly reflecting a process of healthy migrant selectivity. Household migration has mixed blessings for infant health in rural places: remittances are beneficial for infant survival, but recent out-migration is disruptive. Recent community-level migration experience is not significantly associated with infant mortality overall, although in rural places, there is some evidence that higher levels of community migration are associated with lower infant mortality. Household- and community-level migration have no relationship with infant mortality in urban places. Thus, international migration is associated with infant outcomes in Mexico in fairly complex ways, and the relationships are expressed most profoundly in rural areas of Mexico.

Heart Trouble and Racial Group Identity: Exploring Ethnic Heterogeneity Among Black Americans

Heart disease is the leading cause of death among men and women in the United States, and compared to other racial and ethnic groups, Blacks between the ages of 45 and 65 have the highest likelihood of dying from heart disease. Nevertheless, relatively little is known about intragroup variation among the US Black population. In this study, utilizing a nationally representative sample of Black Americans, we examine the relationship between heart trouble and racial group identity for two groups of Blacks: African Americans and Caribbean Blacks. We include two measures of racial group identity: closeness to other Blacks and Black group evaluation. Our results reveal three important patterns. First, closeness to other Blacks is suppressed by Black group evaluation. Second, at low levels of closeness to other Blacks, there is little difference between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the probability of heart trouble. However, as closeness to other Blacks increases, the probability of heart trouble increases for African Americans, but decreases for Caribbean Blacks. Finally, with respect to positive Black group evaluation, both African Americans and Caribbean Blacks benefit and experience a lower probability of heart trouble.     

Selection of Logistic Service Providers for the transportation of refrigerated goods

The aim of this article is to propose a decision model based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for the evaluation and selection of Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) for a refrigerated products company. The results indicated that quality, responsiveness and reliability are the most important criteria for selecting an LSP for the transportation of perishable refrigerated goods, considering contractor’s profile, which is based on protection of its brand and reputation in the market. In addition, sensitivity analysis is performed to verify priority ranking stability. Therefore, this research illustrates how AHP model could be implemented to help the decision-making process for selecting third-party services in logistics for perishable refrigerated goods effectively.     

Divorce and the duality of marital payoff

Empirical studies on the determinants of divorce are scarce in economics. The literature has focused on the impact of income differentials between partners. We extend the model of marital dissolution to integrate time-varying non-pecuniary quality of the match. We use a unique Russian dataset to measure shocks to the non-economic components of the value of marriage. Our estimates suggest that the monetary and non-monetary components enter additively into marriage surplus, but with gender-specific marginal rates of substitution: divorce hazard is more sensitive to the non-pecuniary dissatisfaction of the wife than to that of the husband; impacts of the monetary components are also gender-specific and highly non-linear. We link these findings to remarriage prospects and partial risk sharing.     

On exact strong laws of large numbers for ratios of random variables and their applications

Abstract

We study the almost sure convergence of weighted sums of ratios of independent random variables satisfying some general, mild conditions. The obtained results are applied to exact laws for order statistics. An exact law for independent random variables which are nonidentically distributed is also proved and applied to ratios of adjacent order statistics for a sample of uniformly distributed random variables.