Preserving the Scholarly Collection: An Examination of the Perpetual Access Clauses in the Texas A&M University Libraries' Major E-Journal Licenses

Librarians are urged to lobby for the inclusion of perpetual access clauses during license negotiations and to examine existing contracts to ensure that perpetual access provisions are clearly understood and achievable. The authors analyzed the perpetual access clauses in nineteen of the Texas A&M University Libraries' licenses for electronic journal packages to determine the exact provisions granted, and found that the Libraries do not really know what access to previously subscribed content will entail. This raises profound concerns about the Libraries' ability to provide meaningful perpetual access to previously subscribed content to its users in the current environment.     

Parental Speech at 6 Months Predicts Joint Attention at 12 Months

In a prospective longitudinal study of a representative community sample (N = 264), mothers' references to infants' mental states were coded during a topic‐sharing task in the home at 6 months. Joint attention behaviour was assessed in the laboratory at 12 months. Individual joint attention skills (gaze following, gaze alternating, and declarative pointing) were significantly inter‐correlated, with a single factor accounting for 68% of the variance. Mothers' references to infants' mental states at 6 months predicted infants' joint attention at 12 months. The association was not explained by sociodemographic characteristics of the family, the mother's mental state, or by the quantity or acoustic properties of her speech. However, variability in pitch of maternal speech was an independent predictor of the infants' later joint attention skills. Taken together, these findings suggest that mothers' infant‐directed speech fosters infants' attentive participation in topic‐sharing interactions, which in turn provide an important arena in which joint attention skills develop over the first year of life.     

Bayesian design in queues: An application to aeronautic maintenance

We exploit Bayesian criteria for designing M/M/c//r$M/M/c//r$ queueing systems with spares. For illustration of our approach we use a real problem from aeronautic maintenance, where the numbers of repair crews and spare planes must be sufficiently large to meet the necessary operational capacity. Bayesian guarantees for this to happen can be given using predictive or posterior distributions.     

Energy Poverty and Low Carbon Just Energy Transition: Comparative Study in Lithuania and Greece

Social Indicators Research - EU has set ambitious commitment to achieve low carbon energy and economy transition up to 2050. This low carbon transition means sustainable energy development path...     

The Efficiency of the Italian Judicial System: A Two Stage Data Envelopment Analysis Approach

Social Indicators Research - During the last two decades there was great attention for improved performance in the public sector. We know how important a good judicial system is: it...     

GALILEO's CHILDREN: Italian Americans' Difficult Entry into the Intellectual Elite

We examine the possibility of ethnic exclusion by U.S. intellectual elites for the case of Italian Americans, a large, identifiable group that has assimilated into the mainstream during the last half century but is still the subject of demeaning stereotypes with wide currency. Membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellowship of nearly 4,000 members drawn from throughout the academic, scientific, and artistic worlds, is used as a window into processes of ethnic stratification among intellectuals and academics. The analysis establishes that Italian Americans are represented in the Academy at a level well below their percentage among college and university faculty. Their frequency of election has increased substantially in recent years, but we conclude that the evidence is consistent with continuing ethnic disadvantage.     

Organizational Alternatives for Companies' Management of Occupational Risks: The Examples of Spain and Argentina

This study discusses the various options available to companies for the management of occupational risks. In this context, occupational accident insurance schemes in Spain and Argentina are analysed, with reference to the theory of organizational economics. Spain has 75 years' experience of such schemes, while in Argentina they have only recently been introduced. Although the two models have similar goals, their differences, in terms of competition, regulation and ownership, lead to different incentives for those concerned: workers, companies, insurers and regulatory bodies.     

Vocational rehabilitation of sole mothers who receive income support benefit

This evaluative research is intended to follow up an experimental project, conducted in Israel, which aims to encourage sole mothers to work and to cease receiving public support, and to take upon themselves the responsibility of earning a living, by providing them with vocational training. To this end, an experimental group of 400 divorced and single mothers was randomly sampled from four local branches of the National Insurance Institute in the centre of the country and was invited to participate in vocational training. The research goal was to evaluate the sole mothers'willingness to participate in the training and the effect of their acquiring a vocation on their actual going to work and, as a consequence, ceasing to receive income support benefit. It was found that immediately following the vocational training, there was a significantly higher percentage of women from the experimental group who worked (63 per cent) than that from the control group (37 per cent). No significant difference was found in the percentage of women who were working two years later. Accordingly no significant difference was found in the percentage of women from both groups who continued to receive income support benefit at this time