Bayesian acceptance sampling plans following economic criteria: An application to paper pulp manufacturing

The main purposes of this paper are to derive Bayesian acceptance sampling plans regarding the number of defects per unit of product, and to illustrate how to apply the methodology to the paper pulp industry. The sampling plans are obtained following an economic criterion: minimize the expected total cost of quality. It has been assumed that the number of defects per unit of product follows a Poisson distribution with process average 5 , whose prior information is described either for a gamma or for a non- informative distribution. The expected total cost of quality is composed of three independent components: inspection, acceptance and rejection. Both quadratic and step-loss functions have been used to quantify the cost incurred for the acceptance of a lot containing units with defects. Combining the prior information on 5 with the loss functions, four different sampling plans are obtained. When the quadratic-loss function is used, an analytical relation between the optimum settings of the sample size and the acceptance number is derived. The robustness analysis indicates that the sampling plans obtained are robust with respect to the prior distribution of the process average as well as to the misspecification of its mean and variance.     

A global energy network? The expansion and integration of non‐triad national oil companies

It is widely perceived that the rising influence of state‐owned energy companies from outside the traditional triad (USA, EU, Japan) is transforming the structure of the global energy market and generating a new wave of resource‐nationalism. There is, however, little empirical analysis of how this process has unfolded. Addressing this empirical gap, in this article I employ a longitudinal social network analysis of the changing corporate relations of five major non‐triad state‐owned energy companies in the period 1997–2007. The findings indicate that, in terms of corporate relations, alongside the global expansion of the non‐triad state‐owned energy companies, there was also an increased integration between them and the private energy companies during this decade. This implies that apart from the resurgence of resource‐nationalism – frequently highlighted in academia and politics – this period also witnessed an increasing transnationalization of the global energy market.     

Political discontent in new democracies: the case of Brazil and Latin America

Political changes related to globalization apparently produce similar effects on old and new democracies. All over the world, comparative research on democratization has showed that political distrust is a common variable affecting the whole of the State and the relationship between citizens and democracy. Nevertheless, political discontent in old democracies has stimulated citizens to adopt new attitudes and modes of political participation, while in newly democratized countries citizens tend to withdraw from politics as a consequence of institutional distrust. In fact, in many new democracies, although adhering to the normative meaning of the democratic regime, distrust of democratic institutions is associated to citizens’ negative feeling about political efficacy, low levels of political interest and political participation, and also preference for democratic models which exclude political parties and/or parliaments. This paper evaluates the meanings and consequences of the contemporary phenomenon of political discontent in Brazil and Latin America and discusses its implications for democratic theory.     

Assessing Changes Over Time in Inequality of Opportunity: The Case of Spain

The aim of this paper is to contribute both theoretically and empirically to the analysis of Inequality of Opportunity over time, providing some significant findings referred to the Spanish case. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporate a wide variety of personal harmonised variables, allowing comparability with other countries. The availability of this database for the period 2004 and 2010 is particularly relevant for assessing changes over time in the main inequality indices and the contribution of circumstances to inequality of opportunity. We find that the effect of circumstances on income distribution has significantly intensified between the two years. To test the significance of the differences between years we perform bootstrap estimations.     

A Ecological Model of Well-Being in Child Welfare Referred Children

Despite its social, political and economic relevance, child well-being remains a challenging construct to define and measure accurately. This holds true especially for children growing up in at-risk families, where their development is hindered by many adverse circumstances. Typically, the well-being of child welfare (CW) referred children has been conceptualized as the absence of negative outcomes, and the study of its determinants has been limited to children’s micro-systems. In this study, we aimed to obtain a suitable indicator of child well-being and to test a model of the determinants of CW referred children’s well-being including parental, family and wider contextual variables. The sample included 249 parents and 46 case managers from Portuguese and Spanish CW services. A three-domain solution from selected items of the Child Well-Being Scales (Physical, Academic and Socioemotional) was tested and confirmed through Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The results of structural equation modeling for each domain revealed that risk factors nested in the wider context and those related to material disadvantage were the most powerful predictors of physical well-being, while parenting and family functioning variables predicted better both academic and socio-emotional well-being. Our findings suggest that different risk and protective factors matter for different outcomes and that most of these factors are associated with each other. Therefore, interventions with at-risk children must take this specificity into account when targeting each domain of well-being, and efforts could be allocated to a few modifiable dimensions, which would in turn positively affect other parental and family factors.     

Construction and Evolution of a Multidimensional Well-Being Index for the Spanish Regions

The study presented here is an attempt to calculate a comparative multidimensional index of economic well-being for the Spanish Autonomous Communities. Based on the dimensions of adjusted consumption, real wealth, equity and economic security per inhabitant, we obtain one relative index using a system of uniform weightings, a second resulting from a factor analysis and a third provided by a DEA analysis. We elaborate the index for the year 2000 and for 2006, thereby providing the relative results with greater robustness and permitting some conclusions to be reached with regard to the evolution over time of the index.     

Undocuqueer Stress: How Safe are “Safe” Spaces,and for Whom?

ABSTRACT

Exploring the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and immigration status, this study explored the concept of minority stress among 31 Latinx undocuqueer immigrants within the context of LGBTQ “safe” spaces. For participants, LGBTQ nightclubs and relationships represented important physical and symbolic spaces where they were able to understand what it meant to be undocuqueer. Participants described experiences of fear, anxiety, and rejection as they attempted to enter and exist within spaces presumably “safe” for LGBTQ people. The cumulative effect of feeling unsafe led participants to avoid certain spaces and inhibited their capacity to engage in relationships authentically. This study raises implications for research and policy related to serving LGBTQ and immigrant communities.     

Goodness‐of‐Fit Tests for Bivariate and Multivariate Skew‐Normal Distributions

Abstract. Goodness‐of‐fit tests are proposed for the skew‐normal law in arbitrary dimension. In the bivariate case the proposed tests utilize the fact that the moment‐generating function of the skew‐normal variable is quite simple and satisfies a partial differential equation of the first order. This differential equation is estimated from the sample and the test statistic is constructed as an L ₂ ‐type distance measure incorporating this estimate. Extension of the procedure to dimension greater than two is suggested whereas an effective bootstrap procedure is used to study the behaviour of the new method with real and simulated data.     

Bias Correction in the Type I Generalized Logistic Distribution

Four strategies for bias correction of the maximum likelihood estimator of the parameters in the Type I generalized logistic distribution are studied. First, we consider an analytic bias-corrected estimator, which is obtained by deriving an analytic expression for the bias to order n ^?1; second, a method based on modifying the likelihood equations; third, we consider the jackknife bias-corrected estimator; and fourth, we consider two bootstrap bias-corrected estimators. All bias correction estimators are compared by simulation. Finally, an example with a real data set is also presented.