伊朗的阿富汗政策及其走向

伊朗是阿富汗的西邻,在阿富汗有着重要影响力,尤其是在语言、宗教和文化等方面。从美国发动打击阿富汗“塔利班”政权的战争后至今,伊朗在阿富汗政治和经济重建、民族和解、打击毒品走私等方面都发挥着重要作用。伊朗反对美军在阿富汗长期存在。2014年后,国际安全援助部队将大部分撤出阿富汗。伊朗会继续推动阿富汗政治、社会稳定,防止“塔利班”东山再起,参与阿富汗经济重建,但其政策也会根据地区和国际形势变化进行调整。     

Families,meals and synchronicity: eating together in British dual earner families

Based on a sample of British dual earner families with young children drawn from the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, the paper examines their food practices, in particular the conditions under which families are able to eat together or not during the working week. The concept of synchronicity is drawn upon to shed light on whether meals and meal times are coordinated in family life and the facilitators and constraints upon coordination. The paper suggests that whether families eat together is not only influenced by parents' work time schedules but also children's timetables relating to their age and bodily tempos, their childcare regimes, their extra-curricular activities and the problem of coordinating different food preferences and tastes.     

试论十三世达赖喇嘛的西藏地方近代教育改革

19世纪末20世纪初,世界主要资本主义国家掀起了瓜分中国的狂潮,位于祖国西南边陲的西藏由于其战略位置的重要性,成为英、俄等帝国主义国家角逐的重要对象.西藏在1888、1904年的两次抗英斗争中均以失败告终,作为西藏地方政教领袖的十三世达赖喇嘛被迫两度出走.在两次出走内地和印度的过程中,他亲眼目睹了内地和英国在印度的近代化设施,再加之受"教育救国"思潮和张荫棠、联豫在西藏推行近代教育改革的影响,为改变西藏传统教育与现实社会发展不相适应的矛盾,巩固自己的统治,十三世达赖喇嘛在西藏地方推行近代教育改革,并取得了一定的成绩.     

Delay causes analysis in complex construction projects: a Semantic Network Analysis approach

Delays are among the most crucial adversaries to the success and performance of construction projects, making delay analysis and management a critical task for project managers. This task will be highly complicated in large-scale projects such as construction, which usually consist of a complex network of heterogeneous entities in continuous interaction. Traditional approaches and methods for the analysis of delays and their causes have been criticised for their ability to handle complex projects, and for considering the interrelationships between delay causes. Addressing this gap, this research introduces an alternative approach for delay causes analysis by adopting Semantic Network Analysis (SNA) method. The paper reports the results from an investigation of delays in construction projects in the Oil-Gas-Petrochemical sector using SNA. The method’s capacity to identify and rank delay causes, which can assist managers in selecting appropriate measures for eliminating them, are empirically examined and discussed. The paper argues that SNA leads to a more comprehensive understanding of the main causes of delay in large and complex projects, allowing a better identification and mapping of the interrelationships between these discrete factors.     

Children’s educational attainment,occupation, and income and their parents’ mortality

Using data from Finland, this paper contributes to a small but growing body of research regarding adult children's education, occupation, and income and their parents' mortality at ages 50+ in 1970–2007. Higher levels of children's education are associated with 30–36 per cent lower parental mortality at ages 50–75, controlling for parents' education, occupation, and income. This association is fully mediated by children's occupation and income, except for cancer mortality. Having at least one child educated in healthcare is associated with 11–16 per cent lower all-cause mortality at ages 50–75, an association that is largely driven by mortality from cardiovascular diseases. Children's higher white-collar occupation and higher income is associated with 39–46 per cent lower mortality in the fully adjusted models. At ages 75+, these associations are much smaller overall and children's schooling remains more strongly associated with mortality than children's occupation or income.     

Israel's military public diplomacy evolution: Historical and conceptual dimensions

This study provides an historical overview of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit (ISU) from the early years of the State of Israel until 2009. Analyzing five periods during which the ISU played a key role in Israel's public diplomacy, this research sheds light on the challenges the ISU faced in different periods and circumstances and examines how the ISU tried to modify its methods and actions in response to geopolitical changes and media development, albeit not always successfully. The study suggests better understanding the adaptation process by applying a three-layer framework for analysis: the tactical layer, the strategic layer and the perceptional layer. The findings of this work demonstrate that in adapting to new circumstances, the ISU focused mainly on the tactical response level, with the result that it did not undertake any review or debate over the need for deeper perceptional changes in ISU policies.     

The additive hazards model with high-dimensional regressors

This paper considers estimation and prediction in the Aalen additive hazards model in the case where the covariate vector is high-dimensional such as gene expression measurements. Some form of dimension reduction of the covariate space is needed to obtain useful statistical analyses. We study the partial least squares regression method. It turns out that it is naturally adapted to this setting via the so-called Krylov sequence. The resulting PLS estimator is shown to be consistent provided that the number of terms included is taken to be equal to the number of relevant components in the regression model. A standard PLS algorithm can also be constructed, but it turns out that the resulting predictor can only be related to the original covariates via time-dependent coefficients. The methods are applied to a breast cancer data set with gene expression recordings and to the well known primary biliary cirrhosis clinical data.     

一种新的右手定则替代佛莱铭左手及右手定则

大凡读过高中的人,都知道佛莱铭左手和右手定则,这种左、右定则很容易记错,有时要将手扭歪才能判定其方向,很难运用．为了方便学生记忆及方便判定方向,设法设计出一种新的右手定则,可以同时判定磁场对电流的作用力及磁场中导线所产生的感生电流的方向,显然这种右手定则是一个创新．     

Are Father’s or Mother’s Socioeconomic Characteristics More Important Influences on Student Performance? Recent International Evidence

Since the early 1970s the importance of mothers’ socioeconomic characteristics on their children’s educational and occupational attainment has been acknowledged. However, it is not clear if fathers’ characteristics have a stronger influence because men usually have stronger attachments to the labour market, or alternatively mothers’ characteristics are more important because of their greater role in children’s socialization. This study addresses this question by comparing the influence of father’s and mother’s education and occupation on student performance in literacy and numeracy using data from 30 countries. The impact of mother’s education is usually greater or comparable to that of father’s education. In contrast, substantially stronger effects for mother’s occupational status compared to father’s were rare. In most countries the impact of mother’s socioeconomic characteristics (education plus occupation) on student performance is comparable to that for father’s. Of the four indicators of socioeconomic background, father’s occupational status and mother’s educational attainment tend to have stronger effects, although many countries do not conform to this pattern. There are indications that the relative importance of mother’s characteristics have increased over time.

Demography and housing demand—what can we learn from residential construction data?

There are obvious reasons why residential construction should depend on the population’s age structure. We estimate this relation on Swedish time series data and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development panel data. Large groups of young adults are associated with higher rates of residential construction, but there is also a significant negative effect from those above 75. Age effects on residential investment are robust and forecast well out-of-sample in contrast to the corresponding house price results. This may explain why the debate around house prices and demography has been rather inconclusive. Rapidly aging populations in the industrialized world makes the future look bleak for the construction industry.