Unaddressed problems and research perspectives in scheduling blood collection from donors

Many optimisation problems arise in managing the Blood Donation (BD) supply chain. Most of them have been addressed in the literature, while other problems, e.g. donation scheduling, have not been sufficiently addressed so far. However, blood collection from donors may have a disruptive impact on the entire BD supply chain if not properly managed. For example, scheduling donation appointments based on some system metrics may improve the flow of blood units through the BD supply chain and increase the quality of service perceived by donors. In this short communication, we present the donation scheduling problem and highlight the lack of work in the literature that deals with this problem. Then, we analyse the impact of an unbalanced flow of blood units on the BD system and the benefits that may derive from a suitable appointment scheduling. Finally, we propose suggestions for future research in BD collection scheduling that may improve the BD process.     

国际人类学与民族学联合会都市人类学委员会简介

都市人类学委员会(Commission on Urban Anthropology,简称 CUA)在1983年于温哥华召开的第11届国际人类学与民族学大会(International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences,简称ICAES)上正式成立.CUA的成立是人们长久以来所认识到的"将涉足都市研究并激发了这一领域的进一步研究的国际学者聚集到一起"的需要的成功结果.自正式创建以来,委员会的主要目标是:(1)组织学术会议与研讨会;(2)建设一个国际网络,以促进世界范围内的都市人类学合作.     

Empirical Analyses of Causal Relationships among Estimated Aggregate Unemployment Duration and Some Properly Chosen Economic Variables

ABSTRACT: The paper is concerned with estimating and analysing the duration of unemployment, that is the length of time people spend on average looking for work. The first issue of the paper is to estimate unemployment duration using data from the survey on labour force done quarterly in Italy by ISTAT, the National Institute of Statistics. The survey data on the duration of unemployment measure duration so far, that is the average length of unemployment spells in progress up to the date of the survey, but they don't provide any information about completed duration of unemployment experimented by people before finding a job or leaving the labour force. In order to estimate the average length of completed unemployment spells, we would have to use data on cohorts of people followed from the time of entry to the time of exit from the labour market. As longitudinal data is not available, the problem becomes rather complex. One way to get round this is to use data on flows to firstly estimate probabilities of leaving unemployment within a particular period. The available data refer to quarterly flows and yearly flows. This makes it possible to estimate short-term unemployment (less than six months) and long-term unemployment (more than twelve months). In another paper we have analysed the nature of the bias introduced by estimating short-term and long-term unemployment in the way we do, and we have come to the conclusion that the bias is approximately a constant, which can be very easily estimated and eliminated. The second issue of the paper is to analyse the estimated short-term and long-term unemployment in relation to cyclical changes in the economic system and with trend changes in the number of unemployed people seeking the first job. In particular, we want to establish the extent of causal relationships between the chosen explanatory variables and the dependent variable. These causal analyses are done separately for the male and female population, and cover the period from the first quarter of 1979 to the last quarter of 1986.     

Identifying the Quality of Work by Fuzzy Sets Theory: A Comparison Between Disabled and Non-disabled Workers

The paper assesses the quality of work of people with and without disabilities in Italy using the ISFOL PLUS (Participation, Labour, Unemployment, Survey 2010 Questionnaire, where the data refer to 2009. In particular, we develop a multidimensional indicator of quality of work within the fuzzy set theory. The results of the investigation show a different mechanism of determinants of quality of work for disabled and non-disabled people: while for these last ones seniority seem to highly contribute to the score of quality of work, institutional factors, like Law 68/99, whose aim is the regulation and promotion of the employment of persons with disabilities, appear to play a bigger role in the determination of the score for quality of work for disabled people. For medium and high levels of score of quality of work, education appears to play a similar role for disabled and non-disabled people, as the incidence of people with high quality jobs corresponds to people with a high level of education. However, for disabled people who are in low quality jobs the level of education appears to be irrelevant. Substantial differences emerge with respect to gender among disabled people, where women appear to be in higher quality of work scores than men; no substantial difference between genders emerges for non-disabled people.     

Students’ narratives of the future: Imagined mobilities as forms of youth agency?

In the context of the ‘iFuture’ research project, 341 18-year-old Sardinian students were asked to write an essay in which they imagined themselves at 90 and described what their futures (in the past) would look like. Such data allow us to investigate the notion of agency. Agency and the future are deeply intertwined: agency involves the idea of projection and implies anticipation; the ‘desired’ futures have an impact on the ways in which youth act in the world today. We focus on the analysis of one of the emerging findings, which expresses an interesting configuration of youth agency, namely the imagination of youth mobility. This finding expresses the desire to put some projects into place, yet it concurrently implies that youth believe that these projects are impossible to achieve in the current context. After offering an overview of imagined destinations, we identify two ways in which imagined mobility emerges from the rich material collected: (a) mobility as an entry ticket, to bypass the uncertainty associated with crude reality and (b) mobility as an occasion for self-experimentation and self-growth. We conclude by discussing in what ways these forms of imagined future mobilities may be seen as youth agency.     

Knowledge Sharing is Power

Nowadays we can talk about a “Knowledge Revolution” because managing of information plays a crucial role in our society, both in public and private sphere. After a brief introduction—aimed at underling the main points we will debate on—the first part of the article focus on Knowledge Management techniques and knowledge-based government (k-Government) and the great potential in respect to the public sector transformation. The second part takes into account the social dimension of knowledge managing and the ethical relevance that social networking is progressively acquiring. After that, we have chosen to focus on global warming, indeed, the last session is a detailed analysis of a real case study related to China’s energy security. In the end, a wise use of Knowledge resources, trough the comparison with past experiences, turn out to be the powerful device that will let us provide some useful suggestion for a significant public action.

Intermezzo: play trajectories in mixed reality worlds

Abstract

Drawing on the work of Steve Benford, Gabriella Giannachi, Oliver Grau and Mark Hansen, this article explores the paradigms of mixed reality worlds in order to try to establish how aesthetic illusion is negotiated in the shift from a culture of representation in which art is formed by a fixed gaze and perspective which audiences interpret privately, to a culture of participation that offers audiences multiple opportunities for interaction with the work and each other. This analysis is important because it investigates the interfaces between real and virtual through an analysis of convergence culture and play. It will be argued that the work of Blast Theory and 1927 demonstrate how the development of digital and mobile technology has revived contemporary cultural interest in play as a dynamic that allows societies and communities to communicate and connect, evaluating their realities and imagining new ones, especially through a re-imagined positioning of the body. In this sense, play has become a practice strongly related to processes of social and cultural innovation.     

SNARES IN FAMILY THERAPY

Telephone calls after therapy sessions, concurrent individual treatment of family members, the offer of secret revelations, and the use of psychoactive drugs all involve issues and events that can be insidious to effective family therapy. Various tactics are presented which not only succeed in controlling these incidents, but which also use them as important occasions for therapeutic intervention within the model of family therapy developed by Selvini Palazzoli and her colleagues in Milan.