Are they Surgeons? or are they Plumbers? Assessing the Role of Private Sector Consultants in Place Branding and Other Place-Based Economic Development Strategies

Public Organization Review - This study takes an in-depth look at the roles and utility of consultants in local economic development, focusing on whether there is ultimately a need for this...     

Echoes of the baby boom and bust: Recent and prospective changes in living alone among elderly widows in the united states

Today the great majority of noninstitutionalized elderly widows live alone, a striking increase from a quarter-century ago. A noticeable difference has occurred, however, in trends by age; the proportion of the young-old widows living alone is starting to decline. while that of the old-old continues to increase. We use a model suggested by earlier studies to explain the emergence of this difference, and assess the prospects of its continuing over the next three decades. We find that the recent differential change in the proportions of younger and older widows living alone is due primarily to a differential change in kin availability that has emerged as the baby boomers’ parents have begun to reach retirement age. Over the next decade, the same type of differential change by age in kin availability will continue; living alone is likely to become less common among young-old than among old-old widows, in a reversal of the pattern of the last quarter-century. In the first two decades of the next century, as the baby boom affects kin availability among the old-old, and as the subsequent baby bust affects that among the young-old, the age pattern of living arrangements among elderly widows will reverse once again.     

Mindfulness and Subjective Well-being in the Sustainability Movement: A Further Elaboration of Multiple Discrepancies Theory

In a previous interpretation of multiple discrepancies theory (MDT), the authors operationalized mutiple discrepancies as gaps between respondents' values and their performance. Using a sample of back-to-the-landers from the larger sustainability movement, the first-stage of the data analysis (Jacob and Brinkerhoff, 1997) confirmed that multiple discrepancies between values and do have a significant impact on subjective well-being (SWB), but this initial analysis also demonstrated that there are intervening variables that can act as compensating factors to attenuate the influence of multiple discrepancies on SWB. In this, the second-stage of data analysis, the authors identify and further explore the interaction of phenomena that might serve as compensation variables in respondents' calculus of their SWB. The present study identifies two salient compensating factors: mindfulness (a calm, yet focused, engagement with the present, similar to a meditative experience), and a sense of an absence of time constraints. Operationalized as Mindfulness and Time for Self scales, these two interrelated variables explain, in multiple regression equations, the major share of variation in multiple measures of SWB. Nevertheless, the multiple discrepancies between values and performance are still significant, if secondary, factors in explaining variance in SWB for the sample of back-to-the- landers.     

Refugees: On the Economics of Political Migration

Unless literally forced to leave, prospective refugees have a choice between staying and flight, subject to constraints, particularly the willingness of a country to grant asylum. Although all options may be unpleasant, they nonetheless represent alternatives amenable to economic analysis. The incentive to flee is a function of threat severity and credibility, and the attractiveness of available safe havens. The theoretical analysis suggests that restrictive asylum policies have little impact on demand for asylum, except in the interplay with other factors, such as costs of flight and retribution against unsuccessful refugees. While the case of bogus refugees has received much attention in the popular literature, this article shows that threatened individuals may choose emigration instead of flight if there are repercussions associated with refugee status. The article also analyzes the case of bogus refugees.     

Another characterization of the weibull distribution

A necessary and sufficient condition is given that an absolutely continuous positive random variable follow a Weibull distribution. The condition Is based on some functions of order statistics.     

Exemplar or matching: modeling DCJ problems with unequal content genome data

The edit distance under the DCJ model can be computed in linear time for genomes with equal content or with Indels. But it becomes NP-Hard in the presence of duplications, a problem largely unsolved especially when Indels (i.e., insertions and deletions) are considered. In this paper, we compare two mainstream methods to deal with duplications and associate them with Indels: one by deletion, namely DCJ-Indel-Exemplar distance; versus the other by gene matching, namely DCJ-Indel-Matching distance. We design branch-and-bound algorithms with set of optimization methods to compute exact distances for both. Furthermore, median problems are discussed in alignment with both of these distance methods, which are to find a median genome that minimizes distances between itself and three given genomes. Lin–Kernighan heuristic is leveraged and powered up by sub-graph decomposition and search space reduction technologies to handle median computation. A wide range of experiments are conducted on synthetic data sets and real data sets to exhibit pros and cons of these two distance metrics per se, as well as putting them in the median computation scenario.