Latin American convergence and divergence towards the mortality profiles of developed countries

It is uncertain whether Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries are approaching a single mortality regime. Over the last three decades, LAC has experienced major public health interventions and the highest number of homicides in the world. However, these interventions and homicide rates are not evenly shared across countries. This study documents trends in life expectancy and lifespan variability for 20 LAC countries, 2000–14. By extending a previous method, we decompose differences in lifespan variability between LAC and a developed world benchmark into cause-specific effects. For both sexes, dispersion of amenable diseases through the age span makes the largest contribution to the gap between LAC and the benchmark. Additionally, for males, the concentration of homicides, accidents, and suicides in mid-life further impedes mortality convergence. Great disparity exists in the region: while some countries are rapidly approaching the developed regime, others remain far behind and suffer a clear disadvantage in population health.     

Applying kaizen to the schedule in a concurrent environment

Not only ETO (Engineering to Order), but even serial production industry should know how to deal with projects and their schedule: plant commissioning, shutdown, introducing new products and similar circumstances should be managed with adequate planning and resource allocation techniques to create a schedule useful in decision making during the execution. The current complex reality, with evolving technologies and fierce pressure to reach the market as soon as possible, pushes the project managers to use more advanced techniques than waterfall planning, such as agile or lean. It also requires them to take a holistic view and manage concurrent tasks in complex projects. The contributions of this paper are two: the proposal to control specific parallel groups of waterfall activities under uncertain environments, which can lead to iterations and reworks, as a single concurrent Activity Managed by Kanban Methods (AMKM). This activity can be subsequently embedded into traditional scheduling approaches as CPM-PERT. The second contribution is the feasibility of its application in industrial environments due to the affordability of simulation software. Two use cases are shown as evidence. It is not a disruptive proposal, but a kaizen action based on very mature technologies. Finally, it is suggested some improvements to be implemented in Project Management Software due to this ‘kaizen’ proposal.     

A graphical analysis of some basic results in social choice

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on the robustness of Majority Rule due to Maskin (1995). In each case, geometry provides new insights on the working and interplay of the axioms, and suggests new results including a new characterization of the entire class of Majority Rule SWFs, a strengthening of May's Theorem, and a new version of Maskin's Theorem. Received: 31 July 1999/Accepted: 27 March 2001     

Enduring disablism: students with dyslexia and their pathways into UK higher education and beyond

This paper presents some of the findings derived from a UK Aimhigher South Yorkshire research report on disability and higher education. Many of the students who shared their life histories for this project found that there was a lack of information in making choices about their futures, especially information about pursuing higher education. Without information to make informed choices, disabled students not only experience stress and anxiety, but also difficulty in preparing themselves for higher education study. This is, perhaps, reason for the low proportion of disabled learners in further and higher education. There are many reasons to explain this disparity. Many factors are inextricably linked to disablism institutionalized within many sectors of education. The education arena is not being singled out here. However, it does serve as further notice of the pervasiveness of disablism existing in wider society.     

On Preference, Freedom and Diversity

We study the problem of ranking sets of options in terms of freedom of choice. We propose a framework in which both the diversity of the options and the preferences of the agent over the options do play a role. We formulate some axioms that reflect these two aspects of freedom and we study their logical implications. Two different criteria for ranking sets are characterized, which generalize some of the rankings proposed so far in the literature.     

La médiane simpliciale d'Oja: Existence,unicité et stabilité

Oja (1983) examined various ways of measuring location, scatter, skewness, and kurtosis for multivariate distributions. Among other measures of location, he introduced a generalised median known in this paper under the name of the Oja median. In our study of the existence of that median, we show that Oja's definition can only be applied to distributions having a mean. In dimension d θ 2, we establish that the usual method of extension breaks down, which raises the question of the validity of the concept as a notion of median. Two fundamental theoretical properties of that median are also considered: uniqueness and consistency.     

Organizational Symbolism as a Social Construction: A Perspective from the Sociology of Knowledge

This article describes organizational symbolismfrom a sociology of knowledge perspective and considersboth the theoretical and extra-theoretical bases of thesymbolic approach. It illustrates the distinctive principles of the symbolic approach withrespect to other methods used in the study oforganizations, the concepts on which it is based, andthe organizational issues on which it has shedsignificant light. Symbolist studies of organizations haverefocused scholarly attention on the multidisciplinaryunderstanding of the logos, ethos, and pathos oforganizational life. They have done so by stressing the production of knowledge tout court, rather thanconcerning themselves with the applicability of theorganizational knowledge acquired by this approach formanagerial purposes. Organizational symbolism is described in the article as a fluctuatingand emerging social construction whose growth and spreadhas been fostered by support within academia.     

International income poverty measurement: which way now?

We critically review conceptual and empirical issues surrounding the derivation of the international poverty line, expressed in PPP-adjusted dollars and linked to various rounds of the International Comparison Program (ICP). We find that there are some limitations in the current estimation of these lines, but show that statistically superior methods lead to lines that are relatively robust and confirm the $1.25 using 2005 PPPs and suggest $1.67–1.71 using 2011 PPPs (or close to the $1.90 proposed by the World Bank if we follow the World Bank’s approach of adjusting inflation rates in some countries); they also roughly confirm the current shape of the proposed ‘weakly relative’ poverty line. Using the new absolute line based on 2011 PPPs would lead to substantially lower poverty in our estimation. The extent of the decline depends on whether and how one treats China, India, and Indonesia differently from other countries in the 2005 and 2011 PPPs. More seriously, we note that the dependence on successive ICP rounds creates conceptual and empirical problems that have become worse over time so that we suggest that it would be best to consider alternatives to the current reliance on ICP rounds and the resulting PPPs. As a short-term solution we propose to fix the international poverty line in national currencies using either the 2005 or 2011 level; in the medium term, we argue for global poverty measurement based on internationally coordinated national poverty measurement.