Controversies of US‐USSR Cultural Contacts During the Cold War: The Perspective of Latvian Refugees1

Abstract This article analyzes the conflict that emerged regarding the so‐called US‐USSR “cultural contacts” during the Cold War within the exile community of American Latvians. While most of the American political and cultural elites saw cultural exchanges with the Soviets as beneficial, the reactions of the émigrés were much more controversial and polarizing. This study reveals the unrecognized side of the Cold War politics as experienced by the refugee groups. The study employs American, Latvian and Soviet publications, memoirs, interviews and archival materials.     

Capacity management through Lagrangean relaxation: an application to tyres production

A new integrated approach to capacity management in complex manufacturing systems is developed and the resulting framework is applied to a case study in tyre production. A hierarchical multilayered decomposition of the planning process is proposed, in which lower layers provide an increased level of detail and accuracy in capacity representation and analysis. Thus, a large and comprehensive model describing the manufacturing system is subdivided into smaller sub-models via relaxation and decomposition techniques. The Lagrangean multipliers provide a bi-directional link among different layers, reducing the risk of sub-optimization and infeasibility of the aggregate plans. Each of the sub-models is easier to solve than the original one and involves a different set of decision variables. Moreover, they relate to different levels of the management hierarchy, so that there emerges a strict correspondence between the decomposition scheme and the decision process underlying capacity management.     

Outcome Prediction for Heart Failure Telemonitoring Via Generalized Linear Models with Functional Covariates

An effective methodology for dealing with data extracted from clinical surveys on heart failure linked to the Public Health Database is proposed. A model for recurrent events is used for modelling the occurrence of hospital readmissions in time, thus deriving a suitable way to compute individual cumulative hazard functions. Estimated cumulative hazard trajectories are then treated as functional data, and they are used as covariates along with clinical survey data within the framework of generalized linear models with functional covariates.