Firms’ willingness to invest in a water fund to improve water-related ecosystem services in the Lake Naivasha basin,Kenya

A valuation scenario was designed using a contingent-valuation approach and presented to decision makers in business firms in Kenya’s Lake Naivasha basin to test how applicable a water fund might be as a potential financing mechanism for a payment for water-related ecosystem services scheme. The findings indicate that measuring a firm’s willingness to invest in ecosystem services could help determine whether a firm would invest and engage with other stakeholders to pool their investments in ecosystem services. Linking the institutional decision-making behaviour of a firm and its willingness to invest in a water fund is the novelty of this article.     

New control charts for monitoring the Weibull percentiles under complete data and Type‐II censoring

In this paper, we propose 3 new control charts for monitoring the lower Weibull percentiles under complete data and Type‐II censoring. In transforming the Weibull distribution to the smallest extreme value distribution, Pascaul et al (2017) presented an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) control chart, hereafter referred to as EWMA‐SEV‐Q, based on a pivotal quantity conditioned on ancillary statistics. We extended their concept to construct a cumulative sum (CUSUM) control chart denoted by CUSUM‐SEV‐Q. We provide more insights of the statistical properties of the monitoring statistic. Additionally, in transforming a Weibull distribution to a standard normal distribution, we propose EWMA and CUSUM control charts, denoted as EWMA‐YP and CUSUM‐YP, respectively, based on a pivotal quantity for monitoring the Weibull percentiles with complete data. With complete data, the EWMA‐YP and CUSUM‐YP control charts perform better than the EWMA‐SEV‐Q and CUSUM‐SEV‐Q control charts in terms of average run length. In Type‐II censoring, the EWMA‐SEV‐Q chart is slightly better than the CUSUM‐SEV‐Q chart in terms of average run length. Two numerical examples are used to illustrate the applications of the proposed control charts.     

The Effects of Groundwater and Surface Water Use on Total Water Availability and Implications for Water Management: The Case of Lake Naivasha, Kenya

This study discusses the effects of water abstractions from two alternative sources on the available water volume around Lake Naivasha, Kenya: the lake itself and a connected aquifer. An estimation of the water abstraction pattern for the period 1999–2010 is made and its effect on the available water volume in Lake Naivasha and its connected aquifer is evaluated using a simple water balance modeling approach. This study shows that accurate estimates of annual volume changes of Lake Naivasha can be made using a simple monthly water balance approach that takes into account the exchange of water between the lake and its connected aquifer. The amount of water that is used for irrigation in the area around Lake Naivasha has a substantial adverse effect on the availability of water. Simulation results of our simple water balance model suggests that abstractions from groundwater affect the lake volume less than direct abstractions from the lake. Groundwater volumes, in contrast, are much more affected by groundwater abstractions and therefore lead to much lower groundwater levels. Moreover, when groundwater is used instead of surface water, evaporation losses from the lake are potentially higher due to a larger lake surface area. If that would be the case then the overall water availability in the area is more strongly affected by the abstraction of groundwater than by the abstraction of surface water. Therefore water managers should be cautious when using lake levels as the only indicator of water availability for restricting water abstractions.     

Epidemiological comparisons of problems and positive qualities reported by adolescents in 24 countries.

In this study, the authors compared ratings of behavioral and emotional problems and positive qualities on the Youth Self-Report (T. M. Achenbach & L. A. Rescorla, 2001) by adolescents in general population samples from 24 countries (N = 27,206). For problem scales, country effect sizes (ESs) ranged from 3% to 9%, whereas those for gender and age ranged from less than 1% to 2%. Scores were significantly higher for girls than for boys on Internalizing Problems and significantly higher for boys than for girls on Externalizing Problems. Bicountry correlations for mean problem item scores averaged .69. For Total Problems, 17 of 24 countries scored within one standard deviation of the overall mean of 35.3. In the 19 countries for which parent ratings were also available, the mean of 20.5 for parent ratings was far lower than the self-report mean of 34.0 in the same 19 countries (d = 2.5). Results indicate considerable consistency across 24 countries in adolescents' self-reported problems but less consistency for positive qualities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

EWMA chart based on Bayes‐conditional pivotal quantity for Weibull percentiles under complete data and type‐II censoring

Bayes‐conditional control chart has been used for monitoring the Weibull percentiles with complete data and type‐II censoring. Firstly, the Weibull data are transformed to the smallest extreme value (SEV) distribution. Secondly, the posterior median of quantiles is used as a monitoring statistic. Finally, a pivotal quantity based on the monitoring statistic with its conditional distribution function is derived for obtaining the control limits. This control chart is denoted as Shewhart‐SEV‐ . In this study, we extend this work based on an exponential weighted moving average model named exponential weighted moving average‐SEV‐ for monitoring the Weibull percentiles. We provide the statistical properties of the monitoring statistic. The average run length and the standard deviation of run lengths, computed by the integral equation approach, are used as performance measures. The results indicate that the proposed chart performs better than the Shewhart‐SEV‐ . The breaking strength of carbon fibers is used to illustrate the application of the proposed control chart.     

The continuing effects of substantively complex work on the intellectual functioning of older workers.

Using a nationally representative sample of employed men and women in this longitudinal study, the authors extended for another 20 years findings based on 1964 and 1974 data (Kohn & Schooler, 1983) that substantively complex work improves intellectual functioning. This study provides evidence that intellectual functioning and substantive complexity of work continue to reciprocally affect each other. In addition, it shows that the intellectual flexibility measure used earlier (Kohn & Schooler, 1978, 1983) is highly correlated with more standard measures of intellectual functioning. Most importantly, it shows that, although substantively complex work significantly increased the level of intellectual functioning of both the younger and older halves of the sample, the effect is significantly greater among the older workers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

One‐sided control chart based on support vector machines with differential evolution algorithm

The statistical learning classification techniques have been successfully applied to statistical process control problems. In this paper, we proposed a one‐sided control chart based on support vector machines (SVMs) and differential evolution (DE) algorithm to monitor a process with multivariate quality characteristics. The SVM classifier provides a continuous distance from the boundary, and the DE algorithm is used to obtain the optimal parameters of the SVM model by minimizing mean absolute error (MAE). The average run length of the proposed chart is computed using the Monte Carlo simulation approach. Several simulated cases are conducted using a multivariate normal distribution with 10 and 20 dimensions and three different process shift scenarios. In addition, we consider two non‐normal distribution cases. The ARL performance of the proposed chart is better than the distance‐based SVM chart. A real example is used to illustrate the application of the proposed control chart.     

Book reviews

Environmental Regulation in a Federal System: Framing Environmental Policy in the European Union. Tim Jeppesen
Innovation and the Growth of Cities. Zoltan J. Acs
International Finance and Open-Economy Macro-Economics. Giancarlo Gandolfo
Sports and City Marketing in European Cities. Leo van den Berg, Erik Braun, and Alexander H. J. Otagaar
China and its Regions: Economic Growth and Reform in Chinese Provinces (Series on New Horizons in International Business ). Mary-Francoise Renard (ed.)     

A comparison study of control charts for Weibull distributed time between events

Monitoring decreases in the mean of Weibull time between events data to address process quality deteriorations is an important task in reliability analysis. Two new control charts such as Weibull exponentially weighted moving average and mixed cumulative sum‐exponentially weighted moving average by transforming the Weibull data to the exponential data are proposed and compared with 2 existing control charts such as Weibull cumulative sum and mixed exponentially weighted moving average‐cumulative sum. The performance comparison provides a way to select a specific control chart in a given situation. The average run length and the standard deviation of the run length are used as performance measures. The relative mean index is also utilized to measure the overall performance. The smaller the value of the relative mean index, the better the performance of the control chart and vice versa. Two illustrative examples are provided to show the applications of the proposed control charts.