Number Of Small Areas Research Articles

The Suspect’s Right to Silence in Viet Nam

Viet Nam is attempting to develop a judicial reform strategy to uphold the rule of law and to protect the rights and interests of its people. However, the protection of the rights for criminal suspects in Viet Nam is still limited. In practice, there are still many legal constraints that limit the protection of a suspect’s rights in police custody. First, torture and other forms of ill treatment exist in the investigative phase and the court often condones these practices, regardless of whether the person charged has the constitutional right to both presumption of innocence and freedom from torture and other forms of ill-treatment. Second, the rules on police questioning of suspects and the taking of statements are vague and not respected carefully in reality. The absence of respect for these rights has several negative consequences for the suspect as it opens the way for torture and other forms of inhuman treatment to be used to extort confessions. So far, however, there has been little discussion about the right to silence for suspects in Viet Nam. Most studies on the rights of suspects have only been carried out in a small number of areas and limited to analysing the legal regulations protecting the general rights of the accused. No reliable study has been conducted on whether Viet Nam should guarantee the right to silence. Therefore, this article will explore the requirements needed to guarantee the right of the individual to protect himself or herself from self-incrimination in Viet Nam.

Dewey and Sports: An Overview of Sport in His Work

From beginning to end, John Dewey’s oeuvre is filled with philosophical discussions and political comments on the significance de jure and de facto of a wide range of distinct social spaces. In contrast to subjects he addresses regularly and others that he focuses on occasionally, his work does not systematically address sport. Nonetheless, sport is expressly recognized as a noteworthy environment and integrated into lines of argumentation in no small number of areas as an example. This paper provides an overview of the statements he made on this subject and their context, organizing them on the basis of their social, pedagogical, and aesthetic implications in order to make a supplementary contribution to social spaces in his work. It shall be demonstrated that Dewey assumes a number of positive possibilities in and through sport, but that these are not anchored naturally in or through sport. What sport and movement cultures finally are or should be remains pragmatically dependent on the intentions and consequences that serve as the basis for each specific sporting situation.

Small Area Estimation With Uncertain Random Effects

Random effects models play an important role in model-based small area estimation. Random effects account for any lack of fit of a regression model for the population means of small areas on a set of explanatory variables. In a recent article, Datta, Hall, and Mandal showed that if the random effects can be dispensed with via a suitable test, then the model parameters and the small area means may be estimated with substantially higher accuracy. The work of Datta, Hall, and Mandal is most useful when the number of small areas, m, is moderately large. For large m, the null hypothesis of no random effects will likely be rejected. Rejection of the null hypothesis is usually caused by a few large residuals signifying a departure of the direct estimator from the synthetic regression estimator. As a flexible alternative to the Fay–Herriot random effects model and the approach in Datta, Hall, and Mandal, in this article we consider a mixture model for random effects. It is reasonably expected that small areas with population means explained adequately by covariates have little model error, and the other areas with means not adequately explained by covariates will require a random component added to the regression model. This model is a useful alternative to the usual random effects model and the data determine the extent of lack of fit of the regression model for a particular small area, and include a random effect if needed. Unlike the Datta, Hall, and Mandal approach which recommends excluding random effects from all small areas if a test of null hypothesis of no random effects is not rejected, the present model is more flexible. We used this mixture model to estimate poverty ratios for 5–17-year-old-related children for the 50 U.S. states and Washington, DC. This application is motivated by the SAIPE project of the U.S. Census Bureau. We empirically evaluated the accuracy of the direct estimates and the estimates obtained from our mixture model and the Fay–Herriot random effects model. These empirical evaluations and a simulation study, in conjunction with a lower posterior variance of the new estimates, show that the new estimates are more accurate than both the frequentist and the Bayes estimates resulting from the standard Fay–Herriot model. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Environmental Federalism when Numbers Matter More than Size

C. Urban Density and Air Quality Ambient levels of criteria pollutants vary dramatically across the country, but the highest levels occur disproportionately in large urban areas. (171) Figure 6 displays the counties in nonattainment for ozone and small particulate matter ([PM.sub.2.5]), which are the criteria pollutants that affect the largest number of people and are associated with the greatest cumulative health risks. The relatively small number of areas in nonattainment obscures the large size of the affected population--123 million people, or about 40 percent of the U.S. population, for ozone and 91 million, or about 30 percent of the U.S. population, for [PM.sub.2.5]. The aggregate population in nonattainment areas for all six criteria pollutants is almost 150 million, which represented about half of the U.S. population in 2005. [FIGURE 6 OMITTED] The strong correlation between high ambient levels of criteria pollutants and urbanization explains the divergence between population and geographic area--almost every nonattainment area, aside from California's Central Valley, encompasses a major metropolitan center. The cities in California, Texas, and the northeastern states, which are home to many of the largest cities in the country, stand out as areas of poor air quality for criteria pollutants. A quantitative measure of this geographic pattern is provided in Figure 7, which displays the populations of nonattainment areas by state. This grouping of the data also underscores the extent to which elevated levels of criteria pollutants are concentrated in a few states. Ambient levels of air toxics, and the cancer risks associated with them, likewise vary across the country. Figure 8 displays the populations, at the census-tract level, (172) exposed to different levels of cancer risks from NATA Toxics in 2005. While about 90 percent of the U.S. population was exposed to excess cancer risks of 20 to 80 per million, the distribution has a long tail that extends above 200 per million. In this tail of the distribution, 16 million people were exposed to excess cancer risks above 100 per million. [FIGURE 7 OMITTED] Most of the people who are exposed to these elevated cancer risks live in urban areas. In the ten largest cities, which were home to about 27 percent of the U.S. population in 2005, the average excess cancer risk from all outdoor sources of air toxics was 68 per million (by contrast, the cancer risks from industrial sources in these cities averaged about 2 per million). More importantly, the most severe risks from air pollution are concentrated in the largest cities: 88 percent of the 16 million people subjected to cancer risks above 100 per million--a level EPA deems clearly unacceptable--live in the ten largest metropolitan areas. (173) [FIGURE 8 OMITTED] At the other end of the distribution, only about 40 thousand people lived in census tracts where cumulative excess cancer risks from NATA Toxics were below 10 per million. (174) Moreover, these estimates represent a lower bound on cancer risks, as they are based on a subset of all air pollutants. This result reveals that cancer risks from air toxics exceed EPA's target risk of one per million by tenfold even in very remote areas of the country. (175) An important implication of this finding is that background risks from air toxics, whether from natural or distant anthropogenic sources, are responsible for a baseline excess cancer risk of roughly 10 per million that cannot be influenced by local regulatory efforts. [FIGURE 9 OMITTED] Figure 9 displays census-tract-level data on the excess cancer risks from air toxics. (176) While elevated cancer risks are closely associated with urban areas, the impacts from industrial sources and inter-jurisdictional transport of air toxics is evident in the rural areas of the southeastern states. However, unlike the largest metropolitan areas, the cancer risks in virtually all of these areas still fall within the range of 40 to 70 per million, making them comparable to the national average of 50 per million. …

A Tessellation-Based Localized Chain Construction Scheme for Chain-Oriented Sensor Networks

Chain oriented logical topologies offer significant energy-efficiency, especially for large-scaled wireless sensor networks. Essentially, the effectiveness of this topology largely depends on how the chains are constructed and organized. Thus, chain construction can correctly be presumed as the main challenge for a chain-oriented logical topology. In this paper, we propose a tessellation-based chain construction scheme for chain-oriented sensor networks. This scheme creates multiple chains, each of which is confined in a small area, rather than spanning large areas. The main idea of this scheme is to divide the target field, using the concept of Voronoi diagram, into a number of small areas, and then construct chains in each of those areas. Confining chains in bounded areas results lower interference, which in turns saves energy and time by limiting retransmissions caused by the interference problems. A number of protocols are incorporated in this scheme, such as a distributed protocol for constructing Voronoi diagram, Voronoi diagram management protocol, chain construction protocol, and leader selection protocol. Extensive simulation experiments are performed on this scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme saves more energy, lengthens lifetime of the network, and reduces data collection latency.

The Mohorovicic discontinuity in ocean basins: Some observations from seismic data

Abstract Since the late 1970s studies of the oceanic crust using airgun sources and towed hydrophone arrays have been conducted in a wide range of ocean basin settings including mid-ocean ridges and old oceanic crust. The very earliest studies were performed at the fast-spreading East Pacific Rise (EPR) and revealed a very distinct almost continuous vertical incidence reflection event at a depth corresponding to the crust–mantle transition as inferred from seismic refraction studies. This suggested that the transition was quite sharp in comparison to the source wavelength. That Moho was observed very close to or even exactly beneath the ridge crest implied that it was formed at essentially zero age. Since then, many experiments using progressively improving airgun arrays and streamer systems have expanded these observations. Here we review the literature presenting studies of “normal” oceanic crust produced at mid-ocean ridges with the objective of assessing the age of formation of Moho and the nature of variability of Moho signature in multi-channel seismic data. Moho is observed as a consistent feature for all spreading rates but appears quite variable, being very distinct in some areas, complex in form in others and absent in many regions (as much as 40%). Although fast-spread crust is associated with the strongest, simplest and most laterally continuous Moho images we see significant variability at almost all spreading rates and ages. Where Moho is absent from vertical incidence data this cannot be fully explained by the effect of scattering or attenuation in the crustal section above. Moho can be observed at zero age in only a small number of areas at or near Overlapping Spreading Centers on the EPR. After three decades of marine seismic studies many fundamental questions remain concerning the nature of the Moho that will require targeted experiments to solve.

On Estimation of Mean Squared Errors of Benchmarked Empirical Bayes Estimators

We consider benchmarked empirical Bayes (EB) estimators under the basic area-level model of Fay and Herriot while requiring the standard benchmarking constraint. In this paper we determine the excess mean squared error (MSE) from constraining the estimates through benchmarking. We show that the increase due to benchmarking is O(m^{-1}), where m is the number of small areas. Furthermore, we find an asymptotically unbiased estimator of this MSE and compare it to the second-order approximation of the MSE of the EB estimator or, equivalently, of the MSE of the empirical best linear unbiased predictor (EBLUP), that was derived by Prasad and Rao (1990). Morever, using methods similar to those of Butar and Lahiri (2003), we compute a parametric bootstrap estimator of the MSE of the benchmarked EB estimator under the Fay-Herriot model and compare it to the MSE of the benchmarked EB estimator found by a second-order approximation. Finally, we illustrate our methods using SAIPE data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and in a simulation study.

A controlled study of a simulated workplace laboratory for adults with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

Despite an extant literature documenting that adults with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at increased risk for significant difficulties in the workplace, there is little documentation of the underlying factors associated with these impairments. The main aim of this study was to examine specific deficiencies associated with ADHD on workplace performance in a simulated workplace laboratory relative to controls. Participants were 56 non-medicated young adults with DSM-IV ADHD and 63 age- and sex-matched controls without ADHD. Participants spent 10h in a workplace simulation laboratory. Areas assessed included: (1) simulated tasks documented in a government report (SCANS) often required in workplace settings (taxing vigilance; planning; cooperation; attention to detail), (2) observer ratings, and (3) self-reports. Robust findings were found in the statistically significant differences on self-report of ADHD symptoms found between participants with ADHD and controls during all workplace tasks and periods of the workday. Task performance was found to be deficient in a small number of areas, and there were a few statistically significant differences identified by observer ratings. Symptoms reported by participants with ADHD in the simulation including internal restlessness, intolerance of boredom and difficulty maintaining vigilance were significant and could adversely impact workplace performance over the long-term.

The foodscape: classification and field validation of secondary data sources across urban/rural and socio-economic classifications in England

BackgroundIn recent years, alongside the exponential increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity, there has been a change in the food environment (foodscape). This research focuses on methods used to measure and classify the foodscape. This paper describes the foodscape across urban/rural and socio-economic divides. It examines the validity of a database of food outlets obtained from Local Authority sources (secondary level & desk based), across urban/rural and socio-economic divides by conducting fieldwork (ground-truthing). Additionally this paper tests the efficacy of using a desk based classification system to describe food outlets, compared with ground-truthing.MethodsSix geographically defined study areas were purposively selected within North East England consisting of two Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs; a small administrative geography) each. Lists of food outlets were obtained from relevant Local Authorities (secondary level & desk based) and fieldwork (ground-truthing) was conducted. Food outlets were classified using an existing tool. Positive predictive values (PPVs) and sensitivity analysis was conducted to explore validation of secondary data sources. Agreement between 'desk' and 'field' based classifications of food outlets were assessed.ResultsThere were 438 food outlets within all study areas; the urban low socio-economic status (SES) area had the highest number of total outlets (n = 210) and the rural high SES area had the least (n = 19). Differences in the types of outlets across areas were observed. Comparing the Local Authority list to fieldwork across the geographical areas resulted in a range of PPV values obtained; with the highest in urban low SES areas (87%) and the lowest in Rural mixed SES (79%). While sensitivity ranged from 95% in the rural mixed SES area to 60% in the rural low SES area. There were no significant associations between field/desk percentage agreements across any of the divides.ConclusionDespite the relatively small number of areas, this work furthers our understanding of the validity of using secondary data sources to identify and classify the foodscape in a variety of geographical settings. While classification of the foodscape using secondary Local Authority food outlet data with information obtained from the internet, is not without its difficulties, desk based classification would be an acceptable alternative to fieldwork, although it should be used with caution.

Best Predictive Small Area Estimation

We derive the best predictive estimator (BPE) of the fixed parameters under two well-known small area models, the Fay–Herriot model and the nested-error regression model. This leads to a new prediction procedure, called observed best prediction (OBP), which is different from the empirical best linear unbiased prediction (EBLUP). We show that BPE is more reasonable than the traditional estimators derived from estimation considerations, such as maximum likelihood (ML) and restricted maximum likelihood (REML), if the main interest is estimation of small area means, which is a mixed-model prediction problem. We use both theoretical derivations and empirical studies to demonstrate that the OBP can significantly outperform EBLUP in terms of the mean squared prediction error (MSPE), if the underlying model is misspecified. On the other hand, when the underlying model is correctly specified, the overall predictive performance of the OBP is very similar to that of the EBLUP if the number of small areas is large. A general theory about OBP, including its exact MSPE comparison with the BLUP in the context of mixed-model prediction, and asymptotic behavior of the BPE, is developed. A real data example is considered. A supplementary appendix is available online.

Quality evaluation of virtual slides using methods based on comparing common image areas

BackgroundThere are many scanners of glass slides on the market now. Quality of digital images produced by them may be different and pathologists who examine virtual slides on a monitor may subjectively evaluate it. However, objective comparison of quality of digital slides captured by various devices requires assessment algorithms, which will be automatically executed.MethodsIn this work such an algorithm is proposed and implemented. It is dedicated for comparing quality of virtual slides which show the same glass slide captured by two or more scanners. In the first step this method looks for the largest corresponding areas in the slides. This task is realized by defining boundaries of tissues and providing the relative scale factor. Then, a certain number of smaller areas, which show the same fragments of both slides, is selected. The chosen fragments are analyzed using Gray Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM). For GLCM matrices some of the Haralick features are calculated, like contrast or entropy. Basing on results for some sample images, features appropriate for quality assessment are chosen. Aggregation of values from all selected fragments allows to compare the quality of images captured by tested devices.ResultsDescribed method was tested on two sets of ten virtual slides, acquired by scanning the same set of ten glass slides by two different devices. First set was scanned and digitized using the robotic microscope Axioscope2 (Zeiss) equipped with AxioCam Hrc CCD camera. Second set was scanned by DeskScan (Zeiss) with standard equipment. Before analyzing captured virtual slides, images were stitched and converted using software which utilizes advances in aerial and satellite imaging.The results of the experiment show that calculated quality factors are higher for virtual slides acquired using first mentioned device (Axioscope2 with AxioCam).ConclusionsResults of the tests are consistent with opinion of the pathologists who assessed quality of virtual slides captured by these devices. This shows that the method has potential in automatic evaluation of virtual slides’ quality.

Assessing different uncertainty measures of EBLUP: a resampling-based approach

The empirical best linear unbiased prediction approach is a popular method for the estimation of small area parameters. However, the estimation of reliable mean squared prediction error (MSPE) of the estimated best linear unbiased predictors (EBLUP) is a complicated process. In this paper we study the use of resampling methods for MSPE estimation of the EBLUP. A cross-sectional and time-series stationary small area model is used to provide estimates in small areas. Under this model, a parametric bootstrap procedure and a weighted jackknife method are introduced. A Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted in order to compare the performance of different resampling-based measures of uncertainty of the EBLUP with the analytical approximation. Our empirical results show that the proposed resampling-based approaches performed better than the analytical approximation in several situations, although in some cases they tend to underestimate the true MSPE of the EBLUP in a higher number of small areas.

An abstract virtual instrument system for high throughput automatic microscopy

Modern biomedical therapies often involve disease specific drug development and may require observing cells at a very high resolution. Existing commercial microscopes behave very much like their traditional counterparts, where a user controls the microscope and chooses the areas of interest manually on a given specimen scan. This mode of discovery is suited to problems where it is easy for a user to draw a conclusion from observations by finding a small number of areas that might require further investigation. However, observations by an expert can be very time consuming and error prone when there are a large number of potential areas of interest (such as cells or vessels in a tumour), and compute intensive image processing is required to analyse them. In this paper, we propose an Abstract Virtual Instrument (AVI) system for accelerating scientific discovery. An AVI system is a novel software architecture for building an hierarchical scientific instrument – one in which a virtual instrument could be defined in terms of other physical instruments, and in which significant processing is required in producing the illusion of a single virtual scientific discovery instrument. We show that an AVI can be implemented using existing scientific workflow tools that both control the microscope and perform image analysis operations. The resulting solution is a flexible and powerful system for performing dynamic high throughput automatic microscopy. We illustrate the system using a case study that involves searching for blood vessels in an optical tissue scan, and automatically instructing the microscope to rescan these vessels at higher resolution.

Regional risk factors for health inequalities in Scotland and England and the “Scottish effect”

This paper uses data from the Scottish Health Survey 2003 and the comparable Health Survey for England 2003 to look at whether Scotland's poor health image and mortality profile is reflected in regional inequalities in prevalence of four risk factors for cardiovascular disease: fruit and vegetable consumption, smoking, obesity and diabetes. It also looks at the "Scottish effect" - how much of any difference between and within Scotland and England remains once socio-demographic factors have been taken in to account. The paper then uses regional analyses to determine the extent to which areas within England and Scotland contribute to their national health advantage and disadvantage. All 2003 strategic health authorities in England and Scottish health boards were compared with Greater Glasgow health board as the reference category. The results showed that significant geographic variation in the risk factors remained once individual economic status was taken into account, but the relationship was complex and varied in strength and direction depending upon risk factor involved and gender of respondent. A small number of areas had significantly lower odds of fruit and vegetable consumption of five portions or more a day in men, compared with Greater Glasgow. In contrast some areas had significantly higher odds of fruit and vegetable consumption for women compared with Greater Glasgow. There was greater geographic variation in the odds of smoking in women than in men. Respondents in the south west and southeast of England (areas which usually show health advantage) did not show significantly lower odds of smoking compared with Greater Glasgow once socio-economic variation, age and urban residence was taken into account. It was respondents from central England that had lower odds of smoking than might be expected. Obesity stood out as the single risk factor that had demonstrated a "Scottish effect" in women only.

Thermal conductivity of a plane joint

The heat flux passing through contacting surfaces is very different from the heat flux passing through an equal area of a continuous sample, because metallic contact does not extend over the whole surface in joints. Any real surface consists of projections and depressions, whose magnitude and shape depend on the machining method. When two such surfaces are brought together, there will be a number of small areas of actual metallic contact between them. Over the remainder (the bulk) of the supposed contact area, the two surfaces are separated by a layer of air, oil, or other fluid. In this case, the heat flux passing through the contact surface may be divided into two components: the heat flux through the direct contact area; and the heat flux passing through a thin intermediate layer. On the basis of the theory of contact heat transfer, the contact thermal conductivity α T (W/m 2 K) may be

INLUX: A calculation code for daylight illuminance predictions inside buildings and its experimental validation

A calculation code, named INLUX, able to predict the average illuminance on the inside surfaces of a room with six walls and a window, is presented. The walls and the window are subdivided into a given number of small areas, identified by the coordinates of their centres. The code solves, at each desired instant, the system of the illuminance equations of each surface element, characterized by its reflection coefficient and its view factors toward the other elements. It is assumed that all surfaces reflect the light in a diffuse manner. The model belongs to the calculation models classified as “radiosity models” The code was validated by comparing the calculated values of illuminance with the experimental values measured inside a scale model (1:5) of a building room, located outdoors, in overcast sky conditions. The validation, performed using the sky luminance data measured by a sky scanner as input data, showed a good performance of the code.

Spatial clustering of childhood cancer in Great Britain during the period 1969–1993

The aetiology of childhood cancer is poorly understood. Both genetic and environmental factors are likely to be involved. The presence of spatial clustering is indicative of a very localized environmental component to aetiology. Spatial clustering is present when there are a small number of areas with greatly increased incidence or a large number of areas with moderately increased incidence. To determine whether localized environmental factors may play a part in childhood cancer aetiology, we analyzed for spatial clustering using a large set of national population-based data from Great Britain diagnosed 1969-1993. The Potthoff-Whittinghill method was used to test for extra-Poisson variation (EPV). Thirty-two thousand three hundred and twenty-three cases were allocated to 10,444 wards using diagnosis addresses. Analyses showed statistically significant evidence of clustering for acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) over the whole age range (estimate of EPV = 0.05, p = 0.002) and for ages 1-4 years (estimate of EPV = 0.03, p = 0.015). Soft-tissue sarcoma (estimate of EPV = 0.03, p = 0.04) and Wilms tumours (estimate of EPV = 0.04, p = 0.007) also showed significant clustering. Clustering tended to persist across different time periods for cases of ALL (estimate of between-time period EPV = 0.04, p =0.003). In conclusion, we observed low level spatial clustering that is attributable to a limited number of cases. This suggests that environmental factors, which in some locations display localized clustering, may be important aetiological agents in these diseases. For ALL and soft tissue sarcoma, but not Wilms tumour, common infectious agents may be likely candidates.

Sampling for Global Epidemic Models and the Topology of an International Airport Network

Mathematical models that describe the global spread of infectious diseases such as influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and tuberculosis (TB) often consider a sample of international airports as a network supporting disease spread. However, there is no consensus on how many cities should be selected or on how to select those cities. Using airport flight data that commercial airlines reported to the Official Airline Guide (OAG) in 2000, we have examined the network characteristics of network samples obtained under different selection rules. In addition, we have examined different size samples based on largest flight volume and largest metropolitan populations. We have shown that although the bias in network characteristics increases with the reduction of the sample size, a relatively small number of areas that includes the largest airports, the largest cities, the most-connected cities, and the most central cities is enough to describe the dynamics of the global spread of influenza. The analysis suggests that a relatively small number of cities (around 200 or 300 out of almost 3000) can capture enough network information to adequately describe the global spread of a disease such as influenza. Weak traffic flows between small airports can contribute to noise and mask other means of spread such as the ground transportation.

Numerical method for biaxially loaded reinforced and prestressed concrete slender columns with arbitrary section

In this study, a numerical procedure based on the finite element method for materially and geometrically nonlinear analysis of reinforced and prestressed concrete slender columns with arbitrary section subjected to combined biaxial bending and axial load is developed. In order to overcome the low computer efficiency of the conventional section integration method in which the reinforced concrete section is divided into a large number of small areas, an efficient section integration method is used to determine the section tangent stiffness. In this method, the arbitrary shaped cross section is divided into several concrete trapezoids according to boundary vertices, and the contribution of each trapezoid to section stiffness is determined by integrating directly the trapezoid. The space frame flexural theory is utilized to derive the element tangent stiffness matrix. The nonlinear full-range member response is traced by an updated normal plane arc-length solution method. The analytical results agree well with the experimental ones.

Power and marketing

This paper argues that research on power has suffered from fragmentation and limited convergence, and that the application of power theory in marketing has been limited to a very small number of areas. In order to obviate these limitations, and to revive interest in an area that has the potential to make further important contributions to research on marketing strategy, the paper presents a categorisation of the main schools of thought in power research. These are the bureaucratic, critical contingencies, network and psychological perspectives. The paper provides a review of the application of these perspectives in marketing, and concludes with a brief discussion of potential future research areas, including the influence of marketing within the firm and strategic alliances.