Costs, outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of ovc interventions

This item is archived in the repository for materials published for the USAID supported Orphans and Vulnerable Children Comprehensive Action Research Project (OVC-CARE) at the Boston University Center for Global Health and Development.More than 1 out of every 10 children in sub-Saharan Africa and 1 out of 15 in Asia are orphans. A significant proportion of these children in sub-Saharan Africa were orphaned because one or both parents died from AIDS. Large numbers of other children are vulnerable to becoming orphans because one or both parents are HIV-infected. In response to the needs to children who are orphaned or made more vulnerable because of HIV/AIDS, the U.S. government through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) spent about $1 billion during 2006-2008 on activities to improve the wellbeing of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). Through the Reauthorization Act of 2008 (Lantos and Hyde. United States Global Leadership against HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria Reauthorization Act of 2008. Public Law 110-293; July 30, 2008), significant sums will continue to be allocated to OVC programs between 2009 and 2013. Given the past and continuing magnitude of the U.S. public’s investment in PEPFAR-funded OVC programs, combined with several years of implementation experience, this report reviews existing literature addressing the costs, the impacts/outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of OVC programs/interventions.The USAID | Project SEARCH, Orphans and Vulnerable Children Comprehensive Action Research (OVC-CARE) Task Order, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development under Contract No. GHH-I-00-07-00023-00, beginning August 1, 2008. OVC-CARE Task Order is implemented by Boston University. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency

Factors affecting training effectiveness. A study of semiconductor wafer fabrication industry in Malaysia

Human Resource Development is one of the key issues for Malaysian companies since the introduction of Human Resource Development Fund (HRDF). This is the fact that rapid changes in the organizations need to develop a more focused and coherent approach to develop and manage people (Kirkpatrick 1979; Senge, 1990). The senior management must consider the important of providing training to the people by understanding and believing that training is one of the important factors in organizational effectiveness. For technological based industry such as in wafer fabrication, the technical training for technical staff is very crucial. Hence, the HR manager must really outline the required training programs focus to the outcomes as well as measuring the effectiveness of the training. Factors that contribute to the training effectiveness must be put into serious consideration so that the amount invested into training is benefited. As such, the objectives of this paper are to review previous literatures and reveal the factors that affect the training effectiveness and outcomes. The scope of this research covers the Semiconductor Wafer Fabrication Companies in Malaysia

Costs, outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of ovc interventions

This item is archived in the repository for materials published for the USAID supported Orphans and Vulnerable Children Comprehensive Action Research Project (OVC-CARE) at the Boston University Center for Global Health and Development.More than 1 out of every 10 children in sub-Saharan Africa and 1 out of 15 in Asia are orphans. A significant proportion of these children in sub-Saharan Africa were orphaned because one or both parents died from AIDS. Large numbers of other children are vulnerable to becoming orphans because one or both parents are HIV-infected. In response to the needs to children who are orphaned or made more vulnerable because of HIV/AIDS, the U.S. government through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) spent about $1 billion during 2006-2008 on activities to improve the wellbeing of orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). Through the Reauthorization Act of 2008 [1], significant sums will continue to be allocated to OVC programs between 2009 and 2013. Given the past and continuing magnitude of the U.S. public’s investment in PEPFAR-funded OVC programs, combined with several years of implementation experience, this report reviews existing literature addressing the costs, the impacts/outcomes, and cost-effectiveness of OVC programs/interventions.The USAID | Project SEARCH, Orphans and Vulnerable Children Comprehensive Action Research (OVC-CARE) Task Order, is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development under Contract No. GHH-I-00-07-00023-00, beginning August 1, 2008. OVC-CARE Task Order is implemented by Boston University. The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency

Entrepreneurial orientation and the threat of imitation: the influence of upstream and downstream capabilities

This paper uncovers the complexity between Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) and performance. The paper explores the effect of the threat of imitation, which is a key external factor to explain competitive dynamics, and hence highlights effectiveness of EO. Also the paper accounts for the role of upstream (technical) and downstream (marketing) capabilities as they influence effectiveness of EO. Our results show that, under threat of imitation, downstream marketing capabilities facilitate taping into opportunities derived from EO, which positively affects performance. Conversely, available upstream technical capabilities do not aim at EO when imitation threats exist in the environment. Of importance is that we question the complexity between EO and performance can be better understood using a configurational approach

Formalising responsibility modelling for automatic analysis

Modelling the structure of social-technical systems as a basis for informing software system design is a difficult compromise. Formal methods struggle to capture the scale and complexity of the heterogeneous organisations that use technical systems. Conversely, informal approaches lack the rigour needed to inform the software design and construction process or enable automated analysis. We revisit the concept of responsibility modelling, which models social technical systems as a collection of actors who discharge their responsibilities, whilst using and producing resources in the process. Responsibility modelling is formalised as a structured approach for socio-technical system requirements specification and modelling, with well-defined semantics and support for automated structure and validity analysis. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by two case studies of software engineering methodologies

Effect of surface finishing such as sand-blasting and CrAlN hard coatings on the cutting edge’s peeling tools’ wear resistance

The authors would like to thank IonBond (Chassieu-France) who made the sand-blasting treatments and the Regional Council of Burgundy and CTBA (Wood and Furniture Technical Centre) for their financial support.The aim of this study is first to define the effect of a surface finishing such as sand-blasting on the geometry of a wood cutting tool and its wear resistance. In addition, the effectiveness of surface coatings like CrAlN deposited by physical vapor deposition (PVD) technique on conventional and sand-blasted cutting edges was studied. A reference tool and different sand-blasted ones were tested by micro-peeling of beech in a laboratory. Microscopic observations, cutting forces measurement and cutting wear tests were carried out to quantify the behavior of these tools. The results obtained showed that the artificial wear by sandblasting leads to an increase in the wear resistance and coating effectiveness, and completely changes the type of damage done to the tools. The sand-blasting application combined or not with CrAlN coating showed an improvement in the wear resistance of the tools and a modification of the forces during the peeling process. The effectiveness of the CrAlN layers was improved thanks to the sand-blasting treatment and then the duplex ones performed better.Regional Council of Burgundy CTBA (Wood and Furniture Technical Centre

Testing the performance of technical trading rules in the Chinese market

Technical trading rules have a long history of being used by practitioners in financial markets. Their profitable ability and efficiency of technical trading rules are yet controversial. In this paper, we test the performance of more than seven thousands traditional technical trading rules on the Shanghai Securities Composite Index (SSCI) from May 21, 1992 through June 30, 2013 and Shanghai Shenzhen 300 Index (SHSZ 300) from April 8, 2005 through June 30, 2013 to check whether an effective trading strategy could be found by using the performance measurements based on the return and Sharpe ratio. To correct for the influence of the data-snooping effect, we adopt the Superior Predictive Ability test to evaluate if there exists a trading rule that can significantly outperform the benchmark. The result shows that for SSCI, technical trading rules offer significant profitability, while for SHSZ 300, this ability is lost. We further partition the SSCI into two sub-series and find that the efficiency of technical trading in sub-series, which have exactly the same spanning period as that of SHSZ 300, is severely weakened. By testing the trading rules on both indexes with a five-year moving window, we find that the financial bubble from 2005 to 2007 greatly improve the effectiveness of technical trading rules. This is consistent with the predictive ability of technical trading rules which appears when the market is less efficient.Comment: 11 Latex pages including 2 figures and two table

Artificial Counselor System for Stock Investment

This paper proposes a novel trading system which plays the role of an artificial counselor for stock investment. In this paper, the stock future prices (technical features) are predicted using Support Vector Regression. Thereafter, the predicted prices are used to recommend which portions of the budget an investor should invest in different existing stocks to have an optimum expected profit considering their level of risk tolerance. Two different methods are used for suggesting best portions, which are Markowitz portfolio theory and fuzzy investment counselor. The first approach is an optimization-based method which considers merely technical features, while the second approach is based on Fuzzy Logic taking into account both technical and fundamental features of the stock market. The experimental results on New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) show the effectiveness of the proposed system.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl