Consumer Ethnocentrism: A Comparison of Arab and Western Audiences

The subject of consumer ethnocentrism is discussed in the context of advertising country-of-origin effects. The literature and suggestions concerning the phenomenon in the Middle East are brought up and a study using U.S. and Egyptian samples is described. The findings show some evidence of consumer ethnocentrism in both countries, though statistical significance is only achieved with U.S. data, generally consistent with prior writing and research focused on developed versus developing countries. Special attention is given to the construct of worldliness and though not statistically significant, results suggest it may be a factor deserving additional study

A Review of Near Shore Fisheries Law & Governance in Fiji

This report provides a snapshot of near shore fisheries law and governance in Fiji as of January 2015. It includes an objective, detailed description and analysis of both the modern legal system based on English common law and the traditional iTaukei system of law and governance, and how they apply to near shore fisheries throughout the country. The report also seeks to clarify the relative balance – and the potential gaps, redundancies, and limitations – between these two governing systems by describing how they are or can be used for day-to-day, practical management of near shore fisheries and coastal resources. Ultimately, this report is intended to shed light on a governance system that, on the one hand, has done well over the past 10-15 years to facilitate a dramatic increase in efforts to improve near shore fisheries management in Fiji; but on the other hand, probably requires a thoughtful update sometime in the next several years, with input from all stakeholders, if it is going to promote durable changes in the way near shore fisheries resources are managed for the benefit of both human welfare and environmental integrity

Carbon Dioxide in Exoplanetary Atmospheres: Rarely Dominant Compared to Carbon Monoxide and Water in Hot, Hydrogen-dominated Atmospheres

We present a comprehensive study of the abundance of carbon dioxide in exoplanetary atmospheres in hot, hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. We construct novel analytical models of systems in chemical equilibrium that include carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water, methane and acetylene and relate the equilibrium constants of the chemical reactions to temperature and pressure via the tabulated Gibbs free energies. We prove that such chemical systems may be described by a quintic equation for the mixing ratio of methane. By examining the abundances of these molecules across a broad range of temperatures (spanning equilibrium temperatures from 600 to 2500 K), pressures (via temperature-pressure profiles that explore albedo and opacity variations) and carbon-to-oxygen ratios, we conclude that carbon dioxide is subdominant compared to carbon monoxide and water. Atmospheric mixing does not alter this conclusion if carbon dioxide is subdominant everywhere in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide may attain comparable abundances if the metallicity is greatly enhanced, but this property is negated by temperatures above 1000 K. For hydrogen-dominated atmospheres, our generic result has the implication that retrieval studies may wish to set the subdominance of carbon dioxide as a prior of the calculation and not let its abundance completely roam free as a fitting parameter, because it directly affects the inferred value of the carbon-to-oxygen ratio and may produce unphysical conclusions. We discuss the relevance of these implications for the hot Jupiter WASP-12b and suggest that some of the previous results are chemically impossible. The relative abundance of carbon dioxide to acetylene is potentially a sensitive diagnostic of the carbon-to-oxygen ratio.Comment: Accepted by ApJ. 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 table

Exit polling and racial bloc voting: Combining individual-level and R×\timesC ecological data

Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of some areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating individual-level data into the model. In this paper we test the limits of such an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to assess triggers in voting rights laws that can determine the composition of United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes and our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably available without its use.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS353 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org