The Demand for Private Health Insurance in Malawi

This study investigates the determinants of demand for private health insurance among formal sector employees in Malawi, a poor country with heavy pressure on under-funded free government health services. The study is based on membership in the Medical Aid Society of Malawi’s (MASM), three schemes, namely: the VIP, the best; the Executive, the intermediate; and the Econoplan, the minimum. The results indicate that formal sector employees prefer to receive medical treatment from private fee-charging health facilities, where health insurance would be relevant. The study finds that the probability of enrolling in any of MASM’s schemes increases with income and with age for the top and minimum schemes. More children and good health status reduce the probability of enrolling into the two lower schemes. The results suggest the potentially important roles that can be played by information and interventions that address the affordability factor such as through employer contributions that take into consideration income and family size.Health insurance; MASM; Multinomial logit

Corporate Social Responsibility: International Perspectives

In this introduction to the special issue, we provide a brief review of the CSR literature with attention to some of the difficulties in globalizing the existing CSR concepts. Following this we provide a brief summary of each of the four papers that comprise the special issue, with emphasis on the unique contribution of each.

Corporate Social Responsibility: Strategic Implications

We describe a variety of perspectives on corporate social responsibility (CSR), which we use to develop a framework for consideration of the strategic implications of CSR. Based on this framework, we propose an agenda for additional theoretical and empirical research on CSR. We then review the papers in this special issue and relate them to the proposed agenda.

Some clinical aspects of simple goitre in children with special reference to the chalk valleys of Wilts.

(1) In this area, there is evidence to show that goitre incidence in children is associated with water supplies from cretaceous formations. (2) These water supplies contain in suspension mineral matter of a calcareous nature. (3) There is no evidence in this area to show that contaminated water supply is a factor in the causation of goitre. (4) The class of child liable to attack With goitre is the mal- nourished child of the agricultural worker. (5) This subnórmal nutrition is due to a deficient dietary lacking in vitamines. (6) Simple goitre in early life increases the numbers of "dull and backward" children. (7) The goitrous child is often handicapped in later life on account of his liability to disease and lowered mentality. (8) If malnutrition were prevented or treated in the pre- school period, the number of goitrous children would be small. The rural worker should be instructed in a more suitable dietary for his children. (9) That treatment of malnutrition in early goitre is of primary importance. (10) Diseased tonsils herald the onset of goitre, and tonsillectomy is harmful in these cases. (11) Iodine is definitely curative of such diseased tonsils and early goitres, provided malnutrition, if present, is treated at the same time

The Jenny Interviews and Other Sightings: Needle(s) in the Proverbial Haystack(s)

Article originally published in the Pitcairn Log in July 2021On April 28, 1789, acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian disposed “Captain” William Bligh and 18 crew from the HMAV Bounty just of Tofua, South Pacific Ocean. Bligh’s successful open-boat journey to Timor ranks amongst the greatest survival stories in naval history. Christian’s returned to Tahiti, failed settlement at Tubuai, and eventual “rediscovery” of Pitcairn Island are well known among Bounty enthusiasts. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books and articles have been written on the Bounty/Pitcairn Island Saga over the last 230 years including those written by naval officers, early visitors, descendants (Rosalind Amelia Young, Glynn Christian), journalists, and scholars from most notably history, but also those with credentials in anthropology, sociology, geography, and even psychology. Prior to Henry Evans Maude’s (1958) article published in The Journal of the Polynesian Society (volume 11, 1964) titled “In search of a home: From the mutiny to Pitcairn Island (1789-1790),” the Bounty’s post-mutiny peregrinations from its return to Matavia Bay, Tahiti, on 6 June 1789 and the "rediscovery” of Pitcairn Island on January 15, 1790, were sketchy at best. Maude, a former colonial administrator and subsequent research fellow at the Australian National University, located two “lost” newspaper articles pertaining to the Bounty and Pitcairn Island. These articles contained interviews with Teehuteatuaona (aka Jenny), the consort initially of mutineers Alexander Smith (John Adams) then Isaac Martin. In these interviews Jenny provided geographic references and clues that elucidated the Bounty’s path post mutiny. Jenny’s accounts also illuminated life on Pitcairn Island, especially the violence that occurred during its first ten years

Adaptive sampling in autonomous marine sensor networks

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution June 2006In this thesis, an innovative architecture for real-time adaptive and cooperative control of autonomous sensor platforms in a marine sensor network is described in the context of the autonomous oceanographic network scenario. This architecture has three major components, an intelligent, logical sensor that provides high-level environmental state information to a behavior-based autonomous vehicle control system, a new approach to behavior-based control of autonomous vehicles using multiple objective functions that allows reactive control in complex environments with multiple constraints, and an approach to cooperative robotics that is a hybrid between the swarm cooperation and intentional cooperation approaches. The mobility of the sensor platforms is a key advantage of this strategy, allowing dynamic optimization of the sensor locations with respect to the classification or localization of a process of interest including processes which can be time varying, not spatially isotropic and for which action is required in real-time. Experimental results are presented for a 2-D target tracking application in which fully autonomous surface craft using simulated bearing sensors acquire and track a moving target in open water. In the first example, a single sensor vehicle adaptively tracks a target while simultaneously relaying the estimated track to a second vehicle acting as a classification platform. In the second example, two spatially distributed sensor vehicles adaptively track a moving target by fusing their sensor information to form a single target track estimate. In both cases the goal is to adapt the platform motion to minimize the uncertainty of the target track parameter estimates. The link between the sensor platform motion and the target track estimate uncertainty is fully derived and this information is used to develop the behaviors for the sensor platform control system. The experimental results clearly illustrate the significant processing gain that spatially distributed sensors can achieve over a single sensor when observing a dynamic phenomenon as well as the viability of behavior-based control for dealing with uncertainty in complex situations in marine sensor networks.Supported by the Office of Naval Research, with a 3-year National Defense Science and Engineering Grant Fellowship and research assistantships through the Generic Ocean Array Technology Sonar (GOATS) project, contract N00014-97-1-0202 and contract N00014-05-G-0106 Delivery Order 008, PLUSNET: Persistent Littoral Undersea Surveillance Network