REVIEW OF INEQUALITY METRICS WITH APPLICATION IN INCOME INEQUALITY IN LOUISIANA

Economic data sets usually are, by their nature, very large and therefore researchers naturally want to analyze the distribution of the data set and make statistical inference about various parameters of interest, such as means, medians, variances, etc. To perform such tasks several incomes metrics or indices are generally used. Among the metrics widely used, we will consider in this paper only three: Lorenz curve, the the so-called S-Gini index and the Atkinson index. We also consider a general index of economic inequality that covers a number of indices, including the aforementioned S-Gini and Atkinson indices.Economic inequality, Gini index, Atkinson index, asymptotic normality.

INTEGRATION OF SEMI-SUBSISTENCE AGRICULTURAL FARMS

Intensive agriculture, industrial type, contributed to environmental degradation and pollution. Thus, on the one hand, makes intensive use of chemicals has led to neglect of duty to maintain the natural fertility of the soil organic matter through proper fattening. On the other hand, organizing specialized industrial environments, high animal breeders, considered the only marketable livestock production, neglecting the production of manure, thus representing a break with the brutal nature of biological circuits Following the experience accumulated over two centuries, mankind has drawn valuable education obligation to safeguard the habitat of nature as a collaborator. In this respect, the main task of our times is to develop appropriate technologies humanist ideal, so that man can become a being as fully integrated into the social and cosmic environment. In the present period as a peasant household current form, is typical of developing countries. It is generated by the result of families who received income from farming and increase farm animalelor.Gospodãria organizational structure is the basic economic and agricultural economy. On the basis of the idea that organic production is the main cause of degradation of the biological quality of products is inadequate human intervention at various structural levels of the biosphere, and the most severe effects on humans resulting from the cumulation of errors relating to soil, plants and animals. Organic farming places emphasis on quality natural products, the quantity and productivity issues as a peripheral level. A balanced rural development policy for the future is not an option but a necessity, especially considering the fact that the issue of agriculture and rural development has important national connotations and is a very complex and timely in Romania Regional development is a concept that aims at stimulating and diversifying economic activities, encouraging private sector investment, helping to reduce unemployment and ultimately lead to improved living standards, according to the regions of the country\'s developmentPeasant household, sustainable development, farms, subsistence, european agriculture

AGRICULTURE IN ROMANIA IN THE PROCESS OF INTEGRATION INTO EUROPEAN STRUCTURES DURING POST - ACCESSION

European Union and its Member States shall adjust some provisions of the development strategies aimed at increasing food production in sustainable ways, protecting natural resources and increase competitiveness of European agriculture on the world market. Romania faces imbalances in market conditions is not rationally use land particularly favorable to obtain a competitive agricultural supplies. Large annual variations in crop conditions in which the yields per hectare and per animal is about half the EU15 average does not provide the power necessary at affordable prices, especially for vulnerable population groups. Addressing structural and operational problems of the institutional system of agriculture in Romania\'s European integration process is an important way of overcoming the situations to which the elimination of disparities in economic development and social peace disturbed by high and rising prices of food, produced in quantities increasing imports. In the current international situation in which Romania difficulties in structural adjustment in agriculture and reduction of disparities compared to EU Member States, a national policy of granting real priorities for the sector is badly needed. These priorities cover both ways of achieving the overall objectives which fall within the strategic guidelines of the European Union and European integration meets the needs and solving specific national targets.European integration, rural development, agricultural policy, national objectives, agricultural holdings.

Interactions among components of a university system

In general, terms like competitivity and performance are found together when we want to evaluate the competitivity of a university in the academic system or when we want to rank the performance of the faculty members in the academic world or their competitivity inside their institution. As such, we are interested both in the performance of the institution, as well as in the performance of its human components, the students or the faculty members, with the well defined goal of improving, when it is necessary, the low performances in order to increase se competitivity at the general level.performance, competitivity, management.

Perceptions on the Effectiveness of Communication between Public Institutions and Journalists through Social Media

This article presents the challenges and opportunities of social media for public institutions and argues that the designing and implementing government public relations using social media involves more than merely having another communication channel for publics. I will explain the “social media”, the differences between social media and electronic-Public Relations - E-PR, and the communication between public institutions and journalists. The interviews with journalists or with PR specialists in public institutions were focused on the use, the extent of this use, and the perceived value of various social media as sources contributing to agenda building (Cobb, Elder 1983). If journalists are regularly monitoring sites and forums for story ideas and information, it is necessary for PR professionals within each industry to carefully monitor the information placed there and perhaps engage content producers. In this paper, I conclude that social media is an alternative instrument to encourage a two-way communication channel between government and publics. In public relations, the emergence of social media challenges the traditional instruments of government public relations. Responding to the development of information and communication technology (ICT), social media is considered as an alternative communication channel of government public relations efforts

Measuring inequality: Statistical inference theory with applications

In this dissertation we develop statistical inference for the Atkinson index, one of the measures of inequality used in studying economic inequality. Specifically, we construct empirical estimators for the Atkinson index, both in the parametric and nonparametric case, and derive formulas for the asymptotic variances for the estimators. These statistics are used for testing hypothesis and constructing confidence intervals for the Atkinson index. We test the validity and the robustness of the asymptotic theory, by simulations (using R, a language and environment for statistical computing and graphics), in the case of one and two populations. In addition to proving asymptotic normality for the theory, we develop a nonparametric bootstrap theory, as an alternative to the asymptotic theory, and present some of the advantages for this method. It is natural, when studying income inequality, to analyze the distributions of the data sets and make statistical inference about various parameters of interest, such as means, medians, variances, etc. In trying to condense the information into a few parameters, one certainly faces a problem of constructing measures or indices that would give a proper idea about what happens in the society under consideration. The mean, as a statistical measures of distribution is useful in some instances, but not particularly relevant when, for example, we have outhers and/or skewed distributions. In addition, the mean does not tell us if inequality changes by transfers of wealth from the rich to the poor or from the poor to the rich. Hence, the need for constructing measures with various properties like transfer sensitivity, scale and/or location invariance. Indeed, some measures, like the Gini index, are not sensitive to the transfers at the lower and upper ends of the distribution, whereas other measures like the Atkinson index are more sensitive to such transfers. In this dissertation we have chosen to work with the Atkinson index because of its econometric properties described in Chapter 1 and the lack of inferential statistics results in the literature pertaining to this index

CHANGES IN MANAGEMENT AS AN INSTRUMENT OF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION

In this study, based on the fact that training is an important component of the educational sector both for undergraduate and graduate students, the necessity of knowledge concept as a process of change is imposed.This argument is based on the models which serves as the centre of the change: professional skills of the trainer – the axes of V. Hall, N. Cromey-Hawke and D. Oldroyd: time, content, meetings; Kurt Lewin's model are in two dimensions: knowledge of self, lack of sufficient knowledge of self and self-concern, lack of self-absorption; but the underlying methodology entails the development and organization of training programmes in order to stimulate the learner to adapt to new existential contexts.In conclusion, we noted that the support of the learner's motivation to continue the auto-training process is closely linked to the trainee’s ability to identify the most appropriate methods required as the conditions for training.Thus, at the same time, they continued to examine the cycle of M. Pedler, J. G. Burgoyne and T. Boydell. Hence, the advantages and disadvantages of the various types of training included in the training programmes as methods, and a number of conditions which followed, lead to an increase in the efficiency of the formation and the development of mutual trust between the trainers and the trainee

Closed-loop effects in cardiovascular clinical decision support

We have recently seen impressive methodological developments in quantitative cardiovascular physiology and pathophysiology, with novel mathematical models for the mechanical and electrophysiological processes of the heart, and fluid dynamical models to describe the pressure and flow distribution in the blood vessel network. This allows us to gain deeper insight into the state of a variety of serious cardiovascular diseases. The majority of recent research studies have focused on the forward problem: developing flexible mathematical models and robust numerical simulation procedures to match characteristics of physiological target data, and the inverse problem: inferring model parameters from cardiac physiological data with reliable uncertainty quantification. However, when connecting mathematical model predictions and statistical inference to the clinical decision process, new challenges arise. This paper briefly discusses the complications that potentially result from closed-loop effects, and the model extensions that are required to reduce the ensuing bias

Bayesian parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification in fluid-dynamics models of the pulmonary circulation system

The past few decades have witnessed an explosive synergy between physics and the life sciences. In particular, physical modelling in medicine and physiology is a topical research area. The present work focuses on the inverse problem, more specifically on the parameter inference and uncertainty quantification in a 1D fluid-dynamics model for quantitative physiology: the pulmonary blood circulation. The particular application is pulmonary hypertension, requiring an analysis of the blood pressure, whose measurement in the pulmonary system can only be obtained invasively for patients. The ultimate goal is to develop a non-invasive disease diagnostication method. This could be accomplished by combining non-invasively obtained haemodynamic data (blood flow measured with MRI) with imaging data (CT scans of the lung structure), to be used in conjunction with mathematical and statistical modelling. This will provide a decision-making support mechanism in the clinic, ultimately aiding in personalised medicine. This thesis adopts a Bayesian approach to uncertainty quantification in physiological models, allowing to assess the credibility of these models. The danger with using overly confident models is that they could produce biased predictions, ultimately leading to the wrong disease diagnosis and treatment. Inference of unknown and immeasurable parameters of several 1D fluid-dynamics models, expressed through partial differential equations, is performed with Markov Chain Monte Carlo. These parameters act as bio-indicators for the disease, e.g. vessel wall stiffness, which is high in pulmonary hypertension patients. In addition, the uncertainty in the model form and the data measurement process (jointly called model mismatch) is captured, and the model mismatch is represented with Gaussian Processes. Given that the mathematical model is not a perfect representation of the reality, and that the data measurement process is prone to errors, this introduces an extra layer of uncertainty. If unaccounted for, the result is biased and overly confident parameter estimates and model predictions. Yet another source of uncertainty modelled in this study is the variability in the vessel network geometry, connectivity and size, which is shown to introduce variability in the model predictions, and must be accounted for. The uncertainty in the model parameters, model form, data measurement process and vessel network propagates through to the model predictions, which is also quantified. Lastly, this thesis is concerned with accelerating the computational efficiency of the statistical inference procedure, aiming to make the methods suitable for use in the clinic. Statistical emulation is used in conjunction with a series of efficient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithms, particularly adapted to computationally expensive models. A comparative evaluation study is carried out to identify the algorithm giving the best trade-off between accuracy and efficiency on a set of representative benchmark differential equation models

Resuscitating Old Forest Models to Meet Present Environmental Reporting Needs

A plethora of forest models were developed by transforming dependent variable, which introduces bias in estimation if appropriate correction are not applied when back-transforming to the original units. The need for accurate reporting of environmental statistics to national and international agencies lead to improvement of existing models or development of new ones. However, in many instances, not only were no original models established, but original data sets are no longer available, which recommends ad-hoc bias corrections of existing models. The present research presents a procedure for bias correction based on information extracted from summary statistics, specifically coefficient of determination and standard error. The transformations considered in this study are trigonometric (i.e. sine, cosine, tangent, arcsine, and arctangent), hyperbolic (i.e., sine, secant, and tangent), power, and logarithm. The method was applied to site index equations of Douglas Fir and Ponderosa Pine [Hann and Scrivani, 1987], and tree volume of 27 species from Romania [Giurgiu, 1974]. Using only the information describing the models, such as variance or range, the proposed method corrected the bias, and proved that estimates can change from 1% (the site index equations of Hann and Scrivani) to 40% (the tree volumes of Giurgiu)