36 research outputs found
A Communitarian Alternative Solution to the Pension Crisis
This paper evaluates the economic effects of a politically communitarian model of family
ties towards the pension crisis in developing countries. The use of a Canadian - an
individualist-oriented political economic pension system - is compared to a religiously
and culturally communitarian form of family care in Bangladesh, a country slowly
feeling the effects of the pension crisis. The analysis concludes, based on theoretical and
economic evidence, that it is not in the social or economic interest of Bangladesh or
similar countries to use the same policies currently being deployed by Canada and most
other OECD countries. This paper is the first of its kind to apply socioeconomic costs and
benefits of developed countries’ policies and apply them to the context of a developing
country—keeping in mind the cultural aspect and its implications. It aims at bringing
back original ethical and moral values with a social orientation that should inspire all
stakeholders to ensure family self-regulation that converge toward a solid foundation of
communitarian principles
Fractional-order viscoelasticity applied to describe uniaxial stress relaxation of human arteries.
Viscoelastic models can be used to better understand arterial wall mechanics in physiological and pathological conditions. The arterial wall reveals very slow time-dependent decays in uniaxial stress-relaxation experiments, coherent with weak power-law functions. Quasi-linear viscoelastic (QLV) theory was successfully applied to modeling such responses, but an accurate estimation of the reduced relaxation function parameters can be very difficult. In this work, an alternative relaxation function based on fractional calculus theory is proposed to describe stress relaxation experiments in strips cut from healthy human aortas. Stress relaxation (1 h) was registered at three incremental stress levels. The novel relaxation function with three parameters was integrated into the QLV theory to fit experimental data. It was based in a modified Voigt model, including a fractional element of order α, called spring–pot. The stressrelaxation predictionwas accurate and fast. Sensitivity plots for each parameter presented a minimum near their optimal values. Least-squares errors remained below 2%. Values of order α = 0.1–0.3 confirmed a predominant elastic behavior. The other two parameters of the model can be associated to elastic and viscous constants that explain the time course of the observed relaxation function. The fractional-order model integrated into the QLV theory proved to capture the essential features of the arterial wall mechanical response