Weldments are particularly susceptible to fracture due to defects, material property variations, and residual stresses created during the welding process. It is common in fracture assessments of welded structures to ignore these features; defects are often idealized to be crack-like, weld properties to be homogeneous, and residual stresses to be uniaxial and tensile or nonexistent. This paper p...

INTRODUCTION Community health needs assessments (CHNA) are completed to meet varied regulatory and statutory requirements for local public health departments, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) hospitals, and Federally Qualified Health Centers. Although compliance is a motivating factor, these entities are committed to understanding the communities they serve and to developing strategies to address health ne...

Some organizations, such as General Electric, currently use or have used forced distribution performance evaluation systems in order to rate employees’ performance. This paper addresses the advantages and disadvantages as well as the legal implications of using such a system. It also discusses how an organization might assess whether a forced distribution system would be a good choice and key c...

How do investors evaluate financial products? We propose that investors' financial decisions are influenced by third-party information highlighted by product ratings or certifications. Particularly, we provide an experimental study to investigate the effects of ratings on financial decision-making. Results show that participants' product evaluations and risk perceptions differ if the investment...

In and around urban areas pollution of natural water bodies is on the rise. As a result, wastewater irrigation is an increasingly common reality around most cities in the developing world. For reasons of technical capacity or economics, effective treatment may not be available for years to come; therefore, international guidelines to safeguard farmers and consumers must be practical and offer f...

For the performance evaluation of coal enterprises energy conservation and reduction of pollutant emission, a new attitude index group decision-making method is proposed based on trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Under the condition in which the information of attributes weights and decision maker weights is entirely, the attitude index is introduced firstly. By solving the fuzzy object programming fo...

This article explores the relationship between the social construction of risk, uncertainty and evaluation in the field of development cooperation. It explores the assumption that risk and uncertainty are unusually high in development cooperation. Perceptions of risk and uncertainty are cultural constructs. Several authors have identified perceptions of uncertainty as one of the most important ...

This paper discusses some of the challenges faced by a policy treatment of speculative trading that is motivated by differences in beliefs. The first challenge is philosophical. Suppose two investors prefer to speculate with each other, under the common knowledge that they are motivated to trade purely by a difference in beliefs (unconditional probability assessments). In the absence of third-p...

In a 29-year study of 6,203 individuals ranging in age from 41 to 96 years at initial assessment, we evaluated the relative and combined influence of 65 mortality risk factors, which included sociodemographic variables, lifestyle attributes, medical indices, and multiple cognitive abilities. Reductions in mortality risk were most associated with higher self-rated health, female gender, fewer ye...

We study the dynamic general equilibrium of an economy where risk averse shareholders delegate the management of the firm to risk averse managers. The optimal contract has two main components: an incentive component corresponding to a non-tradable equity position and a variable “salary” component indexed to the aggregate wage bill and to aggregate dividends. Tying a manager’s compensation to th...