In an economy that proved to be highly sensitive to housing prices fluctuations it is at least intriguing why the U.S. has accurate housing price indices for the top 20 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) only. This is an important informational gap since in most the states, housing sales in Small Metropolitan Statistical Areas (SMSAs) account for at least 30% of the total state sales. This p...

This cross-sectional study conducted between March and June 2006 examined stress at work and work ability of 180 people with different workplaces within an oil company. Office, laboratory, and oil-field workers were invited to complete the "Occupational Stress Assessment Questionnaire--the Oil Industry Version and Work Ability Index (WAI) Questionnaire". The overall response rate was 69.4%, and...

Marine ecosystem protection and conservation initiatives rely on the assessment of ecological integrity and health status of marine environments. The AZTI's Marine Biotic Index (AMBI), which consists on using macroinvertebrate diversity as indicator of ecosystem health, is used worldwide for this purpose. Yet, this index requires taxonomic assignment of specimens, which typically involves a tim...

Fifty known siblings and fifty unrelated pairs were genotyped using the ABI Identifiler STR system and sibship indices computed for each pair. Combined sibship indices (CSIs) for the known siblings ranged from less than 10 to greater than 1 billion. CSIs for the unrelated pairs ranged from 4.5 x 10(-8) to 0.12. In the known sibling group the percentage of loci where both alleles matched was app...

Nature conservation is increasingly based on a landscape approach rather than a species approach. Landscape planning that includes nature conservation goals requires integrated ecological tools. However, species differ widely in their response to landscape change. We propose a framework of ecologically scaled landscape indices that takes into account this variation. Our approach is based on a c...

This paper presents a new framework for comprehensively evaluating the sustainability content of a product through Product Sustainability Index (PSI) in terms of all three components of sustainability (economy, environment and society) over its total life-cycle (pre-manufacturing, manufacturing, use, post-use). This method is useful in comparing various competitive products of the same family. ...

We previously quantified frailty in aged mice with frailty index (FI) that used specialized equipment to measure health parameters. Here we developed a simplified, noninvasive method to quantify frailty through clinical assessment of C57BL/6J mice (5-28 months) and compared the relationship between FI scores and age in mice and humans. FIs calculated with the original performance-based eight-it...

2. Regional or national MPIs: These are multidimensional poverty measures that have been created by adapting (or using forms of) the method upon which the MPI is based to better address local realities, needs and the data available (these measures use the Alkire-Foster method). Their purpose is to assess multidimensional poverty levels in specific countries or regions in the components most rel...