Simulation study is very important in model validation. It is invaluable and versatile tool especially in statistical problems and modeling where analytical technique is inadequate. In fitting to a model, problems will raise when there exists one or more high-leverage points in the data set. Due to the fact that the presence high-leverage points are commonly occurred in models fitting, we propo...

Adoption of evidence-based practice (EBP) is an increasingly advocated yet formidable challenge. Much work on EBP has implied simplistic solutions: if researchers would produce practice-relevant evidence-based approaches, practitioners would find, adopt, and use them. Blaming researchers for problems in supply, and practitioners for resistance in adoption, will only thwart progress at improving...

It is recognized that international water sector development work has issues with a lack of sustained positive outcomes. A large driver of this outcome is how NGOs work with communities to implement and then manage water services. Many NGOs tend to focus their efforts on improving their reach and organisational growth by continually engaging in new projects. This behaviour is largely driven by ...

The least squares linear regression estimator is well-known to be highly sensitive to unusual observations in the data, and as a result many more robust estimators have been proposed as alternatives. One of the earliest proposals was least-sum of absolute deviations (LAD) regression, where the regression coefficients are estimated through minimization of the sum of the absolute values of the re...

The introduction of good faith bargaining in Western Australia: Policy origins and implications for collective bargaining Michael Gillan and Donella Caspersz University of Western Australia The Australian Industrial Relations Commission ruled in 2003 that there was no legal duty on parties to bargain in ‘good faith’. In Western Australia, the Gallop Labor Government has introduced good faith ba...

We have conducted a multiscale analysis of system behavior for improvement of infection control in and among hospitals, other care facilities and their relationships to community settings. Our analysis identifies key leverage points for intervention to improve the quality of healthcare systems. In particular, it reveals intervention points that are not currently being addressed. While today the...

The paper develops a system dynamics simulation model to understand the dynamics of immunisation with the aim of aiding decision making process by proposing policies that would enhance immunisation utilization. The model is designed with the intent to show how particular variables influence immunisation demand and coverage rather than predict immunisation coverage rates. The paper applies syste...

The introduction of NVDIMMs (truly non-volatile and directly accessible) requires us to rethink all levels of the system stack, from processor features to applications. Operating systems, too, must evolve to support new I/O models for applications accessing persistent data. We are developing Twizzler, an operating system for next-generation memory hierarchies. Twizzler is designed to provide ap...

Crowdsourcing is an increasingly popular phenomenon where companies solicit the help of the public in helping accomplish some of the activities commonly performed by employees or contractors. These activities can range from solving scientific problems that baffle the in-house experts to repetitive and boring tasks that are deemed too mundane for the employees. Other activities include content g...

This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms’ leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm’s value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non–financial US firms drawn from the COMPUSTAT qua...