AIMS Epidemiological evidence indicates a positive relationship between income and the prevalence of alcohol abuse in the general population, but an inverse relationship between income and alcohol dependence. Among those with a diagnosis of alcohol abuse, the most prevalent criterion is hazardous use, which commonly requires sufficient resources to own or access a car. The present study investi...

It is possible to partially order cities according to the informativeness of neighborhoods about their ethnic groups. It is also possible to partially order cities with two ethnic groups according to the Lorenz criterion. We show that a segregation order satisfies four well-established segregation principles if and only if it is consistent with the informativeness criterion. We then use this re...

This paper is about the economic theory of biodiversity preservation. A cost-effectiveness methodology is constructed, which results in a particular formula that can be used as a criterion to rank projects. The ranking criterion is sufficiently operational to be useful in suggesting what to look at when determining actual conservation priorities among endangered species. At the same time, the f...

A biological model is developed here to determine the fittest attitude to risk. With a fixed environment, the type maximizing expected offspring is selected. This yields the expected utility theorem when translated into a criterion for evaluating gambles over commodities. With a random environment, however, the type selected is strictly less averse to idiosyncratic risk than to risk which is co...

The Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) was presented to obtain the appropriate structure, via the number of hidden nodes, and a new algorithm was proposed to improve the convergence speed of backpropagation training method. The algorithm was obtained by employing the conjugate gradient method to solve the nonlinear part in the weights of the hidden layers and the Kalman filter to solve the li...

Customarily, the LMTD correction factor, FT, is used to screen alternative designs for a heat exchanger. Designs with unacceptably low FT values are discarded. In this paper, authors have proposed a more fundamental criterion, based on feasibility of a multipass exchanger as the only criteria, followed by economic optimization. This criterion, coupled with asymptotic energy targets, provide the...

Abstract This paper considers the economic production quantity (EPQ) problem with backorder in which the setup cost, the holding cost and the backorder cost are characterized as fuzzy variables, respectively. Following expected value criterion and chance constrained criterion, a fuzzy expected value model (EVM) and a chance constrained programming (CCP) model are constructed. Then fuzzy simulat...

The issue of dynamic efficiency is central to analyses of capital accumulation and economic growth. Yet the question of what characteristics should be examined to determine whether actual economies are dynamically efficient is unresolved. This paper develops a criterion for determining whether an economy is dynamically efficient. The criterion, which holds for economies in which technological p...