All of work? All of life? Reconceptualising work‐life balance for the 21st century

This paper argues that the study of work‐life balance to date has, in the main, adopted a restricted conception of both “work” and “life”, which does not take account of recent developments in life worlds, working arrangements and employment relationships. “Life” has hitherto been viewed as largely comprising caring activities for dependent children, whereas “work” has been premised largely on a traditional model of work, characterised by full‐time, permanent employment with one employer and a conventional understanding of what work involves. This means that extant research and theory only provides a partial view of the work‐life needs and experiences of the workforce. In the paper, we propose extending conceptions of both work and life to incorporate different life worlds and social groups and different working arrangements and employment relationships.     

高职院校环境监测实践教学改革探索

本文分析了高职院校环境监测实践教学中存在的问题,从实践参与教学模式、实践教学方法及考核、评价方式等方面进行了一系列的探索和尝试。     

‘I didn't feel like I was alone anymore’: evaluating self‐organised employee coping practices conducted via Facebook

The long‐term fracturing of the labour movement has led to increased attention to employee coping practices under new management practices and labour processes. However, the literature caters little for the recent rise of employees taking to social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, to find ways to cope with the pressures of contemporary employment. To explore the self‐organised coping qualities of SNSs, interviews were conducted with front line workers, employed by a large anti‐trade union US retailer, who contribute to a self‐organised Facebook group set up as a place for fellow employees to deal with collective employment‐related problems. The main findings suggest employee self‐organised Facebook groups represent an important development and extension to the coping practices available to individual and groups of employees. The main implication of the findings is that Facebook groups appear to strengthen and widen the options for employee resilience in an age of continuing trade union retreat.     

A comparison of programming languages in macroeconomics

We solve the stochastic neoclassical growth model, the workhorse of modern macroeconomics, using C++14, Fortran 2008, Java, Julia, Python, Matlab, Mathematica, and R. We implement the same algorithm, value function iteration, in each of the languages. We report the execution times of the codes in a Mac and in a Windows computer and briefly comment on the strengths and weaknesses of each language.     

Repeated moral hazard and recursive Lagrangeans

This paper shows how to solve dynamic agency models by extending recursive Lagrangean techniques à la Marcet and Marimon (2011) to problems with hidden actions. The method has many advantages with respect to the promised utilities approach (Abreu et al., 1990): it is a significant improvement in terms of simplicity, tractability and computational speed. Solutions can be easily computed for hidden actions models with several endogenous state variables and several agents, while the promised utilities approach becomes extremely difficult and computationally intensive even with just one state variable or two agents.     

An information-theoretic approach for forecasting interval-valued SP500 daily returns

We develop an iterative and efficient information-theoretic estimator for forecasting interval-valued data, and use our estimator to forecast the SP500 returns up to five days ahead using moving windows. Our forecasts are based on 13 years of data. We show that our estimator is superior to its competitors under all of the common criteria that are used to evaluate forecasts of interval data. Our approach differs from other methods that are used to forecast interval data in two major ways. First, rather than applying the more traditional methods that use only certain moments of the intervals in the estimation process, our estimator uses the complete sample information. Second, our method simultaneously selects the model (or models) and infers the model’s parameters. It is an iterative approach that imposes minimal structure and statistical assumptions.     

Forecasting Bordeaux wine prices using state-space methods

Generic Bordeaux red wine (basic claret) can be regarded as being similar to an agricultural commodity. Production volumes are substantial, they are traded at high frequency and the quality of the product is relatively homogeneous. Unlike other commodities and the top-end wines (which represent only 3% of the traded volume), there is no futures market for generic Bordeaux wine. Reliable forecasts of prices can to large extent replace this information deficiency and improve the functioning of the market. We use state-space methods with monthly data to obtain a univariate forecasting model for the average price. The estimates highlight the stochastic trend and the seasonality present in the evolution of the price over the period 1999 to 2016. The model predicts the path of wine prices out of sample reasonably well, suggesting that this approach is useful for making reasonably accurate forecasts of future price movements.     

玻璃纤维增强塑料夹砂管初始力学性能检测的研究

由玻璃纤维增强塑料夹砂管的环刚度、刚度等级概念分析了环刚度设计与检测的基本方法,探讨挠曲水平、轴向拉伸强力和环向拉伸强力检测方法,比较分析了各种方法的优缺点与适用范围,对理解及掌握玻璃纤维增强塑料夹砂管初始力学性能的概念及相关检测方法具有一定参考意义。     

粒子群算法惯性算子凹凸性分析

粒子群算法的惯性因子是算法中的一个重要的参数,目前的研究结果表明,惯性因子为减函数时算法的运行效果更为良好。文中提供了四种减函数作为惯性因子可以使用的算子,它们的凹凸性各有不同。对四个算例的数值仿真结果表明,表现最好的是惯性因子先上凸后下凸的PSO,惯性因子为下凸函数的PSO综合表现优于惯性因子为上凸函数的情况。     

Varying Coefficient Regression Models: A Review and New Developments

Varying coefficient regression models are known to be very useful tools for analysing the relation between a response and a group of covariates. Their structure and interpretability are similar to those for the traditional linear regression model, but they are more flexible because of the infinite dimensionality of the corresponding parameter spaces. The aims of this paper are to give an overview on the existing methodological and theoretical developments for varying coefficient models and to discuss their extensions with some new developments. The new developments enable us to use different amount of smoothing for estimating different component functions in the models. They are for a flexible form of varying coefficient models that requires smoothing across different covariates' spaces and are based on the smooth backfitting technique that is admitted as a powerful technique for fitting structural regression models and is also known to free us from the curse of dimensionality.