The Rasch family of models considered in this paper includes models for polytomous items and multiple correlated latent traits, as well as for dichotomous items and a single latent variable. An R package is described that computes estimates of parameters and robust standard errors of a class of log-linear-by-linear association (LLLA) models, which are derived from a Rasch family of models. The ...

This article assesses insurance uptake in three community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes located in rural parts of two of India's poorest states and offered through women's self-help groups (SHGs). We examine what drives uptake, the degree of inclusive practices of the schemes and the influence of health status on enrolment. The most important finding is that a household's socio-economic...

Homogenisation of consolidation and compressible fluid flow in dual-porosity media has highlighted the existence of three characteristic macroscopic behaviours. These three behaviours are, namely, a dual-porosity description which includes memory effects, a single-porosity description with which the micro-porosity is simply ignored, and an intermediate behaviour which we refer as behaviour with...

A field experiment consisting of geophysical logging and tracer testing was conducted in a single well that penetrated a sand-and-gravel aquifer at the U.S. Geological Survey Toxic Substances Hydrology research site on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Geophysical logs and flowmeter/pumping measurements were obtained to estimate vertical profiles of porosity phi, hydraulic conductivity K, temperature, a...

This study aims to identify favorable oil–gas reservoir facies in the Chishan group of the Wubao fault zone (Gaoyou sag, Subei basin, China) using the methods of outcrops and cores observation, granularity analysis, scanning electron microscope, log data, etc. The results suggest that the Chishan group in the studied area mainly develops desert sedimentary system, and contains five kinds of fac...

We study the length of the gaps between consecutive members in the sumset sA when A is a pseudo s-th power sequence, with s ≥ 2. We show that, almost surely, lim sup(bn+1 − bn)/ log(bn) = sss!/Γs(1/s), where bn are the elements of sA.

A filling curve γ on a based surface S determines a pseudo-Anosov homeomorphism P(γ) of S via the process of “point-pushing along γ.” We consider the relationship between the self-intersection number i(γ) of γ and the dilatation λγ of P(γ); our main result is that (i(γ) + 1) 1/5 ≤ λγ ≤ 9i(γ). We also bound the least dilatation of any pseudo-Anosov in the point-pushing subgroup of a closed surfa...

The main result of this paper is a universal finiteness theorem for the set of all small dilatation pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms φ : S → S, ranging over all surfaces S. More precisely, we consider pseudo-Anosov homeomorphisms φ : S → S with |χ(S)| log(λ(φ)) bounded above by some constant, and we prove that, after puncturing the surfaces at the singular points of the stable foliations, the resul...

Let (M,J, θ) be a closed pseudo-Hermintian (2n+1)-manifold. In this paper, we derive the subgradient estimate for positive solutions to a nonlinear subparabolic equation ∂u ∂t = △bu+au log u+bu on M× [0,∞), where a, b are two real constants. M.S.C. 2010: 32V05, 32V20.

Consider an unknown function L(·) : {1, · · · , d} → {1, · · · , r} with range R = {L(i)|i = 1, · · · , d}. Given d, r, , δ > 0 we show how to compute an estimate p̃ such that with probability at least 1 − δ we have ||R|/r − p̃| ≤ p̃. This is an estimate with a fixed relative error, which is stronger than finding an estimate with a fixed absolute error. This calculation can be performed efficientl...