Performance assessment of major European ports

In the recent literature, the strategic relevance of ports has improved, and this paper provides a comparative analysis of 24 European ports. The port performance has been evaluated considering data envelopment analysis and Shephard’s distance function. This latter approach offers an alternative method to address a significant restraint of the standard Stochastic Frontier when the model needs to consider multiple outputs. From a policy point of view, the conclusion could offer valuable insights to support policy measures targeted to expand port efficiency. The findings obtained from the analysis reveal that several contextual indicators must be included in benchmark analysis.

The stratification of education systems and social background inequality of educational opportunity

This article aims to identify the moderating effect of two dimensions of the stratification of education systems (the extent to which the first selection is based on students’ ability and the age of first selection) on social background gradient in educational attainment. Individual-level data of the European Social Survey (round 1 to 9) is complemented with new contextual indicators measuring various education systems’ characteristics. This article’s contribution to the debate is twofold. First, it simultaneously investigates two dimensions of the stratification of education systems that have never been analyzed in cross-country studies investigating long-term educational outcomes. Second, it provides a series of indicators of education systems’ characteristics collected by means of an online expert survey whose validity and reliability is also tested. Findings show that the two dimensions of the stratification of education systems have opposite effects. As the first selection is increasingly based on students’ ability, social background gradient in educational attainment increases. In contrast, postponing the age of first selection decreases social inequality in educational opportunity.

School Satisfaction and Happiness in 10-Year-Old Children from Seven European Countries

School satisfaction is conceptualized as a crucial factor influencing children´s happiness and consequent healthy functioning in multiple developmental areas. Research to date has mainly evaluated how contextual factors related to the interactions between the student, teachers and classmates influence children’s happiness, not considering other important factors more related to their own student experiences. The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of school satisfaction on happiness in 10-year-old children from Europe. Children’s global school satisfaction levels, as well as different separate indicators of school satisfaction (i.e., satisfaction with other children in class; school marks; school life experience as a student; things they have learned; and relationships with teachers) were considered. The study comprised a sample of 7.445 10-year-old children from seven European countries. First, correlation analysis showed that the overall school satisfaction measure, as well as its different indicators, had positive associations with happiness levels. Second, regression analyses confirmed the effect by indicators of global school satisfaction on happiness. The indicators with the strongest effects were the satisfaction with their life as a student and the satisfaction with other children in the class, while the smallest effects were found regarding the satisfaction with the relationships with teachers and the things learned. These results point out the need to consider personal and contextual indicators of school satisfaction in a program design to foster happiness in 10-year-old children.

An overview of penalised regression methods for informing the selection of predictive markers

Background: Penalised regression methods are a useful atheoretical approach for identifying key predictive indicators when one’s initial list of indicators is substantial, a process which may aid in informing population health surveillance. The purpose of this study was to examine the predictive performance and feature (i.e., variable) selection capability of common penalised regression methods (LASSO, adaptive LASSO, and elastic-net), compared with traditional logistic regression and forward selection methods. Design: Data were drawn from the Australian Temperament Project, a longitudinal cohort study beginning in 1983. The analytic sample consisted of 1,292 (707 women) participants. A total of 102 adolescent psychosocial and contextual indicators were available to predict young adult daily smoking. Findings: Penalised regression methods showed small improvements in predictive performance over logistic regression and forward selection. However, no single penalised regression model outperformed the others. Elastic-net models selected more indicators than either LASSO or adaptive LASSO. Additionally, more regularised models included fewer indicators, yet had comparable predictive performance. Forward selection methods dismissed many indicators identified as important in the penalised regression models. Conclusions: Although overall predictive accuracy was only marginally better with penalised regression method, benefits were most clear in their capacity to select a manageable subset of indicators. Preference to competing penalised regression methods may therefore be guided by feature selection capability, and thus interpretative considerations, rather than predictive performance alone.

ANALYSIS OF CONTEXT DATA IN THE REGIONAL MONITORING OF KNOWLEDGE QUALITY

Ensuring high quality education is an important priority of state educational policy in the Russian Federation. Recently, the quality of education, which directly depends on many factors, has been widely discussed. The aim of the study is a statistical analysis of the results of regional qualimetric monitoring of the quality of knowledge based on contextual indicators that affect the educational results of students. As the main tools used correlation and regression analysis. The described technique was tested in the Pskov region. The results of the study provide relevant information to all interested parties: state and municipal levels of education management, heads and teachers of educational institutions, parents and students.

“It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it”: A study on how tone in symbolic- and realistic threat frames affects anti-immigration attitudes in the Netherlands

Immigration has occupied a prominent spot on many European media agendas. Media are often considered a key player in attitude- formation and separation. Yet, much of their exact influence on people’s immigration attitudes in the real world remains unknown, as data often fall short. This study aims to tackle the role of two common news frames in immigration news –the cultural- and economic frame— as well as the tone applied within these frames in the attitude formation process regarding immigration. With the use of Eurobarometer survey data (14 waves between 2003 and 2009), contextual indicators from the Eurostat website, and manually coded print-news media data from the Netherlands, this study examines whether these frames contribute to people’s attitude change and polarization over the issue. The across-the-board results indicate that increased visibility of negative cultural frames increases anti-immigration attitudes, whereas positive cultural frames yield the opposite result. Economic frames hardly produce any effect, and neither one of the two framing effects is dependent upon people’s political position. Meaning there is no indication that either one of these frames adds to polarization over the issue.

Incidence of and mortality from COVID-19 in the older Brazilian population and its relationship with contextual indicators: an ecological study

Objective: to analyze the incidence of and mortality caused by COVID-19 in the older population in Brazil and its relationship with contextual variables. Methods: the 22 Brazilian states (including the Federal District) with 50 deaths or more due to COVID-19 by May 25th, 2020 were included. The rates of accumulated incidence, accumulated mortality and accumulated lethality among older adults were considered as dependent variables. Among the contextual variables, the provision of health services and professionals, and demographic, income and development indicators were included. The variables were analyzed in a descriptive and bivariate manner using Spearman’s correlation. Results: the state of Pará had the highest incidence and mortality rate among older adults. The highest accumulated lethality rates among this population were observed in Bahia (56.46%), Rio de Janeiro (48.10%) and Pernambuco (40.76%). There was a significant negative moderate correlation between the accumulated incidence rate and the aging index (rho=-0.662; p=0.001) and the proportion of older adults (rho=-0.659; p=0.002); and between the mortality rate and the aging index (rho=-0.520; p=0.013) and the proportion of older adults (rho=-0.502; p=0.017). The accumulated incidence rate and mortality rate also revealed, respectively, a significant positive correlation with the proportion of black (Afro-Brazilian) and brown (mixed race) skinned people (rho=0.524; p=0.018 and rho=0.558; p=0.007) and with the income ratio (rho=0.665; p=0.0001 and rho=0.683; p<0.001). Conclusions: the Brazilian epidemiological situation shows that the mortality of older adults due to COVID-19 in Brazil is related to demographic and income distribution aspects.

Usul al-fi qh. Czym są klasyczne sunnickie „korzenie/podstawy wiedzy o prawie”?

Usul al-fi qh is one of the disciplines of fiqh (the science of religious law in Islam), called for simplicity the theory of law, but actually comprising elements – from the Western perspective – of both theory and philosophy of law, theology, logic, epistemology and linguistics. Usul-al-fi qh literature was written until the end of the classical period in the history of Islamic law, i.e. until roughly the 19th century when the world of Islam came into contact on a larger scale with Western civilisation. As a result, Islamic law entered its modern era. The fi rst works on the theory of law (which have not survived or survived only in fragments) were written in the 10th century – at a time when legal practice had already been well established. A stimulus for the emergence of the theory of law most probably came from Iraq where the intellectual traditions of antiquity were still alive, especially Greek philosophical rationalism. It can be claimed that the theory of law developed by combining rationalistic and traditionalistic ideas in Muslim legal thought. Being an embodiment of this merger, the theory of law owed its beginnings to the community of Baghdad jurists gathered around the Shafi ʻte Ibn Surayj (d. 918). In the legal Sunni tradition, the theory of law was meant as a science of the sources of divine laws (rules), bringing order to human reality, and the methods of deriving them from revelation. These were usul – literally meaning ‘roots/foundations’ (of fiqh). They were made up of the revelation included in the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, as well as a consensus of the mujtahids (ijmaʻ) and the method qiyas (most often understood as an analogy). These were the four basic ‘sources’ of law. There were also the so-called controversial ‘sources’ that were not recognised by all the schools of law but which comprised juristic preference (istihsan), custom (urf) or the principle of blocking actions that might lead to evil (sadd adh-dhara’iʻ). The theory of law was meant to serve the mujtahids (jurists taking up ijtihad or individual juristic effort aimed at deriving a rule for a specifi c case in reliance on the texts of the Quran and Sunna, rules of their interpretation and specifi c methods of juristic reasoning). In interpreting the sense of the texts, the concept of qara’in – contextual indicators – was adopted without, however, developing rules for their identifi cation. For this reason, the theory of law made it practically possible to justify individual views, which were recognized as following from the intention of the revealed texts. Because of the conviction about the divine origins of Islamic law (Shariʻa), a distinctive feature of usul al-fi qh was its embedding in a theological structure with which it made up an organic whole. Moreover, the theory of law was a highly inconsistent discipline because of the selective nature of borrowings from Greek logic and philosophy, adoption of various methods of juristic reasoning, or, fi nally, various fashions of presenting content in individual works. In turn, the common and constant features of this cumulative tradition of usul al-fi qh, which made the discipline a unity, ollowed from resting the whole legal system on four basic sources of law, developing the concept of abrogation and interpreting the sense of the Quranic and sunnaic utterances. In the early 20th century, with ever stronger voices heard in juristic-theological discourse, advocating the adoption of the rationalistic position, a multitude of proposals were put forward to review the classical theory of usul al-fi qh so that it could be practically used when faced with the needs of modern society.