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Upgraded water and better sanitation are essential for human health, but it is still a challenge to get admittance to these facilities and the concerns of public health becomes most victims. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the socioeconomic and demographic forecaster linked with admittance to safer water and upgraded sanitation facilities in Rwanda. The study uses the cross-sectional data from the 2014 to 2015 Rwanda Demographic Health Survey and uses linear generalized models for the analysis.

The logit and probit regressions were used to analyze whether or not any forecaster variables influenced the predicted variable.

The findings showed that the households with the highest education background were 11.55 times more probable to have admittance to upgraded water sources compared to those who had none level of education. Likewise, the respondents with secondary and higher education were, respectively, 9.55 times and 4.09 times more probable to have admittance to upgraded latrine facilities. The authors found the increase of household size as significantly associated with admittance to the upgraded water source and latrine facilities compared to those families with fewer household members. The results also found that wealthier households had a larger odds ratio significance in getting admittance to upgraded water sources and sanitation facilities compared to poorer households. The study results found the greatest gap in access to upgraded water sources and sanitation facilities in rural areas compared to urban areas.

The implications of the study results call for water policy formulation and implementation in Rwanda, as well as generally for other developing countries.

In Rwanda, this is the first study that empirically inspected the relationship between socioeconomic and demographic forecasters on admittance to upgraded water and sanitation facilities.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-07-2019-0452

This paper aims to study the impact of manufacturer’s upgrading strategy of durable products on the retailer’s decision on trade-in program and her decision on the secondary market.

This paper develops a channel that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer, where the manufacturer releases an upgraded product, and the retailer introduces a trade-in program for consumers, simultaneously, decides whether to enter the secondary market. These approaches are modeled through Stackelberg game.

This paper reveals that the optimal conditions for manufacturer to release upgraded products and retailer to resell used products in the secondary market, and it reveals that under what conditions it is profitable for retailer to enter the secondary market under product upgrade levels.

If the manufacturer’s upgrade level is low, it is profitable for the retailer to enter the secondary market. However, if the manufacturer’s upgrade level is high, it is unprofitable for the retailer to enter the secondary market.

In this paper, the active secondary market, upgrading of new products, consumer market segmentation and especially, the upgrade degree of new products as a function of consumer demand are considered simultaneously.

The purpose of this paper is to gain knowledge on the renovation status for Norwegian dwellings that can be used to design attractive energy efficiency measures. Norwegian dwellings are exposed to a windy, cold and moist climate and the technical condition of existing dwellings depend on the owners priorities regarding maintenance and renovation. The paper focuses on the renovation status and technical condition of privately owned detached houses built in Norway in the 1980s constituting 10 per cent of the total Norwegian dwelling stock. These houses are high-energy spenders and are at a stage in their lifetime where major renovation such as new windows and ventilation system is expected.

The status for redecoration, maintenance and renovation as well as the technical condition of 91 dwellings are mapped and analysed.

An analysis of the empirical data identified four categories of houses when considering home upgrades and technical condition: the as built, the aesthetic, the well kept and the do it yourselves houses. There is no correlation between the observed technical condition and the home upgrade level for the houses in the study. Significant resources may have been used for redecoration and unskilled renovation while not dealing with the need for maintenance and repair.

The knowledge on homeowner categories can be used to tailor policy instruments to accelerate energy efficiency rates for privately owned dwellings.

There are no previous studies on Norwegian private homeowners and the technical condition of their homes.

In the current market scenario, software upgrades and updates have proved to be very handy in improving the reliability of the software in its operational phase. Software upgrades help in reinventing working software through major changes, like functionality addition, feature enhancement, structural changes, etc. In software updates, minor changes are undertaken which help in improving software performance by fixing bugs and security issues in the current version of the software. Through the current proposal, the authors wish to highlight the economic benefits of the combined use of upgrade and update service. A cost analysis model has been proposed for the same.

The article discusses a cost analysis model highlighting the distinction between launch time and time to end the testing process. The number of bugs which have to be catered in each release has been determined which also consists of the count of latent bugs of previous version. Convolution theory has been utilized to incorporate the joint role of tester and user in bug detection into the model. The cost incurred in debugging process was determined. An optimization model was designed which considers the reliability and budget constraints while minimizing the total debugging cost. This optimization was used to determine the release time and testing stop time.

The proposal is backed by real-life software bug dataset consisting of four releases. The model was able to successfully determine the ideal software release time and the testing stop time. An increased profit is generated by releasing the software earlier and continues testing long after its release.

The work contributes positively to the field by providing an effective optimization model, which was able to determine the economic benefit of the combined use of upgrade and update service. The model can be used by management to determine their timelines and cost that will be incurred depending on their product and available resources.

Bench‐top wind tunnels are used extensively by the US Air Force for calibrating anemometers. As anemometers have improved, the need for reduced uncertainties in the bench‐top wind tunnels was required. A three‐pronged approach was used to reduce low velocity uncertainties by a factor of 2‐3.Design/methodology/approach – The reduction in velocity uncertainties was achieved by upgrading the wind tunnel instrumentation that measured the pressure and differential pressure and by improving the velocity calibration of the bench‐top wind tunnel. A detailed uncertainty analysis was performed to determine how much the instrumentation needed to improve. A laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) was used to calibrate each wind tunnel at low velocities.Findings – The uncertainty analysis indicated that the main contributors to the velocity uncertainty were the differential pressure and the pressure measurements. These two process instruments were upgraded to reduce their individual uncertainties by a factor of 2. Additionally each bench‐top wind tunnel was calibrated using the LDV with special emphasis on flows from 0.15‐3.0 m/s. In all, nine wind tunnels were calibrated and the upgraded systems exhibited a reduction in uncertainties in the low flow region of a factor of 2‐3.Originality/value – A need to reduce velocity uncertainties in bench‐top wind tunnels was a requirement for the US Air Force calibration program. Upgraded instrumentation and individual calibration with an LDV provided the needed reduction. In the low flow region of 0.15 to 3.0 m/s, uncertainties were reduced by a factor of 2‐3.

This paper aims to propose and establish a set of new benchmark models to investigate and confidently validate the modeling and prediction of total stray-field loss inside magnetic and non-magnetic components under harmonics-direct current (HDC) hybrid excitations. As a new member-set (P21^e) of the testing electromagnetic analysis methods Problem 21 Family, the focus is on efficient analysis methods and accurate material property modeling under complex excitations.

This P21^e-based benchmarking covers the design of new benchmark models with magnetic flux compensation, the establishment of a new benchmark measurement system with HDC hybrid excitation, the formulation of the testing program (such as defined Cases I–V) and the measurement and prediction of material properties under HDC hybrid excitations, to test electromagnetic analysis methods and finite element (FE) computation models and investigate the electromagnetic behavior of typical magnetic and electromagnetic shields in electrical equipment.

The updated Problem 21 Family (V.2021) can now be used to investigate and validate the total power loss and the different shielding performance of magnetic and electromagnetic shields under various HDC hybrid excitations, including the different spatial distributions of the same excitation parameters. The new member-set (P21^e) with magnetic flux compensation can experimentally determine the total power loss inside the load-component, which helps to validate the numerical modeling and simulation with confidence. The additional iron loss inside the laminated sheets caused by the magnetic flux normal to the laminations must be correctly modeled and predicted during the design and analysis. It is also observed that the magnetic properties (B27R090) measured in the rolling and transverse directions with different direct current (DC) biasing magnetic field are quite different from each other.

The future benchmarking target is to study the effects of stronger HDC hybrid excitations on the internal loss behavior and the microstructure of magnetic load components.

This paper proposes a new extension of Problem 21 Family (1993–2021) with the upgraded excitation, involving multi-harmonics and DC bias. The alternating current (AC) and DC excitation can be applied at the two sides of the model’s load-component to avoid the adverse impact on the AC and DC power supply and investigate the effect of different AC and DC hybrid patterns on the total loss inside the load-component. The overall effectiveness of numerical modeling and simulation is highlighted and achieved via combining the efficient electromagnetic analysis methods and solvers, the reliable material property modeling and prediction under complex excitations and the precise FE computation model using partition processing. The outcome of this project will be beneficial to large-scale and high-performance numerical modeling.

IBM owners who upgraded to PC‐DOS 4.0 may rightly whimper when confronted with software upgrades—and this time, thanks to System 7, Macintosh owners don't get to nod smugly either. Whether at the system level or in applications, software upgrades can reduce the most expert techie to tears of frustration. At least with hardware, the manufacturers don't send you notices that it's time to change to a new version for a modest additional fee. Software involves more frequent upgrades than hardware, but the choices are no less difficult. The author recounts some personal experiences and offers some guidelines that may or may not do you any good. The author also provides notes from July‐September 1991 PC literature. Other than the drum‐beating for DOS 5.0 (not cited here), it's been a mixed period: some interesting material with few breakthroughs.

Jensen and Murphy (1990) and others have found a small but statistically significant relationship between firm performance (as measured by change in shareholder wealth or firm profits) and executive compensation. In this study we investigate the pay‐ performance relationship further by considering the relationship between an outside measure of firm performance (changes in the firm's bond rating) and the contemporaneous change in the compensation of the firm's CEO. We find that when a firm's bond rating is down‐graded, CEO total compensation declines by a relatively small amount ($165,500) and when a firm's bond rating is upgraded, CEO total compensation increases markedly ($3,202,900). Thus, while a positive pay‐performance relationship exists, the relationship is not symmetric. CEO compensation changes (increases) much more when firm performance improves than it changes (decreases) when firm performance declines. Further, most of the change in CEO compensation occurs in the stock gains (profits from the exercise of stock options) category for both firms experiencing bond rating upgrades and down‐grades.

Drawing on the knowledge-based theory, the purpose of this paper is to extend the current understanding of a company’s upgrading of a foreign subsidiary’s value-adding scope and its impact on growth.

This study applies a longitudinal approach and analyses the value-adding scopes of the subsidiaries of two Swedish industrial companies in the USA, resulting in a proposed model.

Greater adaptation of the corporate competitive strategy is linked to a greater likelihood of upgrading the subsidiary’s scope to include R&D and production activities. Also, market experience of the subsidiary is positively associated with this likelihood. The greater the coherence between the scope and knowledge originating from the local adaptation of the corporate competitive strategy and the subsidiary’s market experience, the greater the growth of the subsidiary.

This study contributes to the literature on international business and strategy in several ways. Future studies may turn the propositions into hypotheses for statistical tests.

An industrial company striving for the growth of a foreign subsidiary must assess subsidiary knowledge pertaining to value-adding. To achieve high growth, the subsidiary’s value-adding scope must be aligned with knowledge stemming from the corporate competitive strategy and market experience.

This is the first study explicitly explaining the crucial upgrading of a foreign subsidiary’s value-adding scope to include R&D and production. Coherence between an upgraded scope and crucial knowledge explains the subsidiary’s growth.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the recently developed multi-physics computational model for the conventional Gas Metal Arc Welding (GMAW) joining process that has been upgraded with respect to its predictive capabilities regarding the spatial distribution of the mechanical properties controlling the ballistic limit (i.e. penetration resistance) of the weld.

The original model consists of five modules, each dedicated to handling a specific aspect of the GMAW process, i.e.: electro-dynamics of the welding-gun; radiation-/convection-controlled heat transfer from the electric arc to the workpiece and mass transfer from the filler-metal consumable electrode to the weld; prediction of the temporal evolution and the spatial distribution of thermal and mechanical fields within the weld region during the GMAW joining process; the resulting temporal evolution and spatial distribution of the material microstructure throughout the weld region; and spatial distribution of the as-welded material mechanical properties. The model is upgraded through the introduction of the sixth module in the present work in recognition of the fact that in thick steel GMAW weldments, the overall ballistic performance of the armor may become controlled by the (often inferior) ballistic limits of its weld (fusion and heat-affected) zones.

The upgraded GMAW process model is next applied to the case of butt-welding of MIL A46100 (a prototypical high-hardness armor-grade martensitic steel) workpieces using filler-metal electrodes made of the same material. The predictions of the upgraded GMAW process model pertaining to the spatial distribution of the material microstructure and ballistic-limit-controlling mechanical properties within the MIL A46100 butt-weld are found to be consistent with general expectations and prior observations.

To the authors’ knowledge, the present work is the first reported attempt to establish, using computational modeling, functional relationships between the GMAW process parameters and the mechanical properties controlling the ballistic limit of the resulting weld.