America's Favorite Holidaysexplores how five of America's culturally important holidays-Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, and Thanksgiving-came to be what they are today, seasonal and ...religious celebrations heavily influenced by modern popular culture. Deftly distilling information from a wide range of sources, Bruce David Forbes reveals often-surprising answers to questions about each holiday's traditions. Was Christmas always as commercialized as it is today? Is Thanksgiving a religious or secular holiday? When did we begin trick-or-treating on Halloween? Appealing and insightful,America's Favorite Holidayssatisfies our curiosity about the origins of our holidays and the fascinating ways in which religion and culture mix.
Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase ...violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, those marked by public days off for dedicated celebration. We argue that militant actors anticipate societal disapproval of violence, predictably inducing restraint on these days. We assess our theory using innovative parallel analysis of multiple datasets and qualitative evidence from Islamic insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan from 2004 to 2014. Consistent with our theory, we find that important Islamic holidays witness systematic declines in violence—as much as 41%—and provide evidence that anticipation of societal disapproval is producing these results. Significantly, we find no systematic evidence for surges of violence associated with any Islamic holiday, including Ramadan.
Introduction: The goal of the present study is to test whether social norms, given their power to justify behaviors, can protect the subjective well-being of group members when they engage in ...unhealthy eating. Method: A three-wave longitudinal study (before T1, during T2, and after the Christmas holidays T3) was conducted (N = 318). Results: Results demonstrated that changes in pro-unhealthy eating norms play a moderating role in the relationship between changes in unhealthy eating and changes in subjective well-being from T1 to T2, but not from T2 to T3. Specifically, when unhealthy eating increased from T1 to T2, a parallel increase in the strength of social norms buffered against a decrease in group members' subjective well-being. The absence of moderation between T2 and T3 could be due to the fact that pro-unhealthy eating norms became less salient at T3. Discussion: These results confirm that when unhealthy eating is salient in a social context, social norms can buffer against its negative impacts.
Highlights and Implications
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During the Christmas holidays period, individuals eat more unhealthy food and perceive that groups to which they belong eat more unhealthy food and encourage more consumption of this type of food compared to approximately 1 month and after the Holiday period.
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When individuals perceive that groups to which they belong encourage more unhealthy food consumption from 1 month before to the Christmas holidays period (i.e., a social context where junk food consumption is salient and socially acceptable), their subjective well-being suffers less as a result of more unhealthy food consumption during this time period.
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When individuals increase unhealthy food consumption from the Christmas holidays to 1 month after, they still experience an overall decrease in subjective well-being over the same time frame.
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Overall, the social context in which eating takes place plays a vital role in shaping individuals' eating behaviors and the relationship of eating behaviors to well-being.
Summary
We evaluated the cost-effectiveness of recurrent periods of 3 versus 6 years of zoledronic acid treatment prior to 3-year bisphosphonate holidays for US postmenopausal women with osteoporosis ...and femoral neck BMD T-scores between − 2.5 and − 3.5. We found that cycles of 3 years of treatment followed by holidays is likely to be the more cost-effective option.
Introduction
We compared the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of cycles of 3 years versus 6 years of zoledronic acid treatment prior to 3-year bisphosphonate holidays for US postmenopausal women with osteoporosis.
Methods
We developed an individual-level state-transition microsimulation cost-effectiveness model to compare treatment strategies over the lifetime of recurrent periods of 3 years of zoledronic acid followed by 3-year holidays (zoledronic acid 3/3), recurrent periods of 6 years of zoledronic acid followed by 3-year holidays (zoledronic acid 6/3), and no zoledronic acid treatment for women with osteoporosis and femoral neck BMD T-scores between − 2.5 and − 3.5.
Results
Base-case analysis and all key parameter sensitivity analysis findings for every treatment initiation age evaluated (50, 60, 70, and 80) revealed that zoledronic acid 3/3 was consistently the most cost-effective strategy, assuming a willingness-to-pay of $100,000 per quality-adjusted life-year (QALY). In general, the zoledronic acid 3/3 and 6/3 strategies were relatively close in effectiveness (QALYs) over the lifetime; however, lifetime direct health care costs were on average approximately $2000 lower for the 3/3 strategy. Probabilistic sensitivity analysis results revealed that the zoledronic acid 3/3 strategy was favored in greater than 70% of the iterations for a willingness-to-pay threshold of $100,000/QALY for all treatment initiation ages evaluated.
Conclusions
After 3 years of zoledronic acid treatment for postmenopausal women with osteoporosis and femoral neck BMD T-scores between − 2.5 and − 3.5, taking 3-year holidays before restarting another treatment cycle is likely to be more cost-effective over the lifetime than cycles of 6 years of treatment prior to 3-year holidays.
We address the issue of public or bank holidays in electricity load modeling and forecasting. Special characteristics of public holidays such as their classification into fixed-date and weekday ...holidays are discussed in detail. We present state-of-the-art techniques to deal with public holidays such as removing them from the data set, treating them as Sunday dummy or introducing separate holiday dummies. We analyze pros and cons of these approaches and provide a large load forecasting study for Germany that compares the techniques using standard performance and significance measures. Finally, we give general recommendations for the treatment of public holidays in energy forecasting to suggest how the drawbacks particular to most of the state-of-the-art methods can be mitigated. This is especially useful, as the incorporation of holiday effects can improve the forecasting accuracy during public holidays periods by more than 80%, but even for non-holidays periods, the forecasting error can be reduced by approximately 10%.
A comprehensive reference guide that covers over 3,500 observances. Features both secular and religious events from many different cultures, countries, and ethnic groups. Includes contact information ...for events; multiple appendices with background information on world holidays; extensive bibliography; multiple indexes.
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