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Cooperation among kin is common in animal societies. Kin groups may form by individuals directly discriminating relatives based on kin recognition cues, or form passively through natal philopatry and limited dispersal. We describe the genetic landscape for a primitively eusocial wasp, Polistes dominula, and ask whether individuals choose cooperative partners that are nearby and/or that are genetic relatives. Firstly, we genotyped an entire sub-population of 1361 wasps and found genetic structuring on an extremely fine scale: the probability of finding genetic relatives decreases exponentially within just a few meters of an individual’s nest. At the same time, however, we found a lack of genetic structuring between natural nest aggregations within the population. Secondly, in a separate dataset where ~2000 wasps were genotyped, we show that wasps forced experimentally to make a new nest choice tended to choose new nests near to their original nests, and that these nests tended to contain some full sisters. However, a significant fraction of wasps chose nests that did not contain sisters, despite sisters being present in nearby nests. Although we cannot rule out a role for direct kin recognition or natal nest-mate recognition, our data suggest that kin groups may form via a philopatric rule-of-thumb, whereby wasps simply select groups and nesting sites that are nearby. The result is that most subordinate helpers obtain indirect fitness benefits by breeding cooperatively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many complex physical systems exhibit a rich variety of discrete behavioural modes. Often, the system complexity limits the applicability of standard modelling tools. Hence, understanding the underlying physics of different behaviours and distinguishing between them is challenging. Although traditional machine learning techniques could predict and classify behaviour well, typically they do not provide any meaningful insight into the underlying physics of the system. In this paper we present a novel method for extracting physically meaningful clusters of discrete behaviour from limited experimental observations. This method obtains a set of physically plausible functions that both facilitate behavioural clustering and aid in system understanding. We demonstrate the approach on the V-shaped falling paper system, a new falling paper type system that exhibits four distinct behavioural modes depending on a few morphological parameters. Using just 49 experimental observations, the method discovered a set of candidate functions that distinguish behaviours with an error of 2.04%, while also aiding insight into the physical phenomena driving each behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Data collection using paper-based questionnaires can be time consuming and return errors affect data accuracy, completeness, and information quality in health surveys. We compared smartphone and paper-based data collection systems in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study in rural Sudan. Methods: This exploratory pilot study was designed to run in parallel with the cross-sectional household survey. The Open Data Kit was used to programme questionnaires in Arabic into smartphones. We included 100 study participants (83% women; median age = 41.5 ± 16.4 years) from the BOLD study from 3 rural villages in East-Gezira and Kamleen localities of Gezira state, Sudan. Questionnaire data were collected using smartphone and paper-based technologies simultaneously. We used Kappa statistics and inter-rater class coefficient to test agreement between the two methods. Results: Symptoms reported included cough (24%), phlegm (15%), wheezing (17%), and shortness of breath (18%). One in five were or had been cigarette smokers. The two data collection methods varied between perfect to slight agreement across the 204 variables evaluated (Kappa varied between 1.00 and 0.02 and inter-rater coefficient between 1.00 and -0.12). Errors were most commonly seen with paper questionnaires (83% of errors seen) vs smartphones (17% of errors seen) administered questionnaires with questions with complex skip-patterns being a major source of errors in paper questionnaires. Automated checks and validations in smartphone-administered questionnaires avoided skip-pattern related errors. Incomplete and inconsistent records were more likely seen on paper questionnaires. Conclusion: Compared to paper-based data collection, smartphone technology worked well for data collection in the study, which was conducted in a challenging rural environment in Sudan. This approach provided timely, quality data with fewer errors and inconsistencies compared to paper-based data collection. We recommend this method for future BOLD studies and other population-based studies in similar settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety of highly aggregated tourist crowds is a challenging and important issue. This paper not only provided a comprehensive analysis of the accidents of highly aggregated tourist crowds but also determined the occurrence mechanism and coping paths. Based on the analysis of multiple cases, we found that the variable status of highly aggregated tourist crowds was the result of the interaction of three main elements: multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses. A series of factors interact and result in accidents, and the lack of a management response or a low-quality management response is the root cause of such accidents. A high-quality management response is a basic safety precaution for highly aggregated tourist crowds. Therefore, forming a virtuous circle of multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses is an effective path for coping with accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet and social media participation open doors to a plethora of positive opportunities for the general public. However, in addition to these positive aspects, digital technology also provides an effective medium for spreading hateful content in the form of cyberbullying, bigotry, hateful ideologies, and harassment of individuals and groups. This research aims to investigate the growing body of online hate research (OHR) by mapping general research indices, prevalent themes of research, research hotspots, and influential stakeholders such as organizations and contributing regions. For this, we use scientometric techniques and collect research papers from the Web of Science core database published through March 2019. We apply a predefined search strategy to retrieve peer-reviewed OHR and analyze the data using CiteSpace software by identifying influential papers, themes of research, and collaborating institutions. Our results show that higher-income countries contribute most to OHR, with Western countries accounting for most of the publications, funded by North American and European funding agencies. We also observed increased research activity post-2005, starting from more than 50 publications to more than 550 in 2018. This applies to a number of publications as well as citations. The hotbeds of OHR focus on cyberbullying, social media platforms, co-morbid mental disorders, and profiling of aggressors and victims. Moreover, we identified four main clusters of OHR: (1) Cyberbullying, (2) Sexual solicitation and intimate partner violence, (3) Deep learning and automation, and (4) Extremist and online hate groups, which highlight the cross-disciplinary and multifaceted nature of OHR as a field of research. The research has implications for researchers and policymakers engaged in OHR and its associated problems for individuals and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal motivation is a key factor in the service of foster care, impending both on the welfare of the child and on the satisfaction of the carer. This paper explores the benefits, challenges and dilemmas involved in the job of professional (i.e. state-supported) foster carer in Romania–a country where the issue of child protection has drawn a great deal of international attention over the last thirty years. The principal hypothesis concerns whether the benefits, challenges and dilemmas identified by foster carers are influenced by the factors that led to their taking up this kind of work. Quantitative research was conducted using a questionnaire as the main tool. The paper takes a descriptive, cross-sectional and multifactorial approach. Sampling was carried out by self-selecting method, and the study involved 51 participants. The research project identified a statistically significant variation in the challenges and dilemmas reported by foster carers. Thus, the results of the study show that the majority of the carers indicate a primarily intrinsic motivation for their work. By way of conclusion, it is argued that social workers, operating in collaboration with multidisciplinary teams, can offer carers support in managing more difficult periods in the child–carer relationship, thus enhancing the sustainability of the foster care service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interaction between phenotypic plasticity, e.g. learning, and evolution is an important topic both in Evolutionary Biology and Machine Learning. The evolution of learning is commonly studied in Evolutionary Biology, while the use of an evolutionary process to improve learning is of interest to the field of Machine Learning. This paper takes a different point of view by studying the effect of learning on the evolutionary process, the so-called Baldwin effect. A well-studied result in the literature about the Baldwin effect is that learning affects the speed of convergence of the evolutionary process towards some genetic configuration, which corresponds to the environment-induced plastic response. This paper demonstrates that learning can change the outcome of evolution, i.e., lead to a genetic configuration that does not correspond to the plastic response. Results are obtained both analytically and experimentally by means of an agent-based model of a foraging task, in an environment where the distribution of resources follows seasonal cycles and the foraging success on different resource types is conditioned by trade-offs that can be evolved and learned. This paper attempts to answer a question that has been overlooked: whether learning has an effect on what genotypic traits are evolved, i.e. the selection of a trait that enables a plastic response changes the selection pressure on a different trait, in what could be described as co-evolution between different traits in the same genome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been increased attention to child neurodevelopment in studies on medication safety in pregnancy. Neurodevelopment is a multifactorial outcome that can be assessed by various assessors, using different measures. This has given rise to a debate on the validity of various measures of neurodevelopment. The aim of this review was twofold. Firstly we aimed to give an overview of studies on child neurodevelopment after prenatal exposure to central nervous system acting medications using psychotropics and analgesics as examples, giving special focus on the use and validity of outcome measures. Secondly, we aimed to give guidance on how to conduct and interpret medication safety studies with neurodevelopment outcomes. We conducted a systematic review in the MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, Web of Science, Scopus, and Cochrane databases from inception to April 2019, including controlled studies on prenatal exposure to psychotropics or analgesics and child neurodevelopment, measured with standardised psychometric instruments or by diagnosis of neurodevelopmental disorder. The review management tool Covidence was used for data-extraction. Outcomes were grouped as motor skills, cognition, behaviour, emotionality, or “other”. We identified 110 eligible papers (psychotropics, 82 papers, analgesics, 29 papers). A variety of neurodevelopmental outcome measures were used, including 27 different psychometric instruments administered by health care professionals, 15 different instruments completed by parents, and 13 different diagnostic categories. In 23 papers, no comments were made on the validity of the outcome measure. In conclusion, establishing neurodevelopmental safety includes assessing a wide variety of outcomes important for the child’s daily functioning including motor skills, cognition, behaviour, and emotionality, with valid and reliable measures from infancy through to adolescence. Consensus is needed in the scientific community on how neurodevelopment should be assessed in medication safety in pregnancy studies. Review registration number: CRD42018086101 in the PROSPERO database. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Animal movement encodes information that is meaningfully interpreted by natural counterparts. This is a behavior that roboticists are trying to replicate in artificial systems but that is not well understood even in natural systems. This paper presents a count on the cardinality of a discretized posture space—an aspect of expressivity—of articulated platforms. The paper uses an information-theoretic measure, Shannon entropy, to create observations analogous to Moore’s Law, providing a measure that complements traditional measures of the capacity of robots. This analysis, applied to a variety of natural and artificial systems, shows trends in increasing capacity in both internal and external complexity for natural systems while artificial, robotic systems have increased significantly in the capacity of computational (internal) states but remained more or less constant in mechanical (external) state capacity. The quantitative measure proposed in this paper provides an additional lens through which to compare natural and artificial systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between women’s social class and their levels of self- and other-objectification. Two online studies comprising of multiple questionnaires were conducted: Study 1 examined the association between the social class (both objective and subjective) of 198 non-student British women and their self-objectification levels, while Study 2 turned towards the relationship between social class and other-objectification among 82 non-student British women. Our results indicated no apparent relationship between social class and each of the relevant objectification measures. As the first paper on the topic of class and objectification, it appears that there is no relationship observed between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding why parenting programmes work or do not work, and for whom, is crucial for development of more effective parenting interventions. In this paper we focus on a specific component of Mellow Bumps: reflection on one’s own childhood/past/life. We explore how this component was implemented, how participants engaged with it, the facilitating and constraining factors shaping this, whether and how it appeared to work, or not, and for whom. The paper analyses data from the Process Evaluation of the Trial of Healthy Relationships Initiatives for the Very Early years, which is evaluating two antenatal interventions delivered to vulnerable women, one of which is Mellow Bumps. Data were collected from January 2014 to June 2018 for 28 groups, 108 participants and 24 facilitators in a comprehensive and rigorous Process Evaluation designed to complement the Outcome Evaluation. Data were gathered at various time points using multiple methods, and were synthesised to triangulate findings. The reflective component was implemented with fidelity and participants engaged with it to varying degrees, dependent largely on the coherence of the group. Patchy attendance compromised the coherence of some groups, with the development of rapport, which is key to delivering reflective exercises, more difficult when group composition varied from week to week. Where there was a coherent group, powerful mechanisms of change, leading to stress reduction, included: relief through unburdening, empowerment through support given and received, reduced isolation through sharing anxieties, and control through self-care advice. A minority of highly vulnerable mothers seemed not to benefit from the reflective exercises and were marginalised within their groups. In order to minimise potential harmful effects of such exercises, allocation of participants to groups should strive to maximise group homogeneity. More research is needed to explore how very vulnerable parents can be supported in attending parenting interventions from start to finish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In order to make informed decisions about how best to support children and young people with disabilities, effective strategies that facilitate active and meaningful participation in school are required. Clinical factors, diagnosis or impairments somewhat helpful in determining what should be provided in interventions. However, clinical factors alone will not offer a clear view of how to support participation. It is helpful then to look at wider psychosocial and environmental factors. The aim of this review was to synthesise evidence of psychosocial and environmental factors associated with school participation of 4–12 year old children with disabilities to inform the development of participation-fostering interventions. Methods: A systematic search and synthesis using realist methods was conducted of published research. Papers had to include consideration of psychosocial and/or environment factors for school participation of children with disabilities. The review was completed in accordance with the Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Syntheses: Evolving Standards (RAMESES) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Papers were identified via Boolean search of the electronic databases MEDLINE, CINAHL, PhycINFO and ERIC (January 2006-October 2018). Appraisal focussed on contributions in terms of whether the articles are appropriate for the review (relevance) and research quality (rigour). Data were analyzed using content and thematic analysis methods using a realist framework. A narrative synthesis of results was reported. Results and implications: We identified 1828 papers in the initial search. Seventy two papers were included in the final synthesis. Synthesis of findings led to three overarching mechanisms representing psychosocial factors for children (1) identity (2) competence and (3) experience of mind and body. Environmental aspects (context) compromised five interrelated areas: (1) structures and organization, (2) peers, (3) adults, (4) space and (5) objects. Our synthesis provides insights on how professionals may organize efforts to improve children’s participation. Consideration of these findings will help to proactively deal with suboptimal participation outcomes. Development of theoretically determined assessments and interventions for management of school participation are now required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A diversity of arthropods (myrmecophiles) thrives within ant nests, many of them unmolested though some, such as the specialized Eucharitidae parasitoids, may cause direct damage to their hosts. Ants are known to discriminate between nestmates and non-nestmates, but whether they recognize the strength of a threat and their capacity to adjust their behavior accordingly have not been fully explored. We aimed to determine whether Ectatomma tuberculatum ants exhibited specific behavioral responses to potential or actual intruders posing different threats to the host colony and to contribute to an understanding of complex ant-eucharitid interactions. Behavioral responses differed significantly according to intruder type. Ants evicted intruders that represented a threat to the colony’s health (dead ants) or were not suitable as prey items (filter paper, eucharitid parasitoid wasps, non myrmecophilous adult weevils), but killed potential prey (weevil larvae, termites). The timing of detection was in accordance with the nature and size of the intruder: corpses (a potential source of contamination) were detected faster than any other intruder and transported to the refuse piles within 15 min. The structure and complexity of behavioral sequences differed among those intruders that were discarded. Workers not only recognized and discriminated between several distinct intruders but also adjusted their behavior to the type of intruder encountered. Our results confirm the previously documented recognition capabilities of E. tuberculatum workers and reveal a very fine-tuned intruder discrimination response. Colony-level prophylactic and hygienic behavioral responses through effective removal of inedible intruders appears to be the most general and flexible form of defense in ants against a diverse array of intruders. However, this generalized response to both potentially lethal and harmless intruders might have driven the evolution of ant-eucharitid interactions, opening a window for parasitoid attack and allowing adult parasitoid wasps to quickly leave the natal nest unharmed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge and motivation of a teacher are two unchallenged, essential characteristics for successful education. Whilst the relevance of teachers’ professional knowledge for successful students’ learning has been studied in a sophisticated manner for years, the meaning of teachers’ motivational orientations for students’ performance still lacks a differentiated consideration. This construct is conceptualized by three domains: (1) self-efficacy, (2) subject-specific enthusiasm, and (3) enthusiasm for teaching the subject. Motivational orientations overall have shown to be relevant predictors of students’ learning. However, there are several dimensions of motivation and their relative importance remains unclear. Our study goes beyond the available findings by considering in detail each of the three domains’ relations to students’ performance. Thus, we aim to further contribute to the clarification of the predictors of students’ performance in school teaching. For this purpose, we conducted a study with 48 biology teachers and their 1036 students. To assess the three domains of teachers’ motivational orientations, we applied paper and pencil tests. Concept maps and paper and pencil tests were used to measure students’ performance. By specifying multilevel structural equation models, we examined the relationship between the domains of teachers’ motivational orientations and the performance of the students. Our results reveal no relationship between teachers’ self-efficacy and students’ performance, but a significant positive relationship between the latter and teachers’ subject-specific enthusiasm. Moreover, our results show a positive trend in the relationship between enthusiasm for teaching the subject and students’ performance. The results provide a differentiated picture about the importance of motivational orientations for the characterisation of an effective teacher. We discuss our findings in terms of possible effect mechanisms and their relevance for further research on teacher motivation and the improvement of teacher education programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The prevalence of intimate partner violence (IPV) is high (54%) in Bangladesh. Moreover, female garment workers report higher rates of IPV and are also vulnerable to workplace violence (WPV). Experience of violence puts women at increased risk of developing depressive symptoms, which are related with low self-esteem, lower life satisfaction and lower productivity. To our knowledge, there has been no previous research on depression among female garment workers and its connections to IPV and WPV in Bangladesh. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the relationship of IPV, WPV and depression among female garment workers. Methods: The data for this paper comes from a cross-sectional survey of female garment workers (n = 800) conducted as baseline survey of a quasi-experimental study known as HERrespect. Survey data were collected during September-December, 2016 among randomly selected female garment workers from eight garment factories in and around Dhaka city. Structural equation modelling was conducted to explore the relationship among IPV, WPV and depression. Results: The findings show high rates of any IPV (69%); WPV (73%, experienced or witnessed) and depressive symptomatology (40%) among female garment workers. The analysis of pathways shows that IPV impacts a woman’s experience of WPV and work related stress leading to the development of depression; while WPV had direct and mediated pathways to depression. Experience of controlling by their husband leads to WPV and increased work related stress, and thus leads to depression. It also reveals that a worker’s ability to mobilize resources in emergency, however, increased self-esteem and reduced work related stress. Conclusion: This study shows the pathways through which experience of IPV and WPV lead to development of depressive symptoms among female garment workers. The link between women’s ability to mobilize resources with self-esteem and work related stress indicates the need for socio-economic empowerment of women and may suggest that combined intervention to address IPV and women’s empowerment could be successful in dealing with WPV and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents first test results of a new performance-based, psychomotor method to measure anger expression and control, based on voice expression and physical force production in directional movement of arms and legs, called the Method of Stamp Strike Shout (MSSS). Recorded are the standardized impact of stamping on a force plate, hitting a punching bag, and the amplitude of shouting in a microphone at various force levels. The premise is, that these body behaviours stand for the ‘urge to act or shout’ that belongs to anger-related emotions. The MSSS is meant to be applied in addition to potentially biased self-report questionnaires and has been designed for diagnostic as well as therapeutic purposes in clinical practice. First, this paper focusses on the instrumentation, internal structure and reliability of the MSSS. An explorative study in a student sample (n = 104) shows correlation patterns between increasing and decreasing levels of force production within each subtest (Stamp, Strike and Shout) and between the three subtests. We found excellent internal consistency of the three subtests and high test-retest reliability. The parameters of increasing and decreasing force levels form the slopes of what we call a force pyramid. To adjust for the clustering within persons, aggregated outcomes were calculated: sum scores per subtest as an indication of total force produced, two linear contrast scores to indicate the rate of increase / decrease, and two quadratic contrast scores as measures of the curvature of the slopes. On all subtests, all aggregated scores showed differences between men and women, also when controlled for weight. To test the validity of the MSSS, the second part of the paper examines the relationship between force parameters and anger coping style, measured by the Self-Expression and Control Scale (SECS). The results suggest that the Shout subtest was the most sensitive indicator for anger coping style, showing negative correlations with Anger In, for women as well as men. For women, higher amplitude was also associated with higher Anger Out and lower amplitude with higher Anger Control. The Stamp subtest showed weak positive correlations with the Anger In subscales, whereas no correlations were found on the Strike subtest. Further, a more robust comparison was made between two groups of participants who reported to have an internalizing versus an externalizing anger coping style. Results indicated that internalizing women as well as men used less force than externalizing participants on all three subtests, especially on the Shout subtest. This was confirmed by lower mean sum scores on the Shout subtest for internalizing women compared with externalizing women. No differences in linear contrast scores were shown between internalizing and externalizing participants. The quadratic contrast scores suggested differences of the curvation of the slopes between women with more or less anger control when stamping, and men with more or less anger control when striking. As this is an explorative study, findings should be interpreted with caution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses text data mining to identify long-term developments in tourism academic research from the perspectives of thematic focus, geography, and gender of tourism authorship. Abstracts of papers published in the period of 1970–2017 in high-ranking tourist journals were extracted from the Scopus database and served as data source for the analysis. Fourteen subject areas were identified using the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) text mining approach. LDA integrated with GIS information allowed to obtain geography distribution and trends of scholarly output, while probabilistic methods of gender identification based on social network data mining were used to track gender dynamics with sufficient confidence. The findings indicate that, while all 14 topics have been prominent from the inception of tourism studies to the present day, the geography of scholarship has notably expanded and the share of female authorship has increased through time and currently almost equals that of male authorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, plagiarism has been classified as a multi-layer phenomenon of dishonesty that occurs in higher education. A number of research papers have identified a host of factors such as gender, socialisation, efficiency gain, motivation for study, methodological uncertainties or easy access to electronic information via the Internet and new technologies, as reasons driving plagiarism. The paper at hand examines whether such factors are still effective and if there are any differences between German and Slovene students’ factors influencing plagiarism. A quantitative paper-and-pencil survey was carried out in Germany and Slovenia in 2017/2018 academic year, with a sample of 485 students from higher education institutions. The major findings of this research reveal that easy access to information-communication technologies and the Web is the main reason driving plagiarism. In that regard, there are no significant differences between German and Slovene students in terms of personal factors such as gender, motivation for study, and socialisation. In this sense, digitalisation and the Web outrank national borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Substance misuse persists as a major public health issue worldwide with significant costs for society. The development of interventions requires methodologically sound studies to explore substance misuse causes and consequences. This Cohort description paper outlines the design of the Belfast Youth Development (BYDS), one of the largest cohort studies of its kind in the UK. The study was established to address the need for a long-term prospective cohort study to investigate the initiation, persistence and desistance of substance use, alongside life course processes in adolescence and adulthood. The paper provides an overview of BYDS as a longitudinal data source for investigating substance misuse and outlines the study measures, sample retention and characteristics. We also outline how the BYDS data have been used to date and highlight areas ripe for future work by interested researchers. Methods: The study began in 2000/1 when participants (n = 3,834) were pupils in their first year of post-primary education (age 10/11 years, school year 8) from over 40 schools in Northern Ireland. Children were followed during the school years: Year 9 (in 2002; aged 12; n = 4,343), Year 10 (in 2003; aged 13; n = 4,522), Year 11 (in 2004; aged 14; n = 3,965) and Year 12 (in 2005; aged 15; n = 3,830) and on two more occasions: 2006/07 (aged 16/17; n = 2,335) and 2010/11 (aged 20/21; n = 2,087). Data were collected on substance use, family, schools, neighbourhoods, offending behaviour and mental health. The most novel aspect of the study was the collection of detailed social network data via friendship nominations allowing the investigation of the spread of substance use via friendship networks. In 2004 (school year 11; respondents aged 14), a sub-sample of participants’ parents (n = 1,097) and siblings (n = 211) also completed measures on substance use and family dynamics. Results: The most recent wave (in 2010/2011; respondents aged 20/21 years) indicated lifetime use of alcohol, tobacco and cannabis among the cohort was 94, 70 and 45 per cent, respectively. The paper charts the development of drug use behaviour and some of the key results to date are presented. We have also identified a number of key areas ripe for analysis by interested researchers including sexual health and education. Conclusions: We have established a cohort with detailed data from adolescence to young adulthood, supplemented with parent and sibling reports and peer network data. The dataset, allowing for investigation of trajectories of adolescent substance use, associated factors and subsequent long-term outcomes, constitutes an important resource for longitudinal substance misuse research. A planned further wave as the cohort enter their late twenties and potential to link to administrative data sources, will further enrich the datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on job design theories and a conceptual framework of work-related goals and motivation in later adulthood, the aim of this paper is to explore how work-related and individual factors are separately and jointly related to psychological work ability and bridge employment intentions via late job mobility. The cross-sectional study is based on a sample of 171 older Spanish workers aged 45–65 and beyond. We differentiated between groups of older workers in mid career (45–55 years of age) and in their later careers (56 years and beyond). Our results confirm that task characteristics and, secondarily, knowledge characteristics are the most relevant factors in perceptions of psychological work ability among aged workers. Both age groups display a very marked personal mastery trait, which mediates the relationships between job characteristics and both psychological work ability and late job mobility intentions. The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications and suggestions for future research on the issues implied in the psychological adjustment of older workers in their mid and late careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In practical research, it was found that most people made health-related decisions not based on numerical data but on perceptions. Examples include the perceptions and their corresponding linguistic values of health risks such as, smoking, syringe sharing, eating energy-dense food, drinking sugar-sweetened beverages etc. For the sake of understanding the mechanisms that affect the implementations of health-related interventions, we employ fuzzy variables to quantify linguistic variable in healthcare modeling where we employ an integrated system dynamics and agent-based model. Methodology: In a nonlinear causal-driven simulation environment driven by feedback loops, we mathematically demonstrate how interventions at an aggregate level affect the dynamics of linguistic variables that are captured by fuzzy agents and how interactions among fuzzy agents, at the same time, affect the formation of different clusters(groups) that are targeted by specific interventions. Results: In this paper, we provide an innovative framework to capture multi-stage fuzzy uncertainties manifested among interacting heterogeneous agents (individuals) and intervention decisions that affect homogeneous agents (groups of individuals) in a hybrid model that combines an agent-based simulation model (ABM) and a system dynamics models (SDM). Having built the platform to incorporate high-dimension data in a hybrid ABM/SDM model, this paper demonstrates how one can obtain the state variable behaviors in the SDM and the corresponding values of linguistic variables in the ABM. Conclusions: This research provides a way to incorporate high-dimension data in a hybrid ABM/SDM model. This research not only enriches the application of fuzzy set theory by capturing the dynamics of variables associated with interacting fuzzy agents that lead to aggregate behaviors but also informs implementation research by enabling the incorporation of linguistic variables at both individual and institutional levels, which makes unstructured linguistic data meaningful and quantifiable in a simulation environment. This research can help practitioners and decision makers to gain better understanding on the dynamics and complexities of precision intervention in healthcare. It can aid the improvement of the optimal allocation of resources for targeted group (s) and the achievement of maximum utility. As this technology becomes more mature, one can design policy flight simulators by which policy/intervention designers can test a variety of assumptions when they evaluate different alternatives interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In political campaigns, perceived candidate credibility influences the persuasiveness of messages. In campaigns aiming to influence people’s beliefs, micro-targeted campaigns (MTCs) that target specific voters using their psychological profile have become increasingly prevalent. It remains open how effective MTCs are, notably in comparison to population-targeted campaign strategies. Using an agent-based model, the paper applies recent insights from cognitive models of persuasion, extending them to the societal level in a novel framework for exploring political campaigning. The paper provides an initial treatment of the complex dynamics of population level political campaigning in a psychologically informed manner. Model simulations show that MTCs can take advantage of the psychology of the electorate by targeting voters favourable disposed towards the candidate. Relative to broad campaigning, MTCs allow for efficient and adaptive management of complex campaigns. Findings show that disliked MTC candidates can beat liked population-targeting candidates, pointing to societal questions concerning campaign regulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pruning is applied in order to combat over-fitting problem where the tree is pruned back with the goal of identifying decision tree with the lowest error rate on previously unobserved instances, breaking ties in favour of smaller trees with high accuracy. In this paper, pruning with Bayes minimum risk is introduced for estimating the risk-rate. This method proceeds in a bottom-up fashion converting a parent node of a subtree to a leaf node if the estimated risk-rate of the parent node for that subtree is less than the risk-rates of its leaf. This paper proposes a post-pruning method that considers various evaluation standards such as attribute selection, accuracy, tree complexity, and time taken to prune the tree, precision/recall scores, TP/FN rates and area under ROC. The experimental results show that the proposed method produces better classification accuracy and its complexity is not much different than the complexities of reduced-error pruning and minimum-error pruning approaches. The experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method shows satisfactory performance in terms of precision score, recall score, TP rate, FP rate and area under ROC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In previous papers, we introduced a normative scheme for scene construction and epistemic (visual) searches based upon active inference. This scheme provides a principled account of how people decide where to look, when categorising a visual scene based on its contents. In this paper, we use active inference to explain the visual searches of normal human subjects; enabling us to answer some key questions about visual foraging and salience attribution. First, we asked whether there is any evidence for ‘epistemic foraging’; i.e. exploration that resolves uncertainty about a scene. In brief, we used Bayesian model comparison to compare Markov decision process (MDP) models of scan-paths that did–and did not–contain the epistemic, uncertainty-resolving imperatives for action selection. In the course of this model comparison, we discovered that it was necessary to include non-epistemic (heuristic) policies to explain observed behaviour (e.g., a reading-like strategy that involved scanning from left to right). Despite this use of heuristic policies, model comparison showed that there is substantial evidence for epistemic foraging in the visual exploration of even simple scenes. Second, we compared MDP models that did–and did not–allow for changes in prior expectations over successive blocks of the visual search paradigm. We found that implicit prior beliefs about the speed and accuracy of visual searches changed systematically with experience. Finally, we characterised intersubject variability in terms of subject-specific prior beliefs. Specifically, we used canonical correlation analysis to see if there were any mixtures of prior expectations that could predict between-subject differences in performance; thereby establishing a quantitative link between different behavioural phenotypes and Bayesian belief updating. We demonstrated that better scene categorisation performance is consistently associated with lower reliance on heuristics; i.e., a greater use of a generative model of the scene to direct its exploration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies showed that scientists’ professional networks contribute to research productivity, but little work has examined what factors predict the formation of professional networks. This study sought to 1) examine what factors predict the formation of international ties between faculty and graduate students and 2) identify how these international ties would affect publication productivity in three East Asian countries. Face-to-face surveys and in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of faculty and doctoral students in life sciences at 10 research institutions in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. Our final sample consisted of 290 respondents (84 faculty and 206 doctoral students) and 1,435 network members. We used egocentric social network analysis to examine the structure of international ties and how they relate to research productivity. Our findings suggest that overseas graduate training can be a key factor in graduate students’ development of international ties in these countries. Those with a higher proportion of international ties in their professional networks were likely to have published more papers and written more manuscripts. For faculty, international ties did not affect the number of manuscripts written or of papers published, but did correlate with an increase in publishing in top journals. The networks we examined were identified by asking study participants with whom they discuss their research. Because the relationships may not appear in explicit co-authorship networks, these networks were not officially recorded elsewhere. This study sheds light on the relationships of these invisible support networks to researcher productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries have some kind of energy-system transformation either planned or ongoing for various reasons, such as to curb carbon emissions or to compensate for the phasing out of nuclear energy. One important component of these transformations is the overall reduction in energy demand. It is generally acknowledged that the domestic sector represents a large share of total energy consumption in many countries. Increased energy efficiency is one factor that reduces energy demand, but behavioral approaches (known as “sufficiency”) and their respective interventions also play important roles. In this paper, we address citizens’ heterogeneity regarding both their current behaviors and their willingness to realize their sufficiency potentials—that is, to reduce their energy consumption through behavioral change. We collaborated with three Swiss cities for this study. A survey conducted in the three cities yielded thematic sets of energy-consumption behavior that various groups of participants rated differently. Using this data, we identified four groups of participants with different patterns of both current behaviors and sufficiency potentials. The paper discusses intervention types and addresses citizens’ heterogeneity and behaviors from a city-based perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study shows how liking politicians’ public Facebook posts can be used as an accurate measure for predicting present-day voter intention in a multiparty system. We highlight that a few, but selective digital traces produce prediction accuracies that are on par or even greater than most current approaches based upon bigger and broader datasets. Combining the online and offline, we connect a subsample of surveyed respondents to their public Facebook activity and apply machine learning classifiers to explore the link between their political liking behaviour and actual voting intention. Through this work, we show that even a single selective Facebook like can reveal as much about political voter intention as hundreds of heterogeneous likes. Further, by including the entire political like history of the respondents, our model reaches prediction accuracies above previous multiparty studies (60–70%). The main contribution of this paper is to show how public like-activity on Facebook allows political profiling of individual users in a multiparty system with accuracies above previous studies. Beside increased accuracies, the paper shows how such parsimonious measures allows us to generalize our findings to the entire population of a country and even across national borders, to other political multiparty systems. The approach in this study relies on data that are publicly available, and the simple setup we propose can with some limitations, be generalized to millions of users in other multiparty systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enthusiasm for using Twitter as a source of data in the social sciences extends to measuring the impact of research with Twitter data being a key component in the new altmetrics approach. In this paper, we examine tweets containing links to research articles in the field of dentistry to assess the extent to which tweeting about scientific papers signifies engagement with, attention to, or consumption of scientific literature. The main goal is to better comprehend the role Twitter plays in scholarly communication and the potential value of tweet counts as traces of broader engagement with scientific literature. In particular, the pattern of tweeting to the top ten most tweeted scientific dental articles and of tweeting by accounts is examined. The ideal that tweeting about scholarly articles represents curating and informing about state-of-the-art appears not to be realized in practice. We see much presumably human tweeting almost entirely mechanical and devoid of original thought, no evidence of conversation, tweets generated by monomania, duplicate tweeting from many accounts under centralized professional management and tweets generated by bots. Some accounts exemplify the ideal, but they represent less than 10% of tweets. Therefore, any conclusions drawn from twitter data is swamped by the mechanical nature of the bulk of tweeting behavior. In light of these results, we discuss the compatibility of Twitter with the research enterprise as well as some of the financial incentives behind these patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most Americans recognize that smoking causes serious diseases, yet many Americans continue to smoke. One possible explanation for this paradox is that perhaps Americans do not accurately perceive the extent to which smoking increases the probability of adverse health outcomes. This paper examines the accuracy of Americans’ perceptions of the absolute risk, attributable risk, and relative risk of lung cancer, and assesses which of these beliefs drive Americans’ smoking behavior. Using data from three national surveys, statistical analyses were performed by comparing means, medians, and distributions, and by employing Generalized Additive Models. Perceptions of relative risk were associated as expected with smoking onset and smoking cessation, whereas perceptions of absolute risk and attributable risk were not. Additionally, the relation of relative risk with smoking status was stronger among people who held their risk perceptions with more certainty. Most current smokers, former smokers, and never-smokers considerably underestimated the relative risk of smoking. If, as this paper suggests, people naturally think about the health consequences of smoking in terms of relative risk, smoking rates might be reduced if public understanding of the relative risks of smoking were more accurate and people held those beliefs with more confidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social skills training, performed by human trainers, is a well-established method for obtaining appropriate skills in social interaction. Previous work automated the process of social skills training by developing a dialogue system that teaches social communication skills through interaction with a computer avatar. Even though previous work that simulated social skills training only considered acoustic and linguistic information, human social skills trainers take into account visual and other non-verbal features. In this paper, we create and evaluate a social skills training system that closes this gap by considering the audiovisual features of the smiling ratio and the head pose (yaw and pitch). In addition, the previous system was only tested with graduate students; in this paper, we applied our system to children or young adults with autism spectrum disorders. For our experimental evaluation, we recruited 18 members from the general population and 10 people with autism spectrum disorders and gave them our proposed multimodal system to use. An experienced human social skills trainer rated the social skills of the users. We evaluated the system’s effectiveness by comparing pre- and post-training scores and identified significant improvement in their social skills using our proposed multimodal system. Computer-based social skills training is useful for people who experience social difficulties. Such a system can be used by teachers, therapists, and social skills trainers for rehabilitation and the supplemental use of human-based training anywhere and anytime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Slope one is a popular recommendation algorithm due to its simplicity and high efficiency for sparse data. However, it often suffers from under-fitting since the global information of all relevant users/items are considered. In this paper, we propose a new scheme called enhanced slope one recommendation through local information embedding. First, we employ clustering algorithms to obtain the user clusters as well as item clusters to represent local information. Second, we predict ratings using the local information of users and items in the same cluster. The local information can detect strong localized associations shared within clusters. Third, we design different fusion approaches based on the local information embedding. In this way, both under-fitting and over-fitting problems are alleviated. Experiment results on the real datasets show that our approaches defeats slope one in terms of both mean absolute error and root mean square error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of how self-driving cars should behave in dilemma situations has recently attracted a lot of attention in science, media and society. A growing number of publications amass insight into the factors underlying the choices we make in such situations, often using forced-choice paradigms closely linked to the trolley dilemma. The methodology used to address these questions, however, varies widely between studies, ranging from fully immersive virtual reality settings to completely text-based surveys. In this paper we compare virtual reality and text-based assessments, analyzing the effect that different factors in the methodology have on decisions and emotional response of participants. We present two studies, comparing a total of six different conditions varying across three dimensions: The level of abstraction, the use of virtual reality, and time-constraints. Our results show that the moral decisions made in this context are not strongly influenced by the assessment, and the compared methods ultimately appear to measure very similar constructs. Furthermore, we add to the pool of evidence on the underlying factors of moral judgment in traffic dilemmas, both in terms of general preferences, i.e., features of the particular situation and potential victims, as well as in terms of individual differences between participants, such as their age and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores which demographic characteristics substantially bias self-reported physical and cognitive health status of older Europeans. The analysis utilises micro-data for 19 European countries from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to compare performance-tested outcomes of mobility and memory with their self-reported equivalents. Relative importance analysis based on multinomial logistic regressions shows that the bias in self-reported health is mostly due to reporting heterogeneities between countries and age groups, whereas gender contributes little to the discrepancy. Concordance of mobility and cognition measures is highly related; however, differences in reporting behaviour due to education and cultural background have a larger impact on self-assessed memory than on self-assessed mobility. Southern as well as Central and Eastern Europeans are much more likely to misreport their physical and cognitive abilities than Northern and Western Europeans. Overall, our results suggest that comparisons of self-reported health between countries and age groups are prone to significant biases, whereas comparisons between genders are credible for most European countries. These findings are crucial given that self-assessed data are often the only information available to researchers and policymakers when asking health-related questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing algorithms of speech-based deception detection are severely restricted by the lack of sufficient number of labelled data. However, a large amount of easily available unlabelled data has not been utilized in reality. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a semi-supervised additive noise autoencoder model for deception detection. This model updates and optimizes the semi-supervised autoencoder and it consists of two layers of encoder and decoder, and a classifier. Firstly, it changes the activation function of the hidden layer in network according to the characteristics of the deception speech. Secondly, in order to prevent over-fitting during training, the specific ratio dropout is added at each layer cautiously. Finally, we directly connected the supervised classification task in the output of encoder to make the network more concise and efficient. Using the feature set specified by the INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion Challenge, the experimental results on Columbia-SRI-Colorado (CSC) corpus and our own deception corpus show that the proposed model can achieve more advanced performance than other alternative methods with only a small amount of labelled data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While road safety in the United States (U.S.) has been continually improving since the 1970's, there are indications that these improvements are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. Strategic Highway Safety Plans (SHSPs) are prepared by States to guide road safety management, however assessing the appropriateness of these plans remains a significant challenge, especially for the future in which they are to be applied. This study developed a new methodology to assess SHSPs from the perspectives of comprehensive system-based safety management and relevant future issues that can be applied before SHSPs are implemented, thereby avoiding long periods after implementation before assessing the appropriateness of the plans. A rating scale was developed and applied to assess 48 U.S. SHSPs against two key criteria: 1. a comprehensive framework for road safety, and 2. the anticipated changing, difficult and unpredictable nature of future transport and its context. The analysis concluded that current SHSPs have good national oversight with several strengths but were weak in some areas of content and did not address future challenges. Improvements are suggested to strengthen the plans’ thoroughness by being consistent with systems theory and practice, as well as ways that these SHSPs can be more resilient to future circumstances. Implementing the recommendations in this paper provides the opportunity to adopt a system-based safety management practice that has been successful in other hazardous industries. Doing so is expected to most efficiently and effectively continue the recent improvements to road safety, which is likely to be increasingly difficult otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual hand gesture recognition systems are promising technologies for Human Computer Interaction, as they allow a more immersive and intuitive interaction. Most of these systems are based on the analysis of skeleton information, which is in turn inferred from color, depth, or near-infrared imagery. However, the robust extraction of skeleton information from images is only possible for a subset of hand poses, which restricts the range of gestures that can be recognized. In this paper, a real-time hand gesture recognition system based on a near-infrared device is presented, which directly analyzes the infrared imagery to infer static and dynamic gestures, without using skeleton information. Thus, a much wider range of hand gestures can be recognized in comparison with skeleton-based approaches. To validate the proposed system, a new dataset of near-infrared imagery has been created, from which good results that outperform other state-of-the-art strategies have been obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overweight and obesity have become global concerns in developed and developing countries due to their rise in recent years and their association with the prevalence of non-communicable diseases including diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. In fact, it is estimated that roughly 39% of adults worldwide are overweight and 13% are obese. Ecuador is an example of a developing country concerned with the overweight and obesity problem, where it is estimated that 30% of children, 26% of teenagers and 63% of adults are either overweight or obese and where 1 in 4 deaths are attributed to chronic diseases. To address the overweight and obesity problem via the promotion of healthy eating habits, in 2013 the country approved technical regulation for the labelling of packed processed food products. The regulation included a mandatory traffic-light (TL) supplemental nutritional information labelling system to be displayed on the package of all processed foods for sale in the country. This new labelling system displays a traffic light panel for the product content of sugar, fat and salt in addition to the traditional nutrient declaration label. The objective of this paper was to evaluate the effect of the TL supplemental nutritional information on consumers’ buying behavior in Ecuador. More specifically, we concentrated on the purchasing behavior of carbonated soft drinks. For our analysis, we used monthly aggregated purchase data (total expenditures, quantities and average prices) of carbonated soft drinks from January 2013 to December 2015 obtained from Kantar World Panel—Ecuador. We estimated a non-linear Almost Ideal Demand System where we model the demand for high sugar and low sugar carbonated soft drinks. We found that the introduction of the traffic light supplemental nutrition labelling did not have the expected effect of reducing purchases of carbonated soft drinks during its first year of implementation, especially those high in sugar. Additionally, we found that lower income-status households tend to spend more on and consume more calories from CSD than households with higher socio-economic status. Finally, we identified that over time purchases of high sugar soft drinks decreased while purchases of low and no sugar soft drinks increased. Beyond our contribution of evaluating the effect of the traffic light on the purchases of carbonated soft drinks, we also estimated price and income elasticities of carbonated soft drinks which can be useful in the evaluation of fiscal policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quandong or native peach (Santalum acuminatum R.Br.) has been recognised as an important and tasty food resource among Aboriginal Australians in arid and semi-arid areas of southern Australia. It is valued for its fruit that is consumed raw or dried, and for its kernel, which is eaten raw or ground into paste for medicinal and skin care purposes. This paper reports on a study of ground stone implements within the Murray Darling Basin that has identified quandong stones as a distinct type of implement made specifically for the efficient cracking of quandong nuts. Data are presented on 1,327 ground stone implements from collections in 12 different locations in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB), an area almost completely devoid of stone sources. Given the paucity of stone, multi-purpose use of implements is widely documented. Although it was common to find pits present in mortars and other ground stone tools demonstrating multiple functions, including use as anvils, a class of single purpose stones with multiple pits and distinctive form was identified. Most of these were found in areas known for groves of quandong and four were analysed for use-wear and residues along with two other ground stone items from the MDB. The results support their identification as specialised anvil stones for cracking quandong nuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment for improving mental health problems among university students. However, intervention components have different effects on mental health problems. This paper is a meta-analysis of the data concerning the relationship between cognitive behavioral variables and mental health status among university students. A total of five electronic databases were reviewed, and 876 articles met the initial selection criteria. Reviewers applied standardized coding schemes to extract the correlational relationship between cognitive behavioral variables and mental health status. A total of 55 articles were included in the meta-analysis. Correlations were found for three cognitive behavioral variables (attention, thought, and behavior) across nine mental health domains (negative affect, positive affect, happiness, social function, stress response, psychological symptom, quality of life, well-being, and general health). Across each cognitive behavioral process and all mental health domains, the estimated mean correlation was medium (r = .32 - .46), and varied by the domain of mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Longitudinal designs provide a strong inferential basis for uncovering reciprocal effects or causality between variables. For this analytic purpose, a cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) has been widely used in medical research, but the use of the CLPM has recently been criticized in methodological literature because parameter estimates in the CLPM conflate between-person and within-person processes. The aim of this study is to present some alternative models of the CLPM that can be used to examine reciprocal effects, and to illustrate potential consequences of ignoring the issue. A literature search, case studies, and simulation studies are used for this purpose. We examined more than 300 medical papers published since 2009 that applied cross-lagged longitudinal models, finding that in all studies only a single model (typically the CLPM) was performed and potential alternative models were not considered to test reciprocal effects. In 49% of the studies, only two time points were used, which makes it impossible to test alternative models. Case studies and simulation studies showed that the CLPM and alternative models often produce different (or even inconsistent) parameter estimates for reciprocal effects, suggesting that research that relies only on the CLPM may draw erroneous conclusions about the presence, predominance, and sign of reciprocal effects. Simulation studies also showed that alternative models are sometimes susceptible to improper solutions, even when reseachers do not misspecify the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Self-regulation is the capacity to regulate attention, emotion, and behaviour to pursue long-term goals. The current study examined the associations between role model presence and self-regulation during early adolescence, controlling for hopefulness, using a large population-based data set from the Tokyo Teen Cohort study. Methods: Adolescents, aged 12 years, identified a role model using a single item on a paper questionnaire: ‘Who is the person you most look up to?’ Level of hopefulness was also assessed using a single question: ‘To what extent do you feel hopeful about the future of your life?’ Trained investigators evaluated self-regulation. Results: Of 2550 adolescents, 2279 (89.4%) identified a role model. After adjusting for level of hopefulness, identifying a role model was associated with higher levels of self-regulation in comparison to indications of no role model. Hopeful future expectations were also associated with higher self-regulation; however, the beta coefficient was smaller than role model presence in the multivariate linear regression analysis. Conclusions: Role model presence was significantly associated with higher self-regulation among early adolescents. Educational environments should focus on support for adolescents with no role models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether tobacco expenditure leads to the crowding out or crowding in of different expenditure items in South Africa. We apply genetic matching to expenditure quartiles of the 2010/2011 South African Income and Expenditure Survey. Genetic matching is a more appealing approach for dealing with the endogeneity of tobacco expenditure that often plagues studies using systems of demand equations. Further, genetic matching provides transparent measures of covariate balance giving the analyst objective means of assessing match success. We find that the poorest tobacco consuming households in South Africa consistently allocate smaller budget shares towards food items than non-smoking households. Specifically, we find that dairy, fruits, nuts and oils are displaced in favour of tobacco expenditure in the two poorest quartiles. Unsurprisingly, food items are never displaced for households in the top two quartiles, given these households’ greater access to resources. Like other studies in the literature, we find that tobacco expenditure consistently crowds-in alcohol across all quartiles confirming the strong complementarities between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Distinguishing certain and uncertain information is of crucial importance both in the scientific field in the strict sense and in the popular scientific domain. In this paper, by adopting an epistemic stance perspective on certainty and uncertainty, and a mixed procedure of analysis, which combines a bottom-up and a top-down approach, we perform a comparative study (both qualitative and quantitative) of the uncertainty linguistic markers (verbs, non-verbs, modal verbs, conditional clauses, uncertain questions, epistemic future) and their scope in three different corpora: a historical corpus of 80 biomedical articles from the British Medical Journal (BMJ) 1840–2007; a corpus of 12 biomedical articles from BMJ 2013, and a contemporary corpus of 12 scientific popular articles from Discover 2013. The variables under observation are time, structure (IMRaD vs no-IMRaD) and genre (scientific vs popular articles). We apply the Generalized Linear Models analysis in order to test whether there are statistically significant differences (1) in the amount of uncertainty among the different corpora, and (2) in the categories of uncertainty markers used by writers. The results of our analysis reveal that (1) in all corpora, the percentages of uncertainty are always much lower than that of certainty; (2) uncertainty progressively diminishes over time in biomedical articles (in conjunction with their structural changes–IMRaD–and to the increase of the BMJ Impact Factor); and (3) uncertainty is slightly higher in scientific popular articles (Discover 2013) as compared to the contemporary corpus of scientific articles (BMJ 2013). Nevertheless, in all corpora, modal verbs are the most used uncertainty markers. These results suggest that not only do scientific writers prefer to communicate their uncertainty with markers of possibility rather than those of subjectivity but also that science journalists prefer using a third-person subject followed by modal verbs rather than a first-person subject followed by mental verbs such as think or believe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing affordability (HA) is considered an important determinant of a country’s socioeconomic development and stability. However, its optimal measurement has remained a major concern worldwide. In recent decades, methodological development and researches on housing affordability measurement approaches (HAMA) have accelerated and continue to grow exponentially. Despite this intensive global development, very few attempts have been made to present the theoretical bases and track the developmental trends of these approaches. Thus, this study attempts to fill this literature gap and extend prior studies by exploring several alternatives of HAMA; with a focus on their methodological weaknesses. This paper highlights three emerging novel methodologies, which complement the relative strength of the conventional approaches. Findings suggest that the main research evidence which summarizes the weaknesses in the conventional measures is; their inability to incorporate sustainability features and over reliance on economic dimension. While the complexity of emerging methodologies, though deepen the overall understanding of multiple concerns that breed HA problems. But are less transparent, more data intensive, and their computation is very demanding, with a high tendency that their complex nature could weaken their uptake by researchers. This study raises concern over the nearly sole reliance on the conventional approaches in the reformations of policy instrument, despite their overwhelming weaknesses. It reiterates the need for reconsideration and offers new insight, but not conclusive information on better ways to conceptualize and measure HA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies show that discrimination by identity found in offline markets also prevails online. This paper reveal that in a competitive market, buyers that intend to discriminate exist but they are prevented from influencing the market outcome. To this end, we construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically discloses the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction. In the anonymous auctions, winning bidders thus learn the identity of the seller after the auction ends, and here we find buyers to discriminate against sellers with foreign-sounding names by leaving them feedback less often. However, there is no such discrimination in feedback provision when the seller name was known to the buyer before the auction. When bidders know the names of the sellers, the bidders with animus towards individuals with specific names can select out of auctions from these sellers, leaving winners that do not discriminate. One would expect that the auctions of for example sellers with foreign-sounding names would receive fewer bidders and thus lower auction prices. However, we observe no such differences: there are no statistically significant differences in the number of bids or auction prices received by sellers with foreign or domestic sounding names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the price changes in global bluefin tuna (BFT) markets in response to shifts in regional and global landings to evaluate the conservation and economic incentives from changes in the Total Allowable Catch (TAC) managed by all three Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. A fisherman’s income, and thus the financial incentive to accept management measures controlling catch levels, depends in part on how responsive price is to overall catch. Individual fisherman, with their own best interest in mind, used to wish to increase their individual landings and create an incentive to ask to increase the TAC for the industry, without realizing the possible revenue loss due to the resulting falling prices. To protect the value of all stakeholders’ property rights, a consensus to avoid abruptly raising the TAC, without first considering the potential loss due to market response, is needed. Alternatively, if revenue increases with lower TAC, a positive economic incentive for conservation is created if price increasing proportionately more than the lower supply, with harvest profits boosted by lower costs of production. To capture the complexity of substituting across various sources of supply and product form, a general synthetic inverse demand system is estimated to identify the impact of overall landings on BFT prices. This system estimates price flexibilities of both fresh and frozen longline-caught sashimi-grade tunas (Pacific, Atlantic and southern bluefins, and bigeye) at the Tokyo Center Market in Japan, including the Tsukiji Market, the world’s largest fish auction market that served as the single global price leader for BFT. The resulting estimation shows that own-quantity price flexibilities of every type of fresh and frozen BFTs are less than unity and inflexible in their own consumption. This creates poor individual producer incentives for fishermen to reduce wild or farmed BFT supply, as there is a chance to increase their own revenue, under the unlikely condition that the total supply is fixed. However, by observing the rapid increases in the TAC of Eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna (EABFT) in the coming years, suppliers may not be better off as price will drop proportionally faster and total revenue if the estimated scale flexibility is greater than one. Based on the estimated scale flexibility of frozen BFT, which is slightly less than unity, the frozen subsector of EABFT suppliers is the only winner under the supply increases. Suppliers of frozen BFT in other regions, fresh BFT (in the Atlantic and elsewhere), and southern BFT and bigeye tuna will all be harmed through lower revenue by the supply increases. Additionally, while total revenue might stay the same for frozen BFT suppliers, fishermen will potentially receive lower profits due to higher operating costs associated with increased landings when the supply of EABFT increases. Given the number of sectors that ultimately lose financially in the short term and given the ecological (and production) risks accompanying an abrupt increase in fishing pressure in the long term, the global economic losses resulting from an increase in the allowable catch of Atlantic bluefin tuna will outweigh any potential increases to revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The Norwegian randomized controlled trial Early Food for Future Health provided parental anticipatory guidance on early protective feeding practices from child age 6 to 12 months through an eHealth intervention. Previously published outcomes at child age 12 months indicated that the eHealth intervention increased daily vegetable/fruit intake and promoted more beneficial mealtime routines. The objective of the current paper is to evaluate the effects of the intervention at child age 24 months, one year after cessation. Methods: Parents of infants aged 3–5 months were recruited via social media and child health clinics during spring 2016. At child age 5.5 months, 715 mothers were randomized to either control (n = 358) or intervention (n = 360) arm. Primary study-outcomes were child eating behaviors, dietary intake, mealtime routines and maternal feeding practices and feeding styles. Secondary outcome was child anthropometry. Results: In total 295 mothers (41%) completed the follow-up questionnaire at child age 24 months. Regarding fruit intake, 54.3% in the intervention group had a high score compared with 48.3% of the control group (p = 0.29). For intake of vegetables, 54.5% in the intervention group had a high score compared with 50.7% in the control group (p = 0.49). A total of 65.7% of the children in the intervention group were eating breakfast together with family ≥ 4 times per week, compared with 57.3% of the children in the control group (p = 0.12). There was no difference between the groups for child anthropometric outcomes at child age 24 months. Conclusions: At child age 24 months, we found no evidence of sustained intervention-effects. Although dietary patterns and mealtime routines at child age 24 months were reasonably consistent and in the same directions as at child age 12 months, the between-group differences were not significant. The large loss to follow-up may have limited power and validity and makes it difficult to draw overall conclusions. Future research is needed to improve knowledge of how short-time effects could be retained over longer term, taking into account that larger samples are necessary when planning longer-term follow-up studies. Trial registration: ISRCTN, . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analyses of large volumes of metagenomic data extracted from aggregate populations of microscopic organisms residing on and in the human body are advancing contemporary understandings of the integrated participation of microbes in human health and disease. Next generation sequencing technology facilitates said analyses in terms of diversity, community composition, and differential abundance by filtering and binning microbial 16S rRNA genes extracted from human tissues into operational taxonomic units. However, current statistical tools restrict study designs to investigations of limited numbers of host characteristics mediated by limited numbers of samples potentially yielding a loss of relevant information. This paper presents a Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial model as an efficient technique capable of compensating for multivariable sets including tens or hundreds of host characteristics as covariates further expanding analyses of human microbiome count data. Simulation studies reveal that the Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial model provides a desirable strategy by often outperforming three competing negative binomial model in terms of type I error while simultaneously maintaining consistent power. An application of the Bayesian hierarchical negative binomial model using subsets of the open data published by the American Gut Project demonstrates an ability to identify operational taxonomic units significantly differentiable among persons diagnosed by a medical professional with either inflammatory bowel disease or irritable bowel syndrome that are consistent with contemporary gastrointestinal literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Alcohol use and abuse constitute a major public health problem and identifying their determinants is a priority. Social network analysis can indicate how characteristics of social networks are related to individual health behaviors. A growing number of studies have used social network analysis to examine how social network characteristics influence adult alcohol consumption, but this literature has never been systematically reviewed and summarized. The current paper systematically reviews empirical studies that used social network analysis to assess the influence of social network characteristics on drinking behaviors in adults. Methods: A literature search of PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO and Web of Science databases and a review of the reference lists of retrieved articles was conducted in March 2019. Two reviewers independently screened 5,510 non-duplicate records, and further screened the full text of 150 articles to determine their eligibility for inclusion. Seventeen articles were judged eligible and included. Results: Most studies were conducted among young adults (mean age<30), in university settings or follow up visits with adolescent networks moving into adulthood. The objectives and methods of the included studies were heterogeneous. All included studies reported a statistically significant association between a social network characteristic and an alcohol consumption-related outcome. Social network members drinking behaviors were associated with participants’ drinking behaviors in multiple ways. Discussion: In young adults, among whom the majority of identified studies were conducted, with whom they socialize and how they socialize appears to be associated with alcohol consumption; this was observed across methodologies and settings. We still know very little about the relationship of social networks to drinking in older age groups, and in populations most impacted by alcohol. As social networks appear to play a role in the consumption of alcohol in young adulthood, interventions that utilize social networks to help reduce harmful alcohol consumption should be considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Against a backdrop of more than four decades of war, conflict and insecurity, Afghanistan is recognised as suffering from endemic violence and children are exposed to multiple forms of violence, including at the family and school levels. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of school-based peace education and a community-based intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence in conflict resolution, implemented in Afghanistan with the aim of reducing violence against and between children. Methods: The evaluation consisted of a cross-sectional, interrupted time series design with three data collection points over 12 months. Data was collected from students in 11 secondary schools (seven girls’ and four boys’ schools) in Jawzjan province of Afghanistan, with a total of 361 boys and 373 girls sampled at endline. All children were interviewed with a questionnaire developed for the study. Key outcomes included children’s experience of peer violence (both perpetration and victimization) at school, corporal punishment both at home and at school, and observation of family violence. Other outcomes included children’s gender equitable attitudes, attitudes towards child punishment, depression and school performance. Results: Between baseline and endline evaluation points, there were significant reductions in various forms of violence at the school level, including both boys’ and girls’ past month experience of peer violence victimization, peer violence perpetration, and corporal punishment by teachers. There were also significant reductions in boys’ and girls’ experience of corporal punishment at home and observation of family violence, with a particularly strong effect observed among girls. Both boys and girls had significantly more equitable gender attitudes and significantly less violence-supportive attitudes in relation to children’s punishment, and significantly fewer symptoms of depression. Girls’ school attendance was also significantly higher at endline. Discussion: To our knowledge this is the first time that a peace education program has been evaluated in Afghanistan, with or without a community intervention to change harmful social norms and practices related to gender and the use of violence for conflict resolution. The evaluation suggests that the intervention may have led to a reduction in various forms of violence, including children’s peer violence, corporal punishment of children both at school and at home, and in children’s reports of domestic violence against women at the household level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]