Cross‐Sectional Psychological and Demographic Associations of Zika Knowledge and Conspiracy Beliefs Before and After Local Zika Transmission

Perceptions of infectious diseases are important predictors of whether people engage in disease‐specific preventive behaviors. Having accurate beliefs about a given infectious disease has been found to be a necessary condition for engaging in appropriate preventive behaviors during an infectious disease outbreak, while endorsing conspiracy beliefs can inhibit preventive behaviors. Despite their seemingly opposing natures, knowledge and conspiracy beliefs may share some of the same psychological motivations, including a relationship with perceived risk and self‐efficacy (i.e., control). The 2015–2016 Zika epidemic provided an opportunity to explore this. The current research provides some exploratory tests of this topic derived from two studies with similar measures, but different primary outcomes: one study that included knowledge of Zika as a key outcome and one that included conspiracy beliefs about Zika as a key outcome. Both studies involved cross‐sectional data collections that occurred during the same two periods of the Zika outbreak: one data collection prior to the first cases of local Zika transmission in the United States (March–May 2016) and one just after the first cases of local transmission (July–August). Using ordinal logistic and linear regression analyses of data from two time points in both studies, the authors show an increase in relationship strength between greater perceived risk and self‐efficacy with both increased knowledge and increased conspiracy beliefs after local Zika transmission in the United States. Although these results highlight that similar psychological motivations may lead to Zika knowledge and conspiracy beliefs, there was a divergence in demographic association.     

MARKET STRUCTURE AND MEDIA DIVERSITY

We estimate a mixed logit model of the demand for local news service. Results provide evidence that suggest the representative consumer values more diverse news, more coverage of multicultural issues, and more information on community news, and has a distaste for advertising. Demand estimates are used to calculate the impact on consumer welfare from a marginal decrease in the number of independent television stations that lowers the amount of diversity, multiculturalism, community news, and advertising. Consumer welfare decreases, but the losses are smaller in large markets. For example, small‐market consumers lose $45 million annually while large‐market consumers lose $13 million. (JEL C9, C25, L13, L82, L96)     

Behavioral responses of rural and urban greater white-toothed shrews (Crocidura russula) to sound disturbance

Urban Ecosystems - The development of urban areas imposes challenges that wildlife must adapt to in order to persist in these new habitats. One of the greatest changes brought by urbanization has...     

Accurate computation of single and product moments of order statistics under progressive censoring

An accurate procedure is proposed to calculate approximate moments of progressive order statistics in the context of statistical inference for lifetime models. The study analyses the performance of power series expansion to approximate the moments for location and scale distributions with high precision and smaller deviations with respect to the exact values. A comparative analysis between exact and approximate methods is shown using some tables and figures. The different approximations are applied in two situations. First, we consider the problem of computing the large sample variance–covariance matrix of maximum likelihood estimators. We also use the approximations to obtain progressively censored sampling plans for log-normal distributed data. These problems illustrate that the presented procedure is highly useful to compute the moments with precision for numerous censoring patterns and, in many cases, is the only valid method because the exact calculation may not be applicable.     

Inference and Decision Making for 21st-Century Drug Development and Approval

ABSTRACT

The cost and time of pharmaceutical drug development continue to grow at rates that many say are unsustainable. These trends have enormous impact on what treatments get to patients, when they get them and how they are used. The statistical framework for supporting decisions in regulated clinical development of new medicines has followed a traditional path of frequentist methodology. Trials using hypothesis tests of “no treatment effect” are done routinely, and the p-value < 0.05 is often the determinant of what constitutes a “successful” trial. Many drugs fail in clinical development, adding to the cost of new medicines, and some evidence points blame at the deficiencies of the frequentist paradigm. An unknown number effective medicines may have been abandoned because trials were declared “unsuccessful” due to a p-value exceeding 0.05. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has shown utility in the clinical drug development process for its probability-based inference. We argue for a Bayesian approach that employs data from other trials as a “prior” for Phase 3 trials so that synthesized evidence across trials can be utilized to compute probability statements that are valuable for understanding the magnitude of treatment effect. Such a Bayesian paradigm provides a promising framework for improving statistical inference and regulatory decision making.     

Constant factor approximation for the weighted partial degree bounded edge packing problem

In the partial degree bounded edge packing problem (PDBEP), the input is an undirected graph \(G=(V,E)\) with capacity \(c_v\in {\mathbb {N}}\) on each vertex v. The objective is to find a feasible subgraph \(G'=(V,E')\) maximizing \(|E'|\), where \(G'\) is said to be feasible if for each \(e=\{u,v\}\in E'\), \(\deg _{G'}(u)\le c_u\) or \(\deg _{G'}(v)\le c_v\). In the weighted version of the problem, additionally each edge \(e\in E\) has a weight w(e) and we want to find a feasible subgraph \(G'=(V,E')\) maximizing \(\sum _{e\in E'} w(e)\). The problem is already NP-hard if \(c_v = 1\) for all \(v\in V\) (Zhang in: Proceedings of the joint international conference on frontiers in algorithmics and algorithmic aspects in information and management, FAW-AAIM 2012, Beijing, China, May 14–16, pp 359–367, 2012). In this paper, we introduce a generalization of the PDBEP problem. We let the edges have weights as well as demands, and we present the first constant-factor approximation algorithms for this problem. Our results imply the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the weighted PDBEP problem, improving the result of Aurora et al. (FAW-AAIM 2013) who presented an \(O(\log n)\)-approximation for the weighted case. We also study the weighted PDBEP problem on hypergraphs and present a constant factor approximation if the maximum degree of the hypergraph is bounded above by a constant. We study a generalization of the weighted PDBEP problem with demands where each edge additionally specifies whether it requires at least one, or both its end-points to not exceed the capacity. The objective is to pick a maximum weight subset of edges. We give a constant factor approximation for this problem. We also present a PTAS for the weighted PDBEP problem with demands on H-minor free graphs, if the demands on the edges are bounded by polynomial. We show that the PDBEP problem is APX-hard even for bipartite graphs with \(c_v = 1, \; \forall v\in V\) and having degree at most 3.     

Quality of Life in Italian Official Surveys

Quality-of-life studies have a 50-year history and inherited the tradition of the “social indicators” movement, born in the United States during the sixties and involving scholars and researchers, supported by the public administration and interested in gathering and analysing data aimed at studying non-economic components of societal wellbeing. The idea of quantifying “symptoms” (indicators) of living conditions has been launched by Italian statistician and criminologist, Alfredo Niceforo, who has been recognised as the pioneer of social-indicators concept. Moreover, with his book on Les indices numérique de la civilisation et du progrès, he may be considered the originator of an approach of comprehensive welfare and quality of life measurement as it is the concern of modern social indicators and quality of life.     

Intergenerational cooperation within the household: a Public Good game with three generations

We analyze cooperation of individuals in a family context, using a Public Good game. In a lab experiment, 165 individuals from 55 three-generation families (youth, parent, and grandparent) play a repeated Public Good game in three different treatments: one in which three members of the same family play each other (family), a second with the youth and two non-family members, while preserving the previous generational structure (inter-generational), and a third in which three randomly-selected players play each other (random). We find that all the age groups cooperate more when playing with relatives, indicating that family ties may have a positive relationship to contributions to the Public Good. We also find that this trend is more evident for the youths and the parents than for the grandparents. Furthermore, young individuals tend to cooperate less than older generations, especially in non-family treatments. Our results serve as evidence of the relationship between family ties and inter-generational cooperative behaviors.