Forecasting intraday time series with multiple seasonal cycles using parsimonious seasonal exponential smoothing

This paper concerns the forecasting of seasonal intraday time series that exhibit repeating intraweek and intraday cycles. A recently proposed exponential smoothing method involves smoothing a different intraday cycle for each distinct type of day of the week. Similar days are allocated identical intraday cycles. A limitation is that the method allows only whole days to be treated as identical. We introduce a new exponential smoothing formulation that allows parts of different days of the week to be treated as identical. The result is a method that involves the smoothing and initialisation of fewer terms. We evaluate forecasting up to a day ahead using two empirical studies. For electricity load data, the new method compares well with a range of alternatives. The second study involves a series of arrivals at a call centre that is open for a shorter duration at the weekends than on weekdays. Among the variety of methods considered, the new method is the only one that can model in a satisfactory way in this situation, where the number of periods on each day of the week is not the same.     

American High School Students’ Perceptions of Determinants of Life Satisfaction

Life satisfaction can be assessed either globally or with regard to satisfaction with specific domains of life. The latter multidimensional approach presumes science has delineated with confidence the specific domains most relevant to evaluating whether the criteria for a good life have been met. This paper shares results of a qualitative study of the perceived determinants of life satisfaction among 30 high school students who were diverse in terms of mental health; 6–10 participants were classified as complete mental health, vulnerable, symptomatic but content, or troubled at two time points separated by a year. Thematic analyses of transcribed individual interviews suggested eight themes that capture the domains of life adolescents perceive influence their happiness. These themes are compared and contrasted to domains included in existing multi-dimensional measures of youth life satisfaction. The factors likely to be particularly salient to students with different levels of mental health are noted.

     

Computationally and statistically efficient model fitting techniques

A significant challenge in fitting metamodels of large-scale simulations with sufficient accuracy is in the computational time required for rigorous statistical validation. This paper addresses the statistical computation issues associated with the Bootstrap and modified PRESS statistic, which yield key metrics for error measurements in metamodelling validation. Experimentation is performed on different programming languages, namely, MATLAB, R, and Python, and implemented on different computing architectures including traditional multicore personal computers and high-power clusters with parallel computing capabilities. This study yields insight into the effect that programming languages and computing architecture have on the computational time for simulation metamodel validation. The experimentation is performed across two scenarios with varying complexity.     

Negotiating Tensions between Methodology and Procedural Ethics

In this commentary, I consider what can go wrong in research when tensions arise between methodology and procedural ethics. I recount difficulties negotiating and implementing a participant recruitment strategy during my doctoral research project, which aimed to explore the experiences of people affected by dementia in the United Kingdom who were disengaged from services. To access this hard-to-reach population, I intended to adopt an informal recruitment strategy, snowball sampling from personal contacts and striking up conversations in public places. The procedural ethics committee were unhappy with this approach, deeming it potentially coercive. They suggested a more formal recruitment strategy enacted via emailing community organisations and churches. This approach entailed practical consequences that ultimately weakened the study sample, data and findings. This case raises questions about the negotiation of tensions between methodology and procedural ethics in gerontological research.     

Do flexible work schedules reduce turnover in U.S. federal agencies?

Agency theory suggests that when agencies adopt flexible work schedules, employees will be more likely to remain with the organization, because these programs demonstrate that the organization cares about their well-being in that flexible work schedules give them more flexibility regarding when, where, and how they perform their work. To test this proposition, cross-sectional panel data at the agency level were obtained from two federal government sources: Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey and FedScope. Furthermore, transfers and quits were the two forms of turnover examined. After lagging the independent variables behind turnover over several years so as to provide a robust test of causality, the results show only limited support for agency theory. Specifically, teleworking was found to lower quits. However, teleworking was not found to reduce transfers or turnover, in general. Furthermore, alternative work schedules were not found to have an impact on quits, transfers, or turnover generally.     

Making Professional Decisions in Research: Measurement and Key Predictors

The professional decision-making in research (PDR) measure was administered to 400 National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded and industry-funded investigators, along with measures of cynicism, moral disengagement, compliance disengagement, impulsivity, work stressors, knowledge of responsible conduct of research (RCR), and socially desirable response tendencies. Negative associations were found for the PDR and measures of cynicism, moral disengagement, and compliance disengagement, while positive associations were found for the PDR and RCR knowledge and positive urgency, an impulsivity subscale. PDR scores were not related to socially desirable responding, or to measures of work stressors and the remaining impulsivity subscales. In a multivariate logistic regression analysis, lower moral disengagement scores, higher RCR knowledge, and identifying the United States as one’s nation of origin emerged as key predictors of stronger performance on the PDR. The implications of these findings for understanding the measurement of decision-making in research and future directions for research and RCR education are discussed.     

Effects of Network Approval on Accounts of Commitment Trajectories in Intraracial and Interracial Relationships

The current study used dyadic data to investigate the impact of relationship type and social support on the retrospective accounts of commitment trajectories of romantic relationships. Past research suggests that social support is a positive contributor to relationship stability and commitment, which may be especially true for partners in interracial relationships who face broader societal opposition than intraracial couples. Using multilevel modeling, we investigated the effects of sex, relationship type, and social support on reports of commitment. Results showed differences in trajectories of commitment based on couple type (interracial vs. intraracial) for both men and women. Social support was found to have an especially strong impact for women in interracial relationships compared with women in intraracial relationships, but there was no differential impact among men.     

Contributions of Look Duration and Gaze Shift Patterns to Infants’ Novelty Preferences

Data from 72 infants, tested using a serial paired‐comparison paradigm, were analyzed to better understand infant novelty preferences. Infants between the ages of 15 and 26 weeks were tested in three studies with familiar stimuli displayed adjacent to novel stimuli on each trial. Differences in look duration, look number, and gaze shifts directed at novel versus familiar stimuli were assessed to measure their contributions to group and individual novelty preferences. Infants produced longer looks for novel stimuli in all three studies, and stimulus differences in look duration accounted for more than 50% of the variability in individual novelty preferences. Infants that produced more looks to novel rather than familiar stimuli did not produce overall novelty preferences unless they also looked longer at novel stimuli. Gaze shift patterns did not predict individual novelty preferences, and novel stimuli did not determine where infants looked. The infants’ visual exploration was constrained by memories for the direction of the previous look as well as by the attention‐holding features of novel stimuli.     

The Influence of Maternal Socialization on Infants’ Social Evaluation in Two Cultures

Although a growing body of research has explored the early development of social evaluation, no research has directly compared social evaluations of infants between different cultures. In addition, there has been little understanding regarding socialization's effects on this ability. The goal of this study was to expand on earlier findings on social evaluation in infants by investigating a broader sample from two cultures, and to explore the influence of maternal socialization on infants’ social evaluation. Using the violation of expectations and the preferential reaching paradigm, four groups aged 6‐, 9‐, 12‐, and 15–18 months and their mothers from Japan and the United States (159 dyads) were compared in terms of spontaneous social evaluations. Japanese and European American infants showed similar performance in dishabituation to the inconsistent behavior and in their reaching preference for prosocial over antisocial agents, indicating that the emergence of spontaneous social evaluation is not culture‐specific. Furthermore, our study provides a novel finding regarding the relationship between mothers’ socially evaluative speech and infants’ preference for prosocial over antisocial agents. These results suggest that the development of sociomoral understanding results from complicated interactions among evolutionary, cognitive, and social factors.