A unified epistemological theory of information processing

Theory and Decision - What does it mean for an agent faced with choice under uncertainty to “know” something? While a variety of mathematical methods are available to construct formal...     

Perfectionism and Choice

Empirical evidence suggests that perfectionism can affect choice behavior. When striving for perfection, a person can desire to keep normatively appealing options feasible even if she persistently fails to use these options later. For instance, she can “pay not to go to the gym,” as in DellaVigna and Malmendier (2006). By contrast, some perfectionists may avoid normatively important tasks for fear of negative self‐evaluation of their performance. This paper models perfectionist behaviors in Gul and Pesendorfer's (2001) menu framework where agents may be tempted to deviate from their long‐term normative objectives. In addition to self‐control costs, I identify a utility component that reflects emotional costs and benefits of perfectionism. My model is derived from axioms imposed on preferences over menus in an essentially unique way.     

Standard statistical tools for the breed allocation problem

Modern technologies are frequently used in order to deal with new genomic problems. For instance, the STRUCTURE software is usually employed for breed assignment based on genetic information. However, standard statistical techniques offer a number of valuable tools which can be successfully used for dealing with most problems. In this paper, we investigated the capability of microsatellite markers for individual identification and their potential use for breed assignment of individuals in seventy Lidia breed lines and breeders. Traditional binomial logistic regression is applied to each line and used to assign one individual to a particular line. In addition, the area under receiver operating curve (AUC) criterion is used to measure the capability of the microsatellite-based models to separate the groups. This method allows us to identify which microsatellite loci are related to each line. Overall, only one subject was misclassified or a 99.94% correct allocation. The minimum observed AUC was 0.986 with an average of 0.997. These results suggest that our method is competitive for animal allocation and has some interpretative advantages and a strong relationship with methods based on SNPs and related techniques.     

A new mathematical approach for the estimation of the AUC and its variability under different experimental designs in preclinical studies

The aim of the present work was to develop a new mathematical method for estimating the area under the curve (AUC) and its variability that could be applied in different preclinical experimental designs and amenable to be implemented in standard calculation worksheets. In order to assess the usefulness of the new approach, different experimental scenarios were studied and the results were compared with those obtained with commonly used software: WinNonlin® and Phoenix WinNonlin®. The results do not show statistical differences among the AUC values obtained by both procedures, but the new method appears to be a better estimator of the AUC standard error, measured as the coverage of 95% confidence interval. In this way, the new proposed method demonstrates to be as useful as WinNonlin® software when it was applicable. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Postural analysis of eight university student wheelchair users when performing written exercises in their classroom: a case study in Santiago de Cali, Colombia

In students with physical disabilities, the more energy and time required and invested into finding a good posture, the longer the learning process takes. For this reason, the objective of this study was to characterize the posture in the act of writing of wheelchair users in a classroom. Eight students, (three women) aged 18-40, of some of the main universities of the city of Santiago de Cali participated. An observational field study filming of approximately 10 minutes was done while they took notes in their classes. Posture of the head, trunk, and upper extremities was analyzed with respect to its axis and the type of movement in each joint. The postures were classified depending on the location of support surface finding five different postures in the eight students. In these five postures some biomechanical risk factors, usually present in wheelchair users, are increased when they are associated with those postures. Those associated risk factors are: possible disc spine deformation, muscular stress and causing of pressure ulcer. In conclusion, in four of these five postures a poor interaction among person, task and work desk was observed. Therefore, seven of the eight students in this study were found to have a posture that could be considered risky.     

Policy Streams and Immigration to Russia: Competing and Complementary Interests at the Federal and Local Levels

This article uses Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework to explain forms of national‐ and region‐level governance used in the Russian Federation to manage unprecedented levels of international immigration. First, we identify the ways that the Russian federal government has legislated and governed international migration from 1991 through 2010. We then compare the federal level to the case of the Krasnodar region, an ethnically diverse region in the North Caucasus. We find that that migration policy adoption in Russia at the federal level is relatively immune to economic trends or labour needs but more sensitive to foreign and domestic political objectives. At the regional level, local socio‐political and economic concerns predominate and political objectives are secondary. Finally, we argue that migration policy changes or adopted policy at the regional level may be explained by an interaction effect between changes in political leadership, federal level policy adoption, and regional level context.     

ZONING UNDER SPATIAL PRICE DISCRIMINATION

This paper investigates zoning in a duopoly model of spatial price discrimination. We find that the zone in which the firms are not allowed to locate depends on the bias of the regulator. A bias toward firms is deduced when locations around the central area are forbidden, and a bias toward consumers exists when firms are only allowed to locate at places around the central area. The design of the zoned area guarantees that firms locate optimally and works under simultaneous or sequential choice of locations by the two firms. (JEL L13, R38)     

Television news consumption and public attitudes towards immigration: a multi-level approach / Consumo de información televisiva y actitudes publicas hacia la inmigración: un enfoque multinivel

This paper analyses the association between TV news consumption and public attitudes towards immigration. A multi-level model is used to study the complex relationship between TV news consumption, how the media treat immigration and public attitudes towards minority groups based on a survey of university students. Multi-level analysis results show the impact of aggregate consumption of TV news on the perception of the current immigration phenomenon and the cognitive/affective components of attitude. It also demonstrates the usefulness of this analytical approach for understanding the processes that describe the relationship between the media and attitudes towards immigration.     

Hierarchical Processing in Seven‐Month‐Old Infants

Hierarchical structures are crucial to many aspects of cognitive processing and especially for language. However, there still is little experimental support for the ability of infants to learn such structures. Here, we show that, with structures simple enough to be processed by various animals, seven‐month‐old infants seem to learn hierarchical relations. Infants were presented with an artificial language composed of “sentences” made of three‐syllable “words.” The syllables within words conformed to repetition patterns based on syllable tokens involving either adjacent repetitions (e.g., dubaba) or nonadjacent repetitions (e.g., du ba du ) . Importantly, the sequence of word structures in each sentence conformed to repetition patterns based on word types (e.g., aba‐ abb ‐ abb ). Infants learned this repetition pattern of repetition patterns and thus likely a hierarchical pattern based on repetitions, but only when the repeated word structure was based on adjacent repetitions. While our results leave open the question of which exact sentence‐level pattern infants learned, they suggest that infants embedded the word‐level patterns into a higher‐level pattern and thus seemed to acquire a hierarchically embedded pattern.