Correction to: Coping with climatic shocks: local perspectives from Haiti’s rural mountain regions

Population and Environment - The article Coping with climatic shocks: local perspectives from Haiti’s rural mountain regions, written by Caroline Staub, Anne Gilot, Molene Pierre, Gerald...     

Post hoc false positive control for structured hypotheses

In a high-dimensional multiple testing framework, we present new confidence bounds on the false positives contained in subsets S of selected null hypotheses. These bounds are post hoc in the sense that the coverage probability holds simultaneously over all S, possibly chosen depending on the data. This article focuses on the common case of structured null hypotheses, for example, along a tree, a hierarchy, or geometrically (spatially or temporally). Following recent advances in post hoc inference, we build confidence bounds for some prespecified forest-structured subsets and deduce a bound for any subset S by interpolation. The proposed bounds are shown to improve substantially previous ones when the signal is locally structured. Our findings are supported both by theoretical results and numerical experiments. Moreover, our bounds can be obtained by an algorithm (with complexity bilinear in the sizes of the reference hierarchy and of the selected subset) that is implemented in the open-source R package sansSouci available from https://github.com/pneuvial/sanssouci , making our approach operational.     

Besoins individuels et collectifs: Nanacatlan,Mexico

The author intends both to describe a native credit institution in a peasant community and to analyse its overt and covert functions. The community fund, managed by the local authority (presidencia auxiliar) is theoretically available to all household heads who can show solvency (e.g., by pawning a piece of property, usually land). Apart from assisting peasants who face a shortage of cash, another overt function of the system is to finance, with the interests which are paid back on the loans, the functioning of the local administration. Because of the great economic discrepancies between peasants (50 per cent of them own no land, while 2.5 per cent own 30 per cent of the land) one real, although covert, function of the credit institution is to channel a substantial amount of cash to the local upper class (which has little access to banking facilities). Therefore it actually enhances their economic domination over the majority of villagers, which fact allows us to understand the strict control they have exerted over the management of the fund since its foundation, some 40 years ago.     

Epidemiologic network inference

Statistics and Computing - In many epidemiologic models, a disease is assumed to spread along a contact network. We aim to infer this network, in addition to the epidemiologic model parameters,...     

Child welfare workers' practice in cases involving domestic violence

This paper reports the findings of an exploratory and qualitative study of child welfare workers' practice in cases involving domestic violence. The research aimed to focus on child welfare workers' interventions with families experiencing domestic violence, elements influencing the child welfare workers' decisions, and the factors facilitating and creating obstacles for intervention. An analysis of the qualitative data showed that child welfare workers have different ways of intervening in cases involving domestic violence. Also, the interventions were especially centred on women victims of violence and they were held responsible for protecting their children. Finally, the dilemmas and difficulties which child welfare workers face in these cases are discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Wage Bargaining with On‐the‐Job Search: Theory and Evidence

Most applications of Nash bargaining over wages ignore between‐employer competition for labor services and attribute all of the workers' rent to their bargaining power. In this paper, we write and estimate an equilibrium model with strategic wage bargaining and on‐the‐job search and use it to take another look at the determinants of wages in France. There are three essential determinants of wages in our model: productivity, competition between employers resulting from on‐the‐job search, and the workers' bargaining power. We find that between‐firm competition matters a lot in the determination of wages, because it is quantitatively more important than wage bargaining à la Nash in raising wages above the workers' “reservation wages,” defined as out‐of‐work income. In particular, we detect no significant bargaining power for intermediate‐ and low‐skilled workers, and a modestly positive bargaining power for high‐skilled workers.     

Evaluation of a Sexual Abuse Prevention Workshop in a Multicultural,Impoverished Urban Area

Participants in the ESPACE sexual abuse prevention workshop were in grades 1 through 4 and attended three Montreal, Canada, public schools in low socioeconomic areas. The sample was culturally diverse, with half born outside of Canada. An evaluation was conducted to explore the effects associated with participating in the workshop and the effects of booster sessions conducted two years later. Outcomes included knowledge gained, the ability to offer behavioral responses to abusive situations, peer victimization, sense of safety, empathy, self-efficacy, and support. Results revealed that participants in this sample obtained low scores on measures of sexual abuse knowledge and that short booster sessions that elicit children's recall of the learned material might produce greater improvements.     

Interweaving Objects,Gestures, and Talk in Context

In a large French hospital, a group of professional experts (including physicians and software engineers) are working on the computerization of a blood-transfusion traceability device. By focusing on a particular moment in this slow process of design, we analyze their collaborative practices during a work session. The analysis takes a praxeological and interactionist approach and is inspired by discussions on the role of artifacts in social practices currently developed within various research frameworks in this field: activity theory, distributed cognition, conversation analysis, and actor network theory. After a brief presentation of the place of objects and artifacts in these ways of approaching action and human cognition, we show how the collective activity analyzed here is generated by the interweaving of discursive, gestural, and artifactual resources.     

Reduced inhibitory control predicts persistence in laboratory slot machine gambling

Impairments in inhibitory control characterize a range of addictive behaviours including gambling disorder. This study investigated the relationship between a neuropsychological measure of inhibitory control and behaviour on a simulated slot machine that included a measure of gambling persistence, in a non-clinical sample of regular gamblers. Regular gamblers (n = 75) performed a laboratory slot machine task for 30 trials where they could win real money, followed by a persistence phase under extinction (i.e. without wins). Participants also completed a stop-signal task, along with measures of gambling-related cognitions, social desirability, and symptoms of disordered gambling. In hierarchical regression models, reduced inhibitory control was found to predict greater persistence and a higher subjective desire to play again after both wins and near-misses (i.e. unsuccessful outcomes close to the jackpot). These data illustrate the impact of low inhibitory control on relevant behavioural tendencies in a group of regular gamblers. Our results help elucidate a cognitive process that may contribute to problem gambling, with implications for screening and treatment.