Priority Topics in the Study of Environmental Risk in Developing Countries: Report on a Workshop Held at the East–West Center, August, 1988

The rapid industrialization occurring in developing regions of the world brings not only economic benefits, but changes in the types and severity of health and environmental problems that each region experiences. As the industrialized world moves toward the use of risk assessment methodologies to aid in problem evaluation and regulatory and policy decision analysis, it seems inevitable that these methodologies will be applied globally. The changes brought about by rapid industrialization, however, must be viewed within the context of societies that are still struggling with the more traditional and basic environmental problems associated with urban and rural poverty. The urgency of development and the lack of adequate resources for characterizing health and environmental changes, often present under these circumstances, offer special challenges to the application of risk assessment methodologies.     

Come one, come all

Aging is a complex process that involves the gradual functional decline of many different tissues and cells. Gene expression microarray analysis provides a comprehensive view of the gene expression signature associated with age and is particularly valuable for understanding the molecular mechanisms that contribute to the aging process. However, because of the stochastic nature of the aging process, animals of the same chronological age often manifest great physiological differences. Therefore, profiling the gene expression pattern of a large population of aging animals risks either exaggerating or masking the changes in gene expression that correspond to physiological aging. In a recent paper, Golden and Melov surveyed the gene expression profiles of individual aging Caenorhabditis elegans, hoping to circumvent the problem of variability among worms of the same chronological age. This initial analysis of age-dependent gene expression in individual aging worms is an important step toward deciphering the molecular basis of physiological aging.     

Bayesian gene set analysis for identifying significant biological pathways

We propose a hierarchical Bayesian model for analyzing gene expression data to identify pathways differentiating between two biological states (e.g., cancer vs. non-cancer and mutant vs. normal). Finding significant pathways can improve our understanding of biological processes. When the biological process of interest is related to a specific disease, eliciting a better understanding of the underlying pathways can lead to designing a more effective treatment. We apply our method to data obtained by interrogating the mutational status of p53 in 50 cancer cell lines (33 mutated and 17 normal). We identify several significant pathways with strong biological connections. We show that our approach provides a natural framework for incorporating prior biological information, and it has the best overall performance in terms of correctly identifying significant pathways compared to several alternative methods.     

Determinants of work-family balance satisfaction during the pandemic: Insights from Québec

The first wave of the COVID pandemic was the most challenging for employed parents, and more specifically for women. In Québec, research has shown a deterioration in the psychological health of parents in the early weeks of the pandemic. In this research, we investigate how Québec parents who remained employed during the lockdown in 2020 perceived their work-family balance in the stressful context of new earning and caregiving constraints, drawing on survey data collected in May 2020. Our approach integrates insights from psychological, managerial and sociological literatures. We find that most parents who remained employed found their work-family balance “easy” in the first months of the pandemic, but women felt less satisfied with their work-family balance than men as well as those whose employers were less understanding and supportive, and those whose workloads increased. The implications of these results are discussed in the light of previous studies on work-family intersections, to show that gender continues to matter when family members are faced with extraordinary circumstances such as the closing of childcare and schools, even in the egalitarian context of Québec, where fathers are perceived as legitimate caregivers.     

Class Differences in Establishment Pathways to Fatherhood Wage Premiums

Organizations have been argued to favor fathers over childless men and skilled fathers over less‐skilled fathers, but group wage inequalities vary across as well as within establishments. This article theorizes class differences in the contribution of being employed in a high‐wage firm to the fatherhood wage premium. Analyses of linked employer–employee data from the Canadian Workplace and Employee Survey reveal that sorting into high‐wage establishments accounts for 60% of the economy‐wide premium for less‐educated and nonprofessional fathers, whereas high‐skilled fathers tend to work in lower wage establishments but receive the largest net fatherhood premium within firms. Among the subsample of fathers who changed employers in the past 5 years, less‐skilled fathers fared worse, whereas high‐skilled fathers sorted into high‐wage firms. Results thus suggest that employment in a higher wage firm likely enables less‐skilled men to transition to fatherhood, whereas high‐wage employers may discriminate in favor of only high‐skilled fathers in hiring.     

‘It wasn’t racism; it was more misunderstanding.’ White teachers,Latino/a students,and racial battle fatigue

This article explores how and why a group of Latino/a high school students identify and explain racism differently over the course of an 18-month participatory action research (PAR) project. To do this we examine what recent scholarship has termed racial microaggressions in what is thought of as the Post-Racial America public school system. Pulling examples from student and teacher interview, focus group, and class discussion data we first examine how these students’ teachers conceptualize and talk about racism, cross-racial relationships, and racial misunderstandings, and then we juxtapose that with students’ discursive work to make sense of the ways their teachers make their conceptualizations known and/or seen in school. Focusing on the K-12 context, this study finds racial battle fatigue may be why students switch between how they label these aggressions.     

Modelling Heterogeneity With and Without the Dirichlet Process

We investigate the relationships between Dirichlet process (DP) based models and allocation models for a variable number of components, based on exchangeable distributions. It is shown that the DP partition distribution is a limiting case of a Dirichlet–multinomial allocation model. Comparisons of posterior performance of DP and allocation models are made in the Bayesian paradigm and illustrated in the context of univariate mixture models. It is shown in particular that the unbalancedness of the allocation distribution, present in the prior DP model, persists a posteriori . Exploiting the model connections, a new MCMC sampler for general DP based models is introduced, which uses split/merge moves in a reversible jump framework. Performance of this new sampler relative to that of some traditional samplers for DP processes is then explored.     

Mobilität oder Immobilität?

An ongoing controversy in transformation research concerns the relative importance of firm-internal versus occupational segmentation in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) employment system compared to the West German system. In a first step, institutions of vocational education and of the employment system focusing on their impact on labor market segmentation are analyzed. Then, the occupational careers of different birth cohorts of East and West Germans are examined. Empirical results show that the importance of internal mobility increased over time in the GDR. But this change cannot primarily be attributed to personnel policies of firms. It was mainly due to social policies, i.e. the introduction of compulsory army service and of maternity leave, since companies were obliged to take the army recruits and mothers back afterwards. Obviously, the way social policies were institutionalized affected the levels of labor market mobility in both countries more than changes of employment strategies.     

Estimating models based on Markov jump processes given fragmented observation series

We consider the problem of estimating the rate matrix governing a finite-state Markov jump process given a number of fragmented time series. We propose to concatenate the observed series and to employ the emerging non-Markov process for estimation. We describe the bias arising if standard methods for Markov processes are used for the concatenated process, and provide a post-processing method to correct for this bias. This method applies to discrete-time Markov chains and to more general models based on Markov jump processes where the underlying state process is not observed directly. This is demonstrated in detail for a Markov switching model. We provide applications to simulated time series and to financial market data, where estimators resulting from maximum likelihood methods and Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling are improved using the presented correction.     

Changing generations in today's workforce: Leadership skills for Millennials

The focus of traditional leadership expectations is the individual leader's developmental experience. However, Millennials are seeking to take on leadership roles more quickly than previous generations. The Practice‐Immediacy Model provides a framework where Millennials can take on these leadership roles while continuing to develop their own behavior and skills. The present article expands on the four basic behavioral components of leadership—vision building, standard‐bearing, integrating, and developing. The article then describes the associated specific skills within each behavioral component. Finally, the article proposes an interdisciplinary model that professionals can use to develop leadership skills for Millennials.