Summer temperature effects on deaths and hospital admissions among the elderly population in two Italian cities

In developed countries the effects of climate on health status are mainly due to temperature. Our analysis is aimed to deepen statistically the relationship between summer climate conditions and daily frequency of health episodes: deaths or hospital admissions. We expect to find a U-shaped relationship between temperature and frequencies of events occurring in summer regarding the elderly population resident in Milano and Brescia. We use as covariates hourly records of temperature recorded at observation sites located in Milano and Brescia. The analysis is performed using Generalized Additive Models (GAM), where the response variable is the daily number of events, which varies as a possibly non-linear function of meteorological variables measured on the same or previous day. We consider separate models for Milano and Brescia and then we compare temperature effects among the two towns and among different age classes. Moreover we consider separate models for all diagnosed events, for those due to respiratory disease and those due to circulatory pathologies. Model selection is a central problem, the basic methods used are the UBRE and GCV criteria but, instead of conditioning all final conclusions on the best model according to the chosen criterion, we investigated the effect of model selection by implementing a bootstrap procedure.     

Moderator Assistant: A Natural Language Generation-Based Intervention to Support Mental Health via Social Media

As online mental health support groups become increasingly popular, they require more support from volunteers and trained moderators who help their users through “interventions” (i.e., responding to questions and providing support). We present a system that supports such human interventions using Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The system generates draft responses aimed at reducing moderators’ workload, and improving their efficacy. NLG and human interventions were compared through the ratings of 35 psychology interns. The NLG-based system was capable of generating messages that are grammatically correct with clear language. The system needs improvement, however, moderators can already use it as draft responses.     

Multicultural Meanings of Social Support among Immigrants and Refugees

Canada continues to be a prominent immigrant and refugee‐receiving country in worldwide migration, resettlement, and search for refuge, yet there is a gap in our understanding of these newcomers’ views of the specific meanings of social support and their support needs and resources. The purpose of this study was to understand the meanings of social support for immigrants and refugees in Canada, and to explore the types and adequacy of formal supports. Individual interviews were conducted with 60 service providers and policymakers initially (Phase 1), and 120 immigrants and refugees (60 Chinese, 60 Somali) in the second phase. The implications of these findings were elicited in group interviews (Phase 3) of policy decision‐makers, advocates, service providers, and managers. This investigation revealed many interrelated challenges facing refugees and immigrants such as language difficulties, inadequate information on services, poor health, racism, needs for retraining, rejection of foreign qualifications, unemployment, social isolation, social insecurity, dwindling social networks, and family conflicts. The study also illuminated culturally and socio‐economically determined perceptions of social support and support‐seeking strategies. Limited personal resources and dwindling social networks are an impediment to coping with integration and settlement challenges. In many cases, newcomers’ efforts to seek help are thwarted by systemic obstacles. Newcomers experienced extensive unmet support needs, which service providers cannot adequately meet due to bureaucratic and resource constraints. Policies in various sectors that affect the lives of immigrants and refugees are inadequate for bridging their support deficiencies. These support gaps hinder the successful settlement and integration of newcomers. Policies and programs fostering culturally relevant support, and inter‐sectoral collaboration among organizations addressing the support needs of immigrants and refugees are timely.     

Nonparametric inference for the joint distribution of recurrent marked variables and recurrent survival time

Time between recurrent medical events may be correlated with the cost incurred at each event. As a result, it may be of interest to describe the relationship between recurrent events and recurrent medical costs by estimating a joint distribution. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric estimator for the joint distribution of recurrent events and recurrent medical costs in right-censored data. We also derive the asymptotic variance of our estimator, a test for equality of recurrent marker distributions, and present simulation studies to demonstrate the performance of our point and variance estimators. Our estimator is shown to perform well for a wide range of levels of correlation, demonstrating that our estimators can be employed in a variety of situations when the correlation structure may be unknown in advance. We apply our methods to hospitalization events and their corresponding costs in the second Multicenter Automatic Defibrillator Implantation Trial (MADIT-II), which was a randomized clinical trial studying the effect of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators in preventing ventricular arrhythmia.     

Exploring the Domestic Homes of Sikhs in Finland as a “Cosmos of Senses”

The domestic home plays an important role in the process of socialization. In the context of migration, home becomes even more meaningful as a site for socialization, since it provides—next to the Internet, cultural events and places of religious worship—one of the few sites where young children can learn about their parent’s cultural and religious traditions in their new homelands. Grounded in data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, this article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which the domestic space of home is involved in the process through which young Sikhs who are growing up in Finland are made familiar with their parents’ religion. To reach this objective, I will examine home as a “cosmos of senses” that has been created by its inhabitants and the practices they perform in the course of everyday life. Applying the ethnographic lens in the study of the domestic home of Sikhs will also help us to gain a more profound understanding of Sikhism as a lived religion, as the findings presented in this article show.     

Transition to Parenthood: The Role of Social Interaction and Endogenous Networks

Empirical studies indicate that the transition to parenthood is influenced by an individual’s peer group. To study the mechanisms creating interdependencies across individuals’ transition to parenthood and its timing, we apply an agent-based simulation model. We build a one-sex model and provide agents with three different characteristics: age, intended education, and parity. Agents endogenously form their network based on social closeness. Network members may then influence the agents’ transition to higher parity levels. Our numerical simulations indicate that accounting for social interactions can explain the shift of first-birth probabilities in Austria during the period 1984 to 2004. Moreover, we apply our model to forecast age-specific fertility rates up to 2016.     

A Two-Step Approach to Analyze Satisfaction Data

In this paper a two-step procedure based on Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis (NLPCA) and Multilevel models (MLM) for the analysis of satisfaction data is proposed. The basic hypothesis is that observed ordinal variables describe different aspects of a latent continuous variable, which depends on covariates connected with individual and contextual features. NLPCA is used to measure the level of a latent variable and MLM is adopted for detecting individual and environmental determinants of the level. This approach is suggested to analyze users’ satisfaction. In fact, NLPCA is used to create a synthetic continuous measure of satisfaction (first step) and MLM are used to detect the role of external (individual or environmental) variables that can affect the level itself (second step). The proposed two-step procedure is applied to the Eurobarometer survey data about opinion of European citizens on services of general interest (SGI) aiming to evaluate and compare the opinion about SGI in different countries. The focus is on overall level of satisfaction about four major public services: fixed telephone, electricity supply, postal and rail services. The item analyzed, which are named manifest variables, are: access easiness, price, quality, information clarity and contract fairness, as reported in the 2002 Eurobarometer survey. In the first step these variables are used to set up the synthetic indicator (the overall level) of satisfaction and, in the second step, a MLM is used to test the impact of some explanatory variables on this satisfaction.     

Educational Mismatch of Graduates: a Multidimensional and Fuzzy Indicator

In this paper we attempt to measure the educational mismatch, seen as a problem of overeducation, using a multidimensional and fuzzy methodology. Educational mismatch can be difficult to measure because many factors can converge to its definition and the traditional unidimensional indicators presented in literature can offer a restricted view of the problem. We discovered two dimensions that properly define overeducation. The first includes information regarding job satisfaction, the use of expertise and the coherence between study and work, but also the measure on which the traditional indicator is based and the second concern earning aspects. We then calculate a degree of membership to the set of overeducated workers using the defined dimensions. We believe that in this manner we can partially overcome the rigidity of the traditional measures. Our findings suggested that generally women have a degree of mismatch higher than men and the graduates in Pharmacy, Medicine and Engineering are the least overeducated in terms of the first dimension, even if in terms of the earnings dimension they have similar mismatches to the other fields of education. Self-employment and collaboration contracts reduce overeducation when the first dimension is considered; on the other hand, when the second dimension is taken into account graduates with collaboration contracts are the most mismatched out of those having a job. Additionally, university reform introduced in the academic year 2001–2002 in the Italian higher education system is shown as not contributing to a reduction of the overeducation phenomenon.