Bayesian nonparametric density estimation under length bias

A density estimation method in a Bayesian nonparametric framework is presented when recorded data are not coming directly from the distribution of interest, but from a length biased version. From a Bayesian perspective, efforts to computationally evaluate posterior quantities conditionally on length biased data were hindered by the inability to circumvent the problem of a normalizing constant. In this article, we present a novel Bayesian nonparametric approach to the length bias sampling problem that circumvents the issue of the normalizing constant. Numerical illustrations as well as a real data example are presented and the estimator is compared against its frequentist counterpart, the kernel density estimator for indirect data of Jones.     

WHO BENEFITS FROM CHILD BENEFIT?

Governments, over much of the developed world, make significant financial transfers to parents with dependent children. For example, in the United States the recently introduced Child Tax Credit (CTC), which goes to almost all children, costs almost $1 billion each week, or about 0.4% of GNP. The United Kingdom has even more generous transfers and spends an average of about $30 a week on each of about 8 million children—about 1% of GNP. The typical rationale given for these transfers is that they are good for our children and here we investigate the effect of such transfers on household spending patterns. In the United Kingdom such transfers, known as Child Benefit (CB), have been simple lump sum universal payments for a continuous period of more than 20 years. We do indeed find that CB is spent differently from other income—paradoxically, it appears to be spent disproportionately on adult-assignable goods. In fact, we estimate that as much as half of a marginal dollar of CB is spent on alcohol. We resolve this puzzle by showing that the effect is confined to unanticipated variation in CB so we infer that parents are sufficiently altruistic toward their children that they completely insure them against shocks.     

Vocal and Facial Emotion Decoding Difficulties Relating to Social and Thought Problems: Highlighting Schizotypal Personality Disorder

Successful social interaction depends on the ability to decode emotion in the nonverbal behaviors of others. Because relationship difficulties are paramount in adolescents with schizotypal personality disorder (SPD), we predicted that adolescents with SPD would (1) make more emotion decoding errors than adolescents with other personality disorders (OPD) or non-psychiatric controls (NPC); and (2) exhibit more social and thought problems than OPD or NPC adolescents. Further, we predicted greater emotion decoding errors for all adolescents would relate to concurrent and future social problems, thought problems, and social reasoning deficits. SPD adolescents made more errors than OPD and NPC adolescents in decoding voices but not faces (except in specific emotion categories). For all adolescents, vocal errors correlated with greater social problems, and facial and vocal errors correlated with greater thought difficulties concurrently and a year later.     

Challenges to care coordination posed by the use of multiple health IT applications

Coordinating care for hospitalized patients requires the use of multiple sources of information. Using a macroergonomic framework (i.e. the work system model), we conducted interviews and observations of care managers involved in care coordination across transitions of care. When information is distributed across multiple health IT applications, care managers experience a range of challenges, including organizational barriers, technology design problems, skills and knowledge issues, and task performance demands (i.e. issues related to individual information processing and management and sharing of information). These challenges can be used as a checklist to evaluate the proposed IT infrastructure that will allow the integration of multiple health IT applications and, therefore, support coordination across transitions of care.     

Physical Attractiveness and Social Status

In this article, we outline the evidence regarding the status effects of physical attractiveness, paying particular attention to outcomes in the areas of jobs, crime, performance evaluations, power, health perceptions, and exchange. The framework of status characteristics theory is used to guide our explication. The role of attractiveness in marketing is also discussed. While the literature generally supports the idea that attractiveness is good for people, we also consider evidence that beauty can be detrimental for some individuals in certain situations. Issues of race and gender are also considered as well as future research directions.     

Latent Growth in Self‐Regulatory Subdimensions in Relation to Adjustment Outcomes in Youth Aged 12–19

This study assessed latent growth in behavioral inhibition, anger regulation, and goal‐setting from ages 12 to 18, as well as links between latent growth and depression, externalizing behavior, and prosocial behavior at age 19. A second goal included examining whether latent growth in these constructs and associations with distal outcomes varied by sex. Generally speaking, self‐regulatory subdimensions displayed distinct patterns of developmental growth from ages 12 to 18. Growth in self‐regulatory subdimensions did not vary by sex, though initial levels of anger regulation and goal‐setting did vary by sex. In addition, self‐regulatory subdimensions from ages 12 to 18 were differentially related to adjustment outcomes at age 19. However, sex did not moderate associations between growth in self‐regulatory subdimensions and distal outcomes.     

Universities as peculiar organizations

We integrate contemporary sociological scholarship on higher education to appraise universities as peculiar organizations, on three dimensions. Universities are positionally central to the institutional order of modern societies, providing working links between state, market, civil society, and private‐sphere organizations. Universities are polysemic, embodying civic, economic, and sacred meanings simultaneously. And universities are quasi‐sovereign, enjoying a substantial margin of jurisdiction over their own boundaries and internal affairs. These insights are harmonious with classic insights on the character of academic organization and offer concise dimensions for observing variation in higher education systems across space and time.