Vygotskian-Inspired Research on the Developmental Implications of Organic Impairment

The aim is to refine recent discussion about the process of compensation under conditions of organic impairment in order to better understand how the concept has been addressed by cultural-historical researchers. From a dialogue among contemporary authors and the examination of the case of a student with multiple disabilities confronting the schooling process, we draw attention to how meaning has an effect upon complex functional systems and paves the way for new forms of human development. We conclude that it is important to challenge the relevance of the term compensation in its connection with the notion of human constitution.     

Association between handgrip strength,walking, age-related illnesses and cognitive status in a sample of Portuguese centenarians

Background

Centenarians are a growing population in Europe and present significant variability in motor and cognitive functions. The aim of our study was to characterize health status, as well as cognitive and motor functions in a group of Portuguese centenarians. In addition, our study also aimed at analyzing the relationship between cognitive functions and the burden of diseases affecting the elderly.

Methods

Fifty-two centenarians were evaluated using the Mini-Mental State Examination, short version. Walking-related parameters (velocity and time spent in the 3 m walk test), grip strength and number of age-related illnesses were also measured. The relationship between cognitive scores and time spent in the three metre walk test, velocity, grip strength and number of diseases was analysed.

Results

Cognitive scores showed a positive correlation with both handgrip strength and time spent in the three metre walk. In contrast, no association was found between cognitive scores and the presence/absence of disease, walking velocity or number of diseases present.

Conclusions

These results suggest that in centenarians, cognitive functions may be related with motor functions.

     

Flexible Tweedie regression models for continuous data

Tweedie regression models (TRMs) provide a flexible family of distributions to deal with non-negative right-skewed data and can handle continuous data with probability mass at zero. Estimation and inference of TRMs based on the maximum likelihood (ML) method are challenged by the presence of an infinity sum in the probability function and non-trivial restrictions on the power parameter space. In this paper, we propose two approaches for fitting TRMs, namely quasi-likelihood (QML) and pseudo-likelihood (PML). We discuss their asymptotic properties and perform simulation studies to compare our methods with the ML method. We show that the QML method provides asymptotically efficient estimation for regression parameters. Simulation studies showed that the QML and PML approaches present estimates, standard errors and coverage rates similar to the ML method. Furthermore, the second-moment assumptions required by the QML and PML methods enable us to extend the TRMs to the class of quasi-TRMs in Wedderburn's style. It allows to eliminate the non-trivial restriction on the power parameter space, and thus provides a flexible regression model to deal with continuous data. We provide an R implementation and illustrate the application of TRMs using three data sets.     

Estimation and diagnostic for skew-normal partially linear models

Partially linear models (PLMs) are an important tool in modelling economic and biometric data and are considered as a flexible generalization of the linear model by including a nonparametric component of some covariate into the linear predictor. Usually, the error component is assumed to follow a normal distribution. However, the theory and application (through simulation or experimentation) often generate a great amount of data sets that are skewed. The objective of this paper is to extend the PLMs allowing the errors to follow a skew-normal distribution [A. Azzalini, A class of distributions which includes the normal ones, Scand. J. Statist. 12 (1985), pp. 171–178], increasing the flexibility of the model. In particular, we develop the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm for linear regression models and diagnostic analysis via local influence as well as generalized leverage, following [H. Zhu and S. Lee, Local influence for incomplete-data models, J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B 63 (2001), pp. 111–126]. A simulation study is also conducted to evaluate the efficiency of the EM algorithm. Finally, a suitable transformation is applied in a data set on ragweed pollen concentration in order to fit PLMs under asymmetric distributions. An illustrative comparison is performed between normal and skew-normal errors.     

Slashed generalized exponential distribution

In this paper, we introduce an extension of the generalized exponential (GE) distribution, making it more robust against possible influential observations. The new model is defined as the quotient between a GE random variable and a beta-distributed random variable with one unknown parameter. The resulting distribution is a distribution with greater kurtosis than the GE distribution. Probability properties of the distribution such as moments and asymmetry and kurtosis are studied. Likewise, statistical properties are investigated using the method of moments and the maximum likelihood approach. Two real data analyses are reported illustrating better performance of the new model over the GE model.     

Slashed generalized Rayleigh distribution

We introduce a new family of distributions suitable for fitting positive data sets with high kurtosis which is called the Slashed Generalized Rayleigh Distribution. This distribution arises as the quotient of two independent random variables, one being a generalized Rayleigh distribution in the numerator and the other a power of the uniform distribution in the denominator. We present properties and carry out estimation of the model parameters by moment and maximum likelihood (ML) methods. Finally, we conduct a small simulation study to evaluate the performance of ML estimators and analyze real data sets to illustrate the usefulness of the new model.     

Mixture inverse Gaussian for unobserved heterogeneity in the autoregressive conditional duration model

In this paper, we assume that the duration of a process has two different intrinsic components or phases which are independent. The first is the time it takes for a trade to be initiated in the market (for example, the time during which agents obtain knowledge about the market in which they are operating and accumulate information, which is coherent with Brownian motion) and the second is the subsequent time required for the trade to develop into a complete duration. Of course, if the first time is zero then the trade is initiated immediately and no initial knowledge is required. If we assume a specific compound Bernoulli distribution for the first time and an inverse Gaussian distribution for the second, the resulting convolution model has a mixture of an inverse Gaussian distribution with its reciprocal, which allows us to specify and test the unobserved heterogeneity in the autoregressive conditional duration (ACD) model.

Our proposals make it possible not only to capture various density shapes of the durations but also easily to accommodate the behaviour of the tail of the distribution and the non monotonic hazard function. The proposed model is easy to fit and characterizes the behaviour of the conditional durations reasonably well in terms of statistical criteria based on point and density forecasts.