A model-based approach to Spotify data analysis: a Beta GLMM

Digital music distribution is increasingly powered by automated mechanisms that continuously capture, sort and analyze large amounts of Web-based data. This paper deals with the management of songs audio features from a statistical point of view. In particular, it explores the data catching mechanisms enabled by Spotify Web API and suggests statistical tools for the analysis of these data. Special attention is devoted to songs popularity and a Beta model, including random effects, is proposed in order to give the first answer to questions like: which are the determinants of popularity? The identification of a model able to describe this relationship, the determination within the set of characteristics of those considered most important in making a song popular is a very interesting topic for those who aim to predict the success of new products.     

Frailty in the Old Age as a Direct Marker of Quality of Life and Health: Gender Differences

Social Indicators Research - Aging of the population emphasizes the need for research on aging-related problems, among which frailty is a key element because of its clinical as well as social...     

robROSE: A robust approach for dealing with imbalanced data in fraud detection

Statistical Methods & Applications - A major challenge when trying to detect fraud is that the fraudulent activities form a minority class which make up a very small proportion of the data set....     

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants have knowledge of a hand‐grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12‐month‐olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self‐produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.     

Modeling Lung Carcinogenesis in Radon‐Exposed Miner Cohorts: Accounting for Missing Information on Smoking

Epidemiological miner cohort data used to estimate lung cancer risks related to occupational radon exposure often lack cohort‐wide information on exposure to tobacco smoke, a potential confounder and important effect modifier. We have developed a method to project data on smoking habits from a case‐control study onto an entire cohort by means of a Monte Carlo resampling technique. As a proof of principle, this method is tested on a subcohort of 35,084 former uranium miners employed at the WISMUT company (Germany), with 461 lung cancer deaths in the follow‐up period 1955–1998. After applying the proposed imputation technique, a biologically‐based carcinogenesis model is employed to analyze the cohort's lung cancer mortality data. A sensitivity analysis based on a set of 200 independent projections with subsequent model analyses yields narrow distributions of the free model parameters, indicating that parameter values are relatively stable and independent of individual projections. This technique thus offers a possibility to account for unknown smoking habits, enabling us to unravel risks related to radon, to smoking, and to the combination of both.     

‘Irregular Adoptions’ in Chile: New Political Narratives About The Right To Know One's Origins

This article examines the background of ‘irregular’ adoptions in Chile and the recent dispute process of political narratives about this topic, in the context of Chilean adoption policies and practices. Special focus is on how the adoption policies and practices have caused serious human rights violations in particular to the child's rights to know one's origins. The article discusses the design and implementation of recognition, justice and reparation policies, for the prevention of future risks associated with these irregular practices.     

The seventh starling

A flock of starlings wheel overhead, thousands of birds rising, falling, turning as if of one mind. Birds move in flocks; fish in schools; insects in swarms. How do they do it? Can we study them to find quantitative answers or must we simply admire them? Andrea Cavagna and Irene Giardina do both.     

Laboring under Uncertainty: Identity Renegotiation among Contingent Workers

Relying on interviews with contingent workers in diverse jobs, this article explores the motivations underlying worker consent, in particular, workers' commitment to employers who did little to encourage it. Driven by the need to address the “spoiled identity” problem brought on by contingent employment, workers engaged in identity‐management strategies that included the following: defining a willingness to work hard rather than the job per se as determinative of personal value, asserting an alternative vocation as one's appropriate identity‐conferring occupation, and aligning with managers as a reference group. These strategies had the ideological effect of reaffirming a managerial ideology that hampered the ability to formulate a critique of existing employment relations. A much smaller group, made up of disillusioned day laborers with few illusions about middle‐class respectability, rejected identity‐management strategies and regarded their relationship with employers in the purely instrumental terms that the business press assumes would apply to all workers. The article concludes that cultural lag and the raw appeal of the notion of a caring employer may underlie the persistence of the accommodationist orientations displayed by most of these workers.