Investigating the Relationship Between Real Estate Agents,Segregation, and House Prices: Steering and Upselling in New York State

This article leverages a unique data set, recently developed regression methods, and qualitative interviews to investigate the multiple ways real estate agents produce housing inequality. We find that the clustering of agents in and around certain neighborhoods correlates positively with house prices. Our results also show a significant relationship between agent concentration and racial segregation. Our qualitative data reveal how agents engage in steering and upselling. The findings enhance our understanding of mechanisms in the housing market, and provide more empirical clarity on the role real estate agents play in asset and place inequality.     

‘I Eat the Vegetables because I Have Grown them with My Own Hands’: Children's Perspectives on School Gardening and Vegetable Consumption

Inadequate vegetable consumption is a global public health concern related to numerous health risks. A promising intervention to increase children's vegetable consumption is school gardening, although earlier studies have shown mixed results. This study explores how gardening might contribute to changed attitudes towards eating vegetables from a child's perspective. Findings are based on qualitative research with children in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. We reflect on how children enact agency regarding their vegetables. Results show that children report that changes occur in their attitudes towards vegetables as they not only eat more vegetables but also advocate the consumption of vegetables at home.     

The interactive effects of political skill and future time perspective on career and community networking behavior

Scholars have suggested that skill (Ferris et al., 2007) and motivation (Forret and Dougherty, 2001) need to be considered in predicting the direction and intensity of networking behaviors. Congruently, the present study argues that skill and motivation operate interactively and assesses the interactive impact of political skill (i.e., the ability to interact effectively with others) and future time perspective on differentially predicting community-based and career-based networking behavior. Results from a sample of managers from a national retail chain (n = 291) indicated that politically skilled individuals who possessed a deep future time perspective were more involved in career-related networking than politically skilled individuals who perceived a shallow future time perspective. Additionally, politically skilled respondents with shallow organizational time perspectives engaged in higher levels of community-based networking than did their counterparts with deeper organizational time perspectives. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of political skill, social networks, and socioemotional selectivity theory.     

What's the problem? A problem-based approach to the reform of the Norwegian drug rehabilitation sector

This article explores how the scope of solutions to complex problems is determined by the way in which the problem is formulated. We inquire into this by means of a theory-driven case study of the reform in the Norwegian drug rehabilitation sector and the Tyrili facility. We analyze divergent approaches to drug rehabilitation by means of a problem formulation framework, which distinguishes between (1) the value dimensions of given problems, and (2) the phases of problem solving activities. Based on this inquiry, we arrive at a set of propositions, in which we propose that the two approaches differ in their inclusion of various value dimensions. Moreover, we suggest that the reform pursued increased efficiency as a solution to a reductionist formulation of the problem, which challenged Tyrili's opportunity to solve the problem in the multidimensional manner they conceive of it. This is an argument against a one-dimensional maximization of efficiency as a pursuit of quality in social services.     

Fitting Curves to Human Respiratory Data

Records of gas flow during breathing are cyclical, with the cycles varying in duration. The shape of these cycles may change with the intensity of respiratory stimulation or the development of respiratory disease, but currently research is hampered by the lack of a fully satisfactory technique for determining the shape of a typical cycle. The approach adopted here is to replace the time series by a 'phase diagram', plotting the time integral of flow against flow itself. Principal curves are then fitted. These are curves `through the middle of the data' which were introduced by Hastie and Stuetzle. The shapes of these curves are compared, either directly or after reconstructing an average cycle corresponding to each fitted curve. This has the advantage that the shape of the waveform is separated from the amplitude, and from the duration of the breath. A disadvantage is that periods of zero flow are lost, and the reconstructed average cycle may show irregularities at points near zero flow as a result. In practice, the methodology showed clear differences in shape between the protocols, gave reasonable average cycles and ordered the waveform shapes according to the hardness of breathing induced by the protocols.     

Air Pollution and Mortality: Quantification and Valuation of Years of Life Lost

To analyze the loss of life expectancy (LLE) due to air pollution and the associated social cost, a dynamic model was developed that took into account the decrease of risk after the termination of an exposure to pollution. A key parameter was the time constant for the decrease of risk, for which estimates from studies of smoking were used. A sensitivity analysis showed that the precise value of the time constant(s) was not critical for the resulting LLE. An interesting aspect of the model was that the relation between population total LLE and PM2.5 concentration was numerically almost indistinguishable from a straight line, even though the functional dependence was nonlinear. This essentially linear behavior implies that the detailed history of a change in concentration does not matter, except for the effects of discounting. This model was used to correct the data of the largest study of chronic mortality for variations in past exposure, performed by Pope et al. in 1995; the correction factor was shown to depend on assumptions about the relative toxicity of the components of PM2.5. In the European Union, an increment of 1 microg/m3 of PM2.5 for 1 year implies an average LLE of 0.22 days per person. With regard to the social cost of an air pollution pulse, it was found that for typical discount rates (3% to 8% real) the cost was reduced by a factor of about 0.4 to 0.6 relative to the case with zero discount rate, if the value of a life year was taken as given; if the value of a life year was calculated from the "value of statistical life" by assuming the latter as a series of discounted annual values, the cost varied by at most +/-20% relative to the case with zero discount rate. To assess the uncertainties, this study also examined how the LLE depended on the demographics (mortality and age pyramid) of a population, and how it would change if the relative risk varied with age, in the manner suggested by smoking studies. These points were found to have a relatively small effect (compared to the epidemiological uncertainties) on the calculated LLE.     

A pre-test like estimator dominating the least-squares method

We develop a pre-test type estimator of a deterministic parameter vector β$\mathit{\beta }$ in a linear Gaussian regression model. In contrast to conventional pre-test strategies, that do not dominate the least-squares (LS) method in terms of mean-squared error (MSE), our technique is shown to dominate LS when the effective dimension is greater than or equal to 4. Our estimator is based on a simple and intuitive approach in which we first determine the linear minimum MSE (MMSE) estimate that minimizes the MSE. Since the unknown vector β$\mathit{\beta }$ is deterministic, the MSE, and consequently the MMSE solution, will depend in general on β$\mathit{\beta }$ and therefore cannot be implemented. Instead, we propose applying the linear MMSE strategy with the LS substituted for the true value of β$\mathit{\beta }$ to obtain a new estimate. We then use the current estimate in conjunction with the linear MMSE solution to generate another estimate and continue iterating until convergence. As we show, the limit is a pre-test type method which is zero when the norm of the data is small, and is otherwise a non-linear shrinkage of LS.     

Convergent Evolution of Innovative Teams in Technical Services

Abstract

In recent years UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries, Duke University Libraries, and NC State University Libraries each formed a new team in response to the increasing need to repurpose and reuse data and metadata in and across domains, systems, and environments in new ways. During this session at NC Serials 2019 the speakers described their teams, how those teams came about, and their responsibilities; discussed similarities and differences across their teams; and shared communication strategies, lessons, and opportunities they’ve learned so far. This report captures the discussions that occurred during this session.     

Some aspects of the use of birth expectations data from sample surveys for population projections

The value of national sample survey data relating to birth expectations for projecting births is reassessed in the light of data limitations pointed out by Ryder and Westoff among others and of the methods of projection used by the United States Bureau of the Census. The annual level of fertility under the cohort-fertility projection method depends on the assumptions regarding completed fertility, about which the available survey data are fairly informative, and on the assumptions regarding the timing of births, about which the survey data tell us very little. Test calculations suggest that Ryder and Westoff have overstated the significance of timing relative to completed family size for the level of future births. We believe that the fall in the annual total fertility rate in the first half of the sixties is to be explained only in part by a general delay in childbearing; a moderate to substantial decrease in completed family size has also occurred. Analysis of the latest set of fertility projections of the Census Bureau also suggests that the assumptions about completed fertility are a much more important determinant of the level of future births than timing, both in the short and long term. Although the available expectations data cannot help in predicting short-term annual changes in fertility, they appear useful for making long-term projections of annual fertility. Expansion of the size, frequency, and content of the sample surveys and incorporation of parity and birth interval into the projection method may improve projections.