Palm snags are a critical nesting resource for woodpeckers in an urbanized tropical region

Urban Ecosystems - Critical resources for birds nesting in cities can support populations in spite of the challenges imposed by urbanization, and the identification of such resources can shed light...     

Recent developments in school social control

In the U.S., decisions regarding social control are increasingly modeled on two dominant institutions: the criminal justice and medical/healthcare systems. Sociologists and other scholars refer to this adoption of legal and/or medical terminology and technologies as criminalization and medicalization. These models of social control are particular evident in how America defines and manages child behavior. Public schools borrow from both the criminal justice and medical systems as part of the routine educational setting. In this article, I provide the first synthesis and review of the school criminalization and medicalization literatures. In doing so, I argue that criminalized school social controls provide harsh, repressive responses to student misbehavior, while medicalized school social controls provide rehabilitative and restitutive responses. Given these fundamentally different approaches to student behavior, I argue that the disproportionate use of criminalized and medicalized social control across racial/ethnic groups and children from different socioeconomic backgrounds entrenches inequalities and functions to channel racial/ethnic minorities and poor children into the school‐to‐prison pipeline while keeping socially advantaged children in school and away from the problems associated with criminalized social control.     

An elastic-net penalized expectile regression with applications

To perform variable selection in expectile regression, we introduce the elastic-net penalty into expectile regression and propose an elastic-net penalized expectile regression (ER-EN) model. We then adopt the semismooth Newton coordinate descent (SNCD) algorithm to solve the proposed ER-EN model in high-dimensional settings. The advantages of ER-EN model are illustrated via extensive Monte Carlo simulations. The numerical results show that the ER-EN model outperforms the elastic-net penalized least squares regression (LSR-EN), the elastic-net penalized Huber regression (HR-EN), the elastic-net penalized quantile regression (QR-EN) and conventional expectile regression (ER) in terms of variable selection and predictive ability, especially for asymmetric distributions. We also apply the ER-EN model to two real-world applications: relative location of CT slices on the axial axis and metabolism of tacrolimus (Tac) drug. Empirical results also demonstrate the superiority of the ER-EN model.     

Prediction of tumour pathological subtype from genomic profile using sparse logistic regression with random effects

The purpose of this study is to highlight the application of sparse logistic regression models in dealing with prediction of tumour pathological subtypes based on lung cancer patients'' genomic information. We consider sparse logistic regression models to deal with the high dimensionality and correlation between genomic regions. In a hierarchical likelihood (HL) method, it is assumed that the random effects follow a normal distribution and its variance is assumed to follow a gamma distribution. This formulation considers ridge and lasso penalties as special cases. We extend the HL penalty to include a ridge penalty (called ‘HLnet’) in a similar principle of the elastic net penalty, which is constructed from lasso penalty. The results indicate that the HL penalty creates more sparse estimates than lasso penalty with comparable prediction performance, while HLnet and elastic net penalties have the best prediction performance in real data. We illustrate the methods in a lung cancer study.     

Industrial Policy Capture in Taiwan and South Korea

Whatever the theoretical merits of an industrial policy, in practice state incentives in support of infant industry are difficult to withdraw once they have been granted. Infant maturation is thereby delayed, resulting in ‘policy capture’ which confers rents on the assisted firms at the expense of consumers and/or taxpayers. The process is well-documented in poorly managed economies pursuing autarkic industrial policies (Auty, 1994a). This article examines evidence of policy capture in well-managed economies pursuing competitive industrial policies. Examples are drawn from the heavy (and chemical) industry drives of South Korea (hereafter Korea) and Taiwan, but the research is first set in the context of the industrial policy debate.     

Women and Their Work on Australian Farms

Traditional definitions of farm work have been narrow and commodity-based, allowing the efforts of women to be discounted because they have not been viewed as directly contributing to production. This paper examines the structural gender arrangements that operate to render farm women powerless and to discount their contributions. Data are presented on the extent of women's economic contribution on Australian farms.     

Conducive Characteristics or Anti-Racist Context? Decomposing the Reasons for Veterans’ High Likelihood of Interracial Marriage

Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, veterans have been more likely to enter into race/ethnic intermarriages than non-veterans. Theories of race/ethnic intermarriage variously point to how minority race/ethnicity, race/ethnically diverse social settings, progressive racial attitudes, and high socioeconomic status increase individuals’ likelihood of intermarrying. Veterans’ unique racial and socioeconomic characteristics may contribute to their greater likelihood of intermarrying relative to non-veterans: larger percentages of veterans than non-veterans are members of racial and ethnic minority groups, while military service increases individual service members’ long-term economic and educational prospects. At the same time, veterans share in common their exposure to the unique military environment, which may increase their likelihood of intermarriage by diversifying their social circles, and subjecting their attitudes and behavior to group norms that are more explicitly egalitarian than those of society at large. The present study considers these two possible explanations for veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarriage. We use data on seven cohorts of men over six decades in the Current Population Survey, representing a total of 1,456,742 observations, to decompose the difference in likelihood of racial intermarriage between veterans and non-veterans among married men aged 18–65. We find that across cohorts and decades, veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarrying is not fully explained by their race/ethnic and socioeconomic composition. We argue that veterans’ greater likelihood of intermarrying may therefore be driven by their exposure to the military environment.     

Financially Overextended: College Attendance as a Contributor to Foreclosures During the Great Recession

Although subprime mortgage lending and unemployment were largely responsible for the wave of foreclosures during the Great Recession, additional sources of financial risk may have exacerbated the crisis. We hypothesize that many parents sending children to college were financially overextended and vulnerable to foreclosure as the economy contracted. With commuting zone panel data from 2006 to 2011, we show that increasing rates of college attendance across the income distribution in one year predict a foreclosure rate increase in subsequent years, net of fixed characteristics and changes in employment, refinance debt, house prices, and 19-year-old population size. We find similar evidence of college-related foreclosure risk using longitudinal household data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our findings uncover a previously overlooked dimension of the foreclosure crisis, and highlight mortgage insecurity as an inadvertent consequence of parental investment in higher education.     

From Privilege to Prevalence: Contextual Effects of Women’s Schooling on African Marital Timing

In Africa and elsewhere, educated women tend to marry later than their less-educated peers. Beyond being an attribute of individual women, education is also an aggregate phenomenon: the social meaning of a woman’s educational attainment depends on the educational attainments of her age-mates. Using data from 30 countries and 246 birth cohorts across sub-Saharan Africa, we investigate the impact of educational context (the percentage of women in a country cohort who ever attended school) on the relationship between a woman’s educational attainment and her marital timing. In contexts where access to education is prevalent, the marital timing of uneducated and highly educated women is more similar than in contexts where attending school is limited to a privileged minority. This across-country convergence is driven by uneducated women marrying later in high-education contexts, especially through lower rates of very early marriages. However, within countries over time, the marital ages of women from different educational groups tend to diverge as educational access expands. This within-country divergence is most often driven by later marriage among highly educated women, although divergence in some countries is driven by earlier marriage among women who never attended school.