The resilient frugivorous fauna of an urban forest fragment and its potential role in vegetation enrichment

Urban Ecosystems - Anthropocentric defaunation affects critical ecological processes, such as seed dispersal, putting ecosystems and biomes at risk, and leading to habitat impoverishment. Diverse...     

Tablet assessment of word comprehension reveals coarse word representations in 18–⁠20-month-old toddlers

The present study explores the viability of using tablets in assessing early word comprehension by means of a two-alternative forced-choice task. Forty-nine 18–20-month-old Norwegian toddlers performed a touch-based word recognition task, in which they were prompted to identify the labeled target out of two displayed items on a touchscreen tablet. In each trial, the distractor item was either semantically related (e.g., dog–cat) or unrelated (e.g., dog–airplane) to the target. Our results show that toddlers as young as 18 months can engage meaningfully with a tablet-based assessment, with minimal verbal instruction and child–administrator interaction. Toddlers performed better in the semantically unrelated condition than in the related condition, suggesting that their word representations are still semantically coarse at this age. Furthermore, parental reports of comprehension, using the Norwegian version of the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories, predicted toddlers’ performance, with parent–child agreement stronger in the semantically unrelated condition, indicating that parents declare a word to be known by their child if it is understood at a coarse representational level. This study provides among the earliest evidence that remote data collection in 18-20 month-old toddlers is viable, as comparable results were observed from both in-laboratory and online administration of the touchscreen recognition task.     

Inside the Museum: Nothing is going to change? Adaptation of the Jewish Pre-Burial House in Gliwice

This article discusses the architectural conversion of the historical Gliwice Pre-Burial House into the Museum of Upper Silesian Jews. It describes the former function of the building in the context of the specific history of Upper Silesian Jews, the Haskalah movement, and funeral rites in Judaism. The main part of the paper is devoted to the presentation of the architectural design and the functional division of the planned museum as proposed by the architectural collective that the author is part of. Special attention is given to a discussion of the conceptual framework of the design which tries to reveal the continuity of unformatted architectural memory. The features of proposed design, such as the central installation of The Cloud, merge commemorative aspects with new functions related to hosting public events and historical display. In this way, the design negotiates between remembrance of the Jewish community and the needs of the new inhabitants and users of the space. Thus, the paper contributes to the larger discussion about the adaptation of former Jewish facilities for new public functions.     

Immigration and Generational Solidarity: Elderly Soviet Immigrants and Their Adult Children in Israel

Immigration in later life is an extremely stressful life event. When multigenerational families resettle together, elders turn to their adult children for support, while both generations face challenges of integration. Drawing on the framework of intergenerational solidarity-conflict-ambivalence, this qualitative study explores the relationships between elderly, ex-Soviet immigrants and their adult children in Israel. The findings illuminate the declining personal resources and family status of the elders, as well as their main coping strategies. Both generations try to discover a new balance among the old and new cultural expectations, reciprocity, and use of available, formal, geriatric services.     

Bayesian inverse problems with heterogeneous variance

We consider inverse problems in Hilbert spaces under correlated Gaussian noise, and use a Bayesian approach to find their regularized solution. We focus on mildly ill-posed inverse problems with fractional noise, using a novel wavelet-based vaguelette–vaguelette approach. It allows us to apply sequence space methods without assuming that all operators are simultaneously diagonalizable. The results are proved for more general bases and covariance operators. Our primary aim is to study posterior contraction rate in such inverse problems over Sobolev classes and compare it to the derived minimax rate. Secondly, we study effect of plugging in a consistent estimator of variances in sequence space on the posterior contraction rate. This result is applied to the problem with error in forward operator. Thirdly, we show that empirical Bayes posterior distribution with a plugged-in maximum marginal likelihood estimator of the prior scale contracts at the optimal rate, adaptively, in the minimax sense.     

Experience in public goods experiments

Theory and Decision - Using information on students’ past participation in economic experiments, we analyze whether behavior in public goods games is affected by experience (participation in...     

The Fiscal Disparity and Achievement Gap between Extremely Wealthy and Poor School Districts in Illinois

Public Organization Review - This study investigates the achievement gap and horizontal disparity of schools’ funding by exploring and comparing the differences of funding between extremely...