Betwixt and between the market and the state: Israeli students' welfare attitudes in comparative perspective

Analysing comparable samples of students from the Cross-Cultural Variations in Distributive Justice Perception (CVDJP) project, we explore the multidimensionality of attitudes towards the welfare state in Israel compared with countries from liberal and social-democratic welfare regimes (the USA, Canada-Ontario, Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands). We derive six different attitudinal dimensions that constitute two distinct sets of opposing welfare ideological frames. The first set, market-based ideology, entails three coexisting criteria: individualism, internal attribution of inequality, and work ethic. The second set, welfare-statist ideology, entails three additional coexisting criteria: egalitarian redistribution, external attribution of inequality, and broad scope of welfare. Along with structural similarities, we find considerable variation in levels of aggregate attitudes across the different types of welfare regimes. Israeli respondents stand out because of their strongly ambivalent welfare attitudes. While scoring higher than respondents from the liberal regimes on market-based measures, they paradoxically record similarly high scores (comparable to social-democratic regimes) on state-based measures. On one criterion – attribution of inequality to external causes – Israeli respondents even score higher than respondents from both liberal and social-democratic regimes. We consider potential explanations for this ambivalence and suggest possible directions for further research.     

Cooperative learning in intercultural education

Implementation of intercultural education implies that teachers command the strategies to use the skills and knowledge that children bring into the classroom, to create opportunities to communicate and cooperate in heterogeneous groups, and to provide equal opportunities to participate in the learning processes which are organised in the classroom. The use of small groups in which students learn together and benefit from each others skills and knowledge is a logical option, but conditions have to be fulfilled on the levels of teachers’ communication and management skills, curriculum and pedagogical climate in order to achieve the aims of ‘doing justice to diversity’ and the provision of equal opportunities to participate.     

The planning of cycle trips in the province of East Flanders

Traditional route planners assist in finding the shortest or fastest route from one place to another. This paper presents a novel approach to path finding in a directed graph, namely a target distance, motivated by the problem that a recreational cyclist deals with when searching a nice route of a certain length. The problem is defined as a variant of the arc orienteering problem (AOP), a new combinatorial optimisation problem in which the score of a route in a directed graph has to be maximised by visiting arcs, while each arc can be visited at most once and the total cost of the route should not exceed a predefined cost. The contribution of this paper is threefold: (1) a mathematical model of the AOP is provided, (2) a metaheuristic method that solves AOP instances to near optimality in 1 s of execution time, is proposed and evaluated, and (3) two real-life applications of the method are presented. An on-line cycle route planning application offers personalised cycle routes based on user preferences, and an SMS service provides cyclists “in the field” with routes on demand.     

Modeling and Forecasting Health Expectancy: Theoretical Framework and Application

Life expectancy continues to grow in most Western countries; however, a major remaining question is whether longer life expectancy will be associated with more or fewer life years spent with poor health. Therefore, complementing forecasts of life expectancy with forecasts of health expectancies is useful. To forecast health expectancy, an extension of the stochastic extrapolative models developed for forecasting total life expectancy could be applied, but instead of projecting total mortality and using regular life tables, one could project transition probabilities between health states simultaneously and use multistate life table methods. In this article, we present a theoretical framework for a multistate life table model in which the transition probabilities depend on age and calendar time. The goal of our study is to describe a model that projects transition probabilities by the Lee-Carter method, and to illustrate how it can be used to forecast future health expectancy with prediction intervals around the estimates. We applied the method to data on the Dutch population aged 55 and older, and projected transition probabilities until 2030 to obtain forecasts of life expectancy, disability-free life expectancy, and probability of compression of disability.     

Naturalization and Earnings: A Denmark–Sweden Comparison

The determinants and consequences of the naturalization of immigrants is a hot topic in the political debate in Europe. This article compares the effect of naturalization on the income attainment of immigrants in two Scandinavian countries, Denmark and Sweden, using longitudinal register data from 1986 and onward. Sweden is characterized by low obstacles to naturalization, and existing studies provide inconclusive evidence regarding the impact of naturalization on labor market outcomes. Denmark is instead characterized by higher barriers to naturalization, as well as a virtual inexistence of previous studies on the topic. Results, obtained through individual fixed-effect regression analysis, suggest similar effects in both countries. A consistent naturalization premium is detected for immigrants of Asian and African descent, but not for any other immigrant group. The similarity across contexts arguably questions the use of more stringent naturalization laws to promote the economic integration of immigrants.     

Online reach correction in 6- and 11-month-old infants

The current study investigated the development of online reach control. Six- and 11-month-old infants reached for a toy while their hand position was tracked. The toy either remained stationary (baseline trials) or unexpectedly displaced left- or rightward during the reach (perturbation trials). To obtain a measure of online reach correction, we compared reaches in the perturbation trials to reaches in baseline trials using autoregression analysis. Infants of both age groups adjusted their reach trajectories in the direction of the displacement. Moreover, we divided the reaching movements into movement units, defined as the submovements of a reach between local minima in hand speed. Eleven-month-old infants adjusted their reach within the span of a single movement unit; corrections in 6-month-olds spanned multiple movement units. These results suggest that the reach control system has a rudimentary replanning capacity by 6 months of age, which, with age, further develops to a more sophisticated online control mechanism for ongoing reaches.