Paternal Age and Child Death: The Stillbirth Case

Previous research has shown an association between paternal age and neonatal mortality controlling for age of mother and other confounding factors. As this association is possibly of a biological nature, one would also expect to find a significant relationship between paternal age and fœtal mortality,stillbirth in particular. The present research is based on a Czech individual data set for the period 1986–1990. The risk of stillbirth is examined using logistic regression, taking account of both parental ages, sex of the fœtus, birth order, prematurity, and education of parents. It is shown that, in this data set, there is a significant relation between age of father and risk of stillbirth. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Socio-Economic differences in mortality. A life course approach

Differential mortality in Norway has been studied on the basis of a sample of data derived from the linkage of the 1960, 1970, and 1980 censuses to vital registration records. Based on the hypothesis that the determinants of survival act in interaction, two models are proposed. The first is based on states defined at each observation period by the conjunction of attributes characterizing each individual. The second model considers the chronological order of the states. Logistic regression applied to the latter shows that the most favourable male and female life trajectories are those for married people belonging to rather privileged categories. There are however some differences by sex, as favourable trajectories concern both economically inactive females and employees.     

Self-Rated Health in the Baltic Countries, 1994–1999

Numerous studies have examined the explanations of mortality fluctuations in the former USSR during the last decade of the twentieth century—a time of considerable political and socio-economic changes—but fewer studies have considered the health of these populations during this period. Using individual data from the Norbalt surveys held in 1994 and 1999 in the three Baltic countries, we examine the determinants of self-rated health in the three countries and for the two periods, by way of Bayesian structural equation modelling and directed acyclic graphs. The model takes into account, as possible determinants, alcohol consumption, physical health, psychological distress, education, locus of control, and social support. A major result is the remarkable stability of the model’s parameters whatever the country, year, gender, ethnicity, or age-group. Particular attention is given to the role of alcohol consumption and to the association observed between better self-assessed health and higher drinking.     

Reconsidering the Effect of Market Experience on the “Endowment Effect”

Simple exchange experiments have revealed that participants trade their endowment less frequently than standard demand theory would predict. List (2003a) found that the most experienced dealers acting in a well functioning market are not subject to this exchange asymmetry, suggesting that a significant amount of market experience is required to overcome it. To understand this market‐experience effect, we introduce a distinction between two types of uncertainty—choice uncertainty and trade uncertainty—both of which could lead to exchange asymmetry. We conjecture that trade uncertainty is most important for exchange asymmetry. To test this conjecture, we design an experiment where the two treatments impact differently on trade uncertainty, while controlling for choice uncertainty. Supporting our conjecture, we find that “forcing” subjects to give away their endowment in a series of exchanges eliminates exchange asymmetry in a subsequent test. We discuss why markets might not provide sufficient incentives for learning to overcome exchange asymmetry.     

Welcome everything

The failure of management is largely a failure to bring our whole selves to it. What parts of your self do you bring to your work? Do you bring only the management mind, only logic, only the company guidelines? Or do you bring your passions, your values, your soul, your deepest self? Do you react? Or do you respond? Letting go of what you think you know can be the first step to a creative and powerful response. Many of the tools we use in management can actually remove us from the experience and make it harder to respond. Reacting closes down options. Responding opens up possibilities and nurtures trust. This is kindness transformed into a business imperative--responsiveness.     

Joint covariate selection and joint subspace selection for multiple classification problems

We address the problem of recovering a common set of covariates that are relevant simultaneously to several classification problems. By penalizing the sum of ℓ ₂ norms of the blocks of coefficients associated with each covariate across different classification problems, similar sparsity patterns in all models are encouraged. To take computational advantage of the sparsity of solutions at high regularization levels, we propose a blockwise path-following scheme that approximately traces the regularization path. As the regularization coefficient decreases, the algorithm maintains and updates concurrently a growing set of covariates that are simultaneously active for all problems. We also show how to use random projections to extend this approach to the problem of joint subspace selection, where multiple predictors are found in a common low-dimensional subspace. We present theoretical results showing that this random projection approach converges to the solution yielded by trace-norm regularization. Finally, we present a variety of experimental results exploring joint covariate selection and joint subspace selection, comparing the path-following approach to competing algorithms in terms of prediction accuracy and running time.     

Urban culture and physical and sports activities. The "sportification" of parkour and street golf as cultural mediation

The article explores the process of "sportification"--i.e., processing physical activity in a sport regulated by a set of rules and standards, legitimized by supervisory institutions--from two originals practices, parkour and urban golf. To study these practices, we crossed the contributions of urban sociology and of the contemporary sociology of sport while respecting the methodological principles of qualitative sociology. A first point concerns the process of"sport" itself, its definition, its various stages, and the role played by communication of stakeholders on public space. The cultural mediation shows us how to institutionalize the movement that represents the "sports" resulted in the same time reconfiguration of physical practices themselves. Recent events illustrate the ongoing reconfiguration, we will detail them. Finally, we show the effects produced by the process on the definition of urban culture and sports: setting sight of activities, enhanced cooperation with the media-cultural, polarization between different types of practical in the case of parkour, around a confrontation between two of the founders.