The impact of extreme weather events on education

This paper provides new evidence on the long- and medium-term impact of extreme weather events on education. Our focus is on Mongolia, where two extremely severe winters caused mass livestock mortality. We use household panel data with information on households’ preshock location, combined with historic district-level livestock census data and climate data. Our econometric strategy exploits exogenous variation in shock intensity across space and time, using a difference-in-differences approach. Results indicate that individuals who experience the shock while of schooling age and living in severely affected districts are significantly less likely to complete mandatory education, both in the long and medium terms. The effects are driven by individuals from herding households, while no significant effects are found for individuals from nonherding households. This finding renders it unlikely that extreme winters affect education through school closures during extreme climatic conditions, to which all children were exposed. Moreover, there is no evidence for a differential impact of extreme weather events by gender. This suggests that the effects are not mainly channeled through increased child labor in herding but rather they are related to reductions in household income.     

Regular provision of grandchild care and participation in social activities

Against the background of rapid population ageing, studying social participation in later life is of particular relevance within the framework of active ageing. Although caring for grandchildren has taken a central role for older persons due to unprecedented overlap between grandparents’ and their grandchildren’s lives, whether the relationship between grandparental childcare and social activities is characterised by cumulation or competition remains under-explored. Grandparental childcare may increase the purpose in life for grandparents, stimulating their social participation, or it may impose time and energy constraints on it. This study aims to assess the effect of providing grandchild care on participation in social activities for people aged 50–85 in Europe. Using an instrumental variable approach on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we find no significant negative effects of grandchild care on engagement in at least one social activity. However, regular provision of grandchild care has a significant negative effect on the number of activities in which grandmothers participate. When considering the activities separately by type we also find, for grandmothers only, a negative effect on volunteering, engagement in educational or training courses and participation in political or community-related organisation.     

Ergonomics and design for sustainability in healthcare: ambient assisted living and the social-environmental impact of patients lifestyle

This work presents considerations on Ergonomics and Design for Sustainability in the healthcare field based on research experiences of the Technology and Design for Healthcare (TeDH) research group of INDACO (Industrial design, communication, arts and fashion) department of Politecnico di Milano. In order to develop a multidisciplinary approach to design able to answer to specific user needs such as elderly in an environmental sustainable way (1) this paper shows the results we achieved concerning ergonomics and environmental impact in product development (2), the extension of this approach to interior and home design and the advantage of the application of Information Communication Technologies (ICT). ICT can help people with special needs to make their everyday life easier and more safe, at the same time, ICT can make social-environmental impact of everyday behavior evident and can be applied to manage sustainability. The specific theme is thus to integrate ergonomics and sustainability competences in the development of Ambient Assisted Living through a Product- Service System approach. The concept of product service system has the potential to improve product performances and services, establish new relations and networks with different actors in order to satisfy user needs and apply a systems approach considering environmental, social and economic factors in the users' environment.     

A Permutation and Combination-Based Solution on the Ranking of Multivariate Populations in the Case of Ordered Categorical Responses with Application to the Evaluation of the Indoor Environment

This article deals with the problem of classifying and ranking several multivariate populations of interests using the permutation and combination approach providing also an inferential validity of the procedure. The need to define an appropriate classification of populations, i.e., products, services, teaching courses, degree programs, and so on, is very common within many areas of applied research. Many times the populations of interest are multivariate in nature meaning that many aspects of that populations can be simultaneously observed on the same unit/subject. From a statistical point of view, when the response variable of interest is multivariate in nature, the problem may become quite difficult to cope with especially in case of ordered categorical responses, due to the large dimensionality of the parametric space. Nonparametric inference based on the NPC methodology however, allows us to overcome these limitations, without the need of referring to assume any specified random distribution.     

Likelihood and bayesian approaches to inference for the stationary point of a quadratic response surface

In response surface analysis, a second order polynomial model is often used for inference on the stationary point of the response function. The standard confidence regions for the stationary point are due to Box & Hunter (1954). The authors propose an alternative parametrization, in which the stationary point is the parameter of interest; likelihood techniques and Bayesian analysis are then easier to perform. The authors also suggest an approximate method to get highest posterior density regions for the maximum point (not simply for the stationary point). Furthermore, they study the coverage probabilities of these Bayesian regions through simulations.     

The Use of Instructive Feedback to Promote Emergent Tact and Intraverbal Control: A Replication

Instructive feedback (IF) involves incorporating additional acquisition targets into skill-acquisition programs. A recent study by Frampton and Shillingsburg (2020) found that IF led to emergent verbal operants with two elementary-aged children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current study replicated Frampton and Shillingsburg with two children with ASD. Therapists conducted sessions of mastered listener-by-name trials (e.g., “Show me otter,” with pictures of otter, dog, and elephant) with IF statements for features of the target stimuli (e.g., “It lives in rivers.”) embedded during the consequence portion of the trial. We evaluated the acquisition of secondary targets and emergent responses using a concurrent multiple baseline across sets design. We observed increased correct responding for secondary targets and emergent responses for all three sets of stimuli with one participant. The other participant emitted correct responses for secondary targets and emergent operants with the first set but not with the other two sets of stimuli. Results suggested that IF can lead to emergent verbal operants, but the extent of emergence may be idiosyncratic.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40616-022-00171-y.     

Confidence regions for the stationary point of a quadratic response surface based on the asymptotic distribution of its MLE

Response surface methodology aims at finding the combination of factor levels which optimizes a response variable. A second order polynomial model is typically employed to make inference on the stationary point of the true response function. A suitable reparametrization of the polynomial model, where the coordinates of the stationary point appear as the parameter of interest, is used to derive unconstrained confidence regions for the stationary point. These regions are based on the asymptotic normal approximation to the sampling distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of the stationary point. A simulation study is performed to evaluate the coverage probabilities of the proposed confidence regions. Some comparisons with the standard confidence regions due to Box and Hunter are also showed.