The Measurement of Multidimensional Poverty

Many authors have insisted on the necessity of defining poverty as a multidimensional concept rather than relying on income or consumption expenditures per capita. Yet, not much has actually been done to include the various dimensions of deprivation into the practical definition and measurement of poverty. Existing attempts along that direction consist of aggregating various attributes into a single index through some arbitrary function and defining a poverty line and associated poverty measures on the basis of that index. This is merely redefining more generally the concept of poverty, which then essentially remains a one dimensional concept. The present paper suggests that an alternative way to take into account the multi-dimensionality of poverty is to specify a poverty line for each dimension of poverty and to consider that a person is poor if he/she falls below at least one of these various lines. The paper then explores how to combine these various poverty lines and associated one-dimensional gaps into multidimensional poverty measures. An application of these measures to the rural population in Brazil is also given with poverty defined on income and education.     

Parenting Behaviors Among Mainland Puerto Rican Adolescent Mothers: The Role of Grandmother and Partner Involvement

Relations between grandmother and partner involvement (coresidence, social support, child care) and Puerto Rican adolescent mothers' parenting behaviors were examined. Few associations between grandmother involvement and behavior emerged, and these were moderated by coresidence. In contrast, partner involvement showed a number of significant (positive) direct and moderated relations with behavior. For both providers, the direction of the relations between social support and behavior during teaching was the opposite depending on coresidence: Greater social support was related to the display of more positive behavior among coresiding mothers but to less competent behavior among non‐coresiding mothers. The relations between child care support and behavior differed across providers. For grandmothers, greater child care was related to less positive behavior during teaching among coresiding mothers but to more competent behavior among non‐coresiding mothers. For partners, greater child care was more strongly related to positive behavior during play among non‐coresiding than coresiding mothers. Results are discussed in light of Latino cultural values, developmental issues, and implications for intervention.     

Silphids in urban forests: Diversity and function

Many ecologists have examined the process of how urbanization reduces biological diversity but rarely have its ecological consequences been assessed. We studied forest-dwelling burying beetles (Coleoptera: Silphidae)—a guild of insects that requires carrion to complete their life cycles—along an urban-rural gradient of land use in Maryland. Our objective was to determine how forest fragmentation associated with urbanization affects (1) beetle community diversity and structure and (2) the ecological function provided by these insects, that is, decomposition of vertebrate carcasses. Forest fragmentation strongly reduced burying beetle diversity and abundance, and did so far more pervasively than urbanization of the surrounding landscape. The likelihood that beetles interred experimental baits was a direct, positive function of burying beetle diversity. We conclude that loss of burying beetle diversity resulting from forest fragmentation could have important ecological consequences in urban forests.     

Horwitz's rule, transforming both sides and the design of experiments for mechanistic models

Summary. The paper develops methods for the design of experiments for mechanistic models when the response must be transformed to achieve symmetry and constant variance. The power transformation that is used is partially justified by a rule in analytical chemistry. Because of the nature of the relationship between the response and the mechanistic model, it is necessary to transform both sides of the model. Expressions are given for the parameter sensitivities in the transformed model and examples are given of optimum designs, not only for single-response models, but also for experiments in which multivariate responses are measured and for experiments in which the model is defined by a set of differential equations which cannot be solved analytically. The extension to designs for checking models is discussed.     

2½‐Year‐Old Children Use Animacy and Syntax to Learn a New Noun

We examine how attention to animacy information may contribute to children's developing knowledge of language. This research extends beyond prior research in that children were shown dynamic events with novel entities, and were asked not only to comprehend sentences but to use sentence structure to infer the meaning of a new word. In a 4 × 3 design, animacy status (e.g., animate agent, inanimate patient) and labeling syntax (agent, patient, nonlabel control) were varied. Across most events, 2 1/2‐year‐old participants responded as if they expected animate entities to be named. However, in a prototypical (animate agent‐inanimate patient) event condition, children responded differentially across different syntactic structures. Thus, the clearest evidence for attention to syntactic cues was found in the prototypical event condition. These results suggest that young children attend to the animacy status of unfamiliar entities, that they have expectations about animacy relations in events, and that these expectations support emerging syntactic knowledge.     

A note on interval‐censored lifetime data and the constant‐sum condition of oiler,gómez & calle (2004)

Oiler, Gomez & Calle (2004) give a constant sum condition for processes that generate interval‐censored lifetime data. They show that in models satisfying this condition, it is possible to estimate non‐parametrically the lifetime distribution based on a well‐known simplified likelihood. The author shows that this constant‐sum condition is equivalent to the existence of an observation process that is independent of lifetimes and which gives the same probability distribution for the observed data as the underlying true process.     

Direct and Indirect Causal Effects via Potential Outcomes*

Abstract. The use of the concept of ‘direct’ versus ‘indirect’ causal effects is common, not only in statistics but also in many areas of social and economic sciences. The related terms of ‘biomarkers’ and ‘surrogates’ are common in pharmacological and biomedical sciences. Sometimes this concept is represented by graphical displays of various kinds. The view here is that there is a great deal of imprecise discussion surrounding this topic and, moreover, that the most straightforward way to clarify the situation is by using potential outcomes to define causal effects. In particular, I suggest that the use of principal stratification is key to understanding the meaning of direct and indirect causal effects. A current study of anthrax vaccine will be used to illustrate ideas.