Mainstreaming Nutrition for Better Development Outcomes

Even though the millennium development goals (MDGs) tackle the main economic and social problems in developing countries, nutrition is not addressed adequately despite its important role in achieving the MDGs. It is therefore crucial to mainstream nutrition by strengthening public-private partnerships, increased political and technical capacity and by achieving food security. The paper aims to discuss how strong partnerships bringing public and private efforts together are important to the success of increasing nutritional programs by providing a redesign and marketing of products and services, other services, and funding. The report explores the need to assess the setting of pertinent nutritional policies and to increase technical capacity. The study found that the relation between agriculture and nutrition is a key component for achieving food safety in order to mainstream nutrition into the MDGs. The three main topics considered in this analysis are biotechnology, food trade policies, and bioenergy products as they have a strong impact on prices. Mainstreaming Nutrition for better development outcomes.

AGING,RETIREMENT AND SOCIAL SECURITY IN A MODEL OF INTEREST GROUPS

The assessment of the degree of genetic variation in a natural population, and the nature of that variation, is of central importance in both theoretical and applied population studies. Two “variance” results in population genetics theory are presented. For the first, expressions are found for the expected difference in the estimates of genetic variation in a population obtained by two investigators sampling from the same population in the same generation. The second result concerns the question of whether the degree of genetic variation in a population is best estimated by using the number of alleles observed in a sample of genes or by the number of polymorphic sites observed in the sample. For some combinations of the actual degree of variation and the sample size the former is preferred while for other combinations the latter is preferred. The reason for this is discussed.     

Choosing monetary sequences: theory and experimental evidence

We formulate and investigate experimentally a model of how individuals choose between time sequences of monetary outcomes. The model assumes that a decision maker uses, sequentially, two criteria to screen options. Each criterion only permits a decision between some pairs of options, while the other options are incomparable according to that criterion. When the first criterion is not decisive, the decision maker resorts to the second criterion to select an alternative. We find that: (1) traditional economic models based on discounting alone cannot explain a significant (almost 30%) proportion of the data no matter how much variability in the discount functions is allowed; (2) our model, despite considering only a specific (exponential) form of discounting, can explain the data much better solely thanks to the use of the secondary criterion; (3) our model explains certain specific patterns in the choices of the “irrational” people. We reject the hypothesis that anomalous behavior is due simply to random “mistakes” around the basic predictions of discounting theories: deviations are not random and there are clear systematic patterns of association between “irrational” choices.     

Occupancy numbers for dynamic heterogeneous populations: Estimate of particles lifetimes

A dynamic model of a heterogeneous population is studied. Particles belonging to a population are divided, at every time t, into a finite number of classes according to their types and the partition changes over time. The role of the occupancy numbers, namely the cardinality of each class, is highlighted. The relationship between the stochastic process of occupancy numbers and the process of particle types is analyzed. The main goal of this paper is the estimation of the lifetime of each particle at a given time t, when the observed data are the history of the process of the number of dead particles up to t. Furthermore, a discrete time approximation of the filter is given.     

Predicting Severity of Foreign Body Injuries in Children in Upper Airways: An Approach Based on Regression Trees

The entry of a small item into the upper airways is one of the leading causes of injuries in children up to 14 years old. The aim of this study is to characterize types of objects causing choking along with the features of the children involved in the accident and compare results with current standards. The European Survey on Foreign Bodies Injuries Study (ESFBI) collected data on foreign body injuries from 19 European countries. The data from ESFBI were selected according to the ICD-9-CM codes 933 (foreign body in the pharynx and larynx) and 934 (foreign body in the trachea, bronchi, and lungs). Both a classification tree and a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) have been set up to predict the probability that an injured child experiences a hospitalization. The classification tree provides flowchart-type decision rules and allows for analyzing the impact of the item features, the children characteristics, and the circumstances of the accidents on the severity of the foreign body injuries. Results showed that children younger than 3.5 who are involved in an accident have a high probability to experience a hospitalization.     

Mortality Peaks in Italy in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries: Trends by Age and Sex

Infant and youth mortality fell steeply between the Unification of Italy and the 1930s, particularly due to the decline in infectious and parasitic diseases. A number of mortality crises, however, at times halted this decline: the 1908 Calabria-Sicily earthquake, the 1915 Marsica earthquake, World War I and 1918 Spanish INFLUENZA outbreak.This paper focuses as the repercussions of these events on the general survival status of young people from birth to puberty, as well as the main pathologies responsible for the rise in mortality.An analysis of differences in mortality according to sex during the various crises was also performed to ascertain whether the more difficult survival conditions during these periods affected males and females equally.     

Modeling healthcare costs in simultaneous presence of asymmetry,heteroscedasticity and correlation

Highly skewed outcome distributions observed across clusters are common in medical research. The aim of this paper is to understand how regression models widely used for accommodating asymmetry fit clustered data under heteroscedasticity. In a simulation study, we provide evidence on the performance of the Gamma Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) and log-Linear Mixed-Effect (LME) model under a variety of data-generating mechanisms. Two case studies from health expenditures literature, the cost of strategies after myocardial infarction randomized clinical trial on the cost of strategies after myocardial infarction and the European Pressure Ulcer Advisory Panel hospital prevalence survey of pressure ulcers, are analyzed and discussed. According to simulation results, the log-LME model for a Gamma response can lead to estimations that are biased by as much as 10% of the true value, depending on the error variance. In the Gamma GLMM, the bias never exceeds 1%, regardless of the extent of heteroscedasticity, and the confidence intervals perform as nominally stated under most conditions. The Gamma GLMM with a log link seems to be more robust to both Gamma and log-normal generating mechanisms than the log-LME model.     

Infra-humanization: The Wall of Group Differences

Infra-humanizing outgroups involves considering outgroups less human and more animal-like than the ingroup, which is perceived, in essence, as fully human. In this article, the first section presents the theoretical background of infra-humanization and distinguishes it from related concepts, such as dehumanization. The three basic hypotheses of the theory are then presented with a summary of empirical evidence. Social implications follow. Reasons for the pervasiveness of the phenomenon are examined as well as conditions that lead a specific outgroup to be infra-humanized. We also explore the consequences of infra-humanization, such as a lack of forgiveness for the outgroup and the ingroup's justification for past misdeeds against the outgroup, rather than guilt. Policy issues center on ways to combat essentialism, walls of difference between groups, and irrational symbols of superiority. The roles of egalitarian values and of deprovincialized intergroup contact are emphasized.     

Extremes of Markov chains with tail switching potential

Summary.  A recent advance in the utility of extreme value techniques has been the characteri- zation of the extremal behaviour of Markov chains. This has enabled the application of extreme value models to series whose temporal dependence is Markovian, subject to a limitation that prevents switching between extremely high and extremely low levels. For many applications this is sufficient, but for others, most notably in the field of finance, it is common to find series in which successive values switch between high and low levels. We term such series Markov chains with tail switching potential, and the scope of this paper is to generalize the previous theory to enable the characterization of the extremal properties of series displaying this type of behaviour. In addition to theoretical developments, a modelling procedure is proposed. A simulation study is made to assess the utility of the model in inferring the extremal dependence structure of autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes, which fall within the tail switching Markov family, and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes which do not, being non-Markov in general. Finally, the procedure is applied to model extremal aspects of a financial index extracted from the New York Stock Exchange compendium.