Explaining Asia's “Missing Women”: A New Look at the Data

The fact that millions of females are “missing” in East Asia and South Asia has been attributed to cultural factors that support strong son preference in these countries. A widely disseminated paper by Emily Oster argues that a large part of this phenomenon can be attributed to excessively masculine sex ratios at birth resulting from maternal infection with hepatitis B. If her thesis is true, current policies to address this problem would need to be reframed to include biological factors in addition to cultural factors. The data show, however, that whether or not females “go missing” is determined by the existing sex composition of the family into which they are conceived. Girls with no older sisters have similar chances of survival as boys. However, girls conceived in families that already have a daughter experience steeply higher probabilities of being aborted or of dying in early childhood. This indicates that cultural factors still provide the overwhelming explanation for the “missing” females.     

Geriatric Care during Public Health Emergencies: Lessons Learned from Novel Corona Virus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Geriatric care in public health emergencies is a serious concern, while, high case-fatalities among older adults across the globe in COVID-19 pandemic implies lack of preparedness. Most of the countries irrespective of developing and developed one enormously struggling because of an inchoate response system ignorant of geriatric health needs. Therefore, a robust approach is highly essential that requires an integrated emergency preparedness by addressing geriatric care.     

„Solidarität“ in südasiatischen Gesellschaften

Taking South Asia as an example, it is shown how efforts to designate “solidarity” as a universally valid category are handicapped on the one hand by the ambiguity of the concept, on the other by its culture-specificity. Based on a linguistic, historical and social overview, it is demonstrated that the discourse parameters for “solidarity” as they dominate in the German language discourse are little suited for the South Asian reality. This leads to critical deliberations on the assumption that concepts and notions of the so-called West are to be seen as universally valid and universally binding.     

Some variations on constrained minimum enclosing circle problem

Given a set P of n points and a straight line L, we study three important variations of minimum enclosing circle problem as follows:

1. Computing k identical circles of minimum radius with centers on L, whose union covers all the points in P.
2. Computing the minimum radius circle centered on L that can enclose at least k points of P.
3. If each point in P is associated with one of the k given colors, then compute a minimum radius circle with center on L such that at least one point of each color lies inside it.

We propose three algorithms for Problem (i). The first one runs in O(nklogn) time and O(n) space. The second one is efficient where k?n; it runs in O(nlogn+nk+k ²log³ n) time and O(nlogn) space. The third one is based on parametric search and it runs in O(nlogn+klog⁴ n) time. For Problem (ii), the time and space complexities of the proposed algorithm are O(nk) and O(n) respectively. For Problem (iii), our proposed algorithm runs in O(nlogn) time and O(n) space.     

Families,social life,and well-being at older ages

As people age, many aspects of their lives tend to change, including the constellation of people with whom they are connected, their social context, their families, and their health—changes that are often interrelated. Wave I of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) has yielded rich information on intimate ties, especially dyads and families, and on social connections generally. Combined with extensive biological and other health measures, NSHAP enables researchers to address key questions on health and aging. We begin with recent findings on intimate dyads, then move to social participation, and finally to elder mistreatment. Among dyads, we find that whereas sexual activity drops sharply with age for both women and men, gender differences in partner loss as well as psychosocial and normative pressures constrain women’s sex more than men’s. However, surviving partnerships tend to be emotionally and physically satisfying and are marked by relatively frequent sex. In contrast to sex, nonsexual intimacy is highly prevalent at older ages, especially among women. Older adults are also socially resilient—adapting to the loss of social ties by increasing involvement with community and kin networks. Despite these social assets, older adults remain vulnerable to mistreatment. Overall, these findings yield a mixed picture of gender-differentiated vulnerabilities balanced by proactive adaptation and maintenance of social and dyadic assets.     

Evidence for an Incipient Decline in Numbers of Missing Girls in China and India

The apparently inexorable rise in the proportion of “missing girls” in much of East and South Asia has attracted much attention among researchers and policymakers. An encouraging trend was suggested by the case of South Korea, where child sex ratios (males to females under age 5) were the highest in Asia but peaked in the mid‐1990s and normalized thereafter. Using census data, we examine whether similar trends have begun to manifest themselves in the two most populous countries of this region, China and India. The data indicate that child sex ratios are peaking in these countries, and in many subnational regions are beginning to trend toward lower, more normal values. This suggests that, with continuing economic and social development and vigorous public policy efforts to reduce son preference, the “missing girls” phenomenon could eventually disappear in Asia.     

Maternal Cocaine Use and Infant Behavior

This study examined the impact of maternal cocaine use and associated risk factors such as polysubstance use, maternal functioning, and caregiving on affect regulation during infancy. Participants were 45 mother‐infant dyads (19 cocaine exposed and 26 control infants) recruited at birth. Observations and maternal reports of infant behavior were obtained at 2 and 7 months of age, along with measures of pre‐ and postnatal substance use, maternal functioning, and caregiving stability. Maternal cocaine use accounted for significant variance in infant positive affect at 2 months. Other substance use and gestational age predicted infant distress to novelty and arousal during developmental assessments. At 7 months, the impact of prenatal cocaine exposure on infant affect regulation was mediated by postnatal alcohol use and caregiving stability. These findings, if replicated, suggest that 1 pathway to later problem behavior reported among substance‐exposed children may be through early regulatory problems and the quality of postnatal caregiving.     

INFERENCE IN DIRICHLET PROCESS MIXED GENERALIZED LINEAR MODELS BY USING MONTE CARLO EM

Generalized linear mixed models are widely used for describing overdispersed and correlated data. Such data arise frequently in studies involving clustered and hierarchical designs. A more flexible class of models has been developed here through the Dirichlet process mixture. An additional advantage of using such mixture models is that the observations can be grouped together on the basis of the overdispersion present in the data. This paper proposes a partial empirical Bayes method for estimating all the model parameters by adopting a version of the EM algorithm. An augmented model that helps to implement an efficient Gibbs sampling scheme, under the non‐conjugate Dirichlet process generalized linear model, generates observations from the conditional predictive distribution of unobserved random effects and provides an estimate of the average number of mixing components in the Dirichlet process mixture. A simulation study has been carried out to demonstrate the consistency of the proposed method. The approach is also applied to a study on outdoor bacteria concentration in the air and to data from 14 retrospective lung‐cancer studies.     

Community mentors as coaches: transforming gender norms through cricket among adolescent males in urban India

Addressing violence against women and girls (VAWG) through the medium of male team sport may be a promising strategy for addressing interpersonal violence and gender norms transformation in urban communities. Parivartan is a violence prevention programme in a large slum community in Mumbai, India, which works with men and boys to reduce violence and promote gender-equitable attitudes and beliefs via membership of a cricket team and mentoring from coaches. This article discusses findings from a recent evaluation of the programme.     

Antecedents of Innovativeness in Technology‐Based Services (TBS): Peering into the Black Box of Entrepreneurial Orientation

Innovativeness is the organization's capability for developing and introducing innovations. We argue that new combinations and recombinations of prior and new knowledge (by way of creating, assembling, and transforming knowledge) result in innovativeness in an organization. We further assert that a knowledge‐based focus on innovativeness is particularly important for firms that are technology‐based. The majority of studies focusing on innovativeness are in the entrepreneurship arena, and a large number of studies consider innovativeness as one of three dimensions of the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) construct, the other two dimensions being proactiveness and risk‐taking. However, recent research has suggested peering into the black box of EO by disaggregating the EO construct and examining the interrelationships among its three components. Hence, using the knowledge‐based view and drawing from multiple disciplines, our study conceptualizes innovativeness as a criterion variable and investigates the antecedent role of proactiveness and risk‐taking propensity on innovativeness in the context of technology‐based services (TBS). We hypothesize that both proactiveness and risk‐taking propensity exhibit a curvilinear relationship with innovativeness and introduce organizational structure formality as a moderator to further explicate these relationships. Our results show that proactiveness has a curvilinear (inverted U relationship) with innovativeness, and that this relationship is attenuated by organizational structure formality. Additional analysis indicates that in TBS firms, risk‐taking propensity has a positive linear relationship with innovativeness, and this relationship is accentuated by organizational structure formality. Finally, we discuss important conceptual and practical implications of our study and provide suggestions for future research.