A pixel level evaluation of five multitemporal global gridded population datasets: a case study in Sweden, 1990–2015

Population and Environment - Human activity is a major driver of change and has contributed to many of the challenges we face today. Detailed information about human population distribution is...     

Data tilting for time series

Summary. We develop a general methodology for tilting time series data. Attention is focused on a large class of regression problems, where errors are expressed through autoregressive processes. The class has a range of important applications and in the context of our work may be used to illustrate the application of tilting methods to interval estimation in regression, robust statistical inference and estimation subject to constraints. The method can be viewed as 'empirical likelihood with nuisance parameters'.     

Interactionism,Social Organization,and Social Processes: Looking Back and Moving Ahead

With its roots in American pragmatism, symbolic interactionism has created a distinctive perspective and produced numerous important contributions and now offers significant prospects for the future. In this article, I review my intellectual journey with this perspective over forty years. This journey was initiated within the American society, sociology, and symbolic interaction of circa 1960. I note many of the contributions made by interactionists since that time, with particular focus on those who have contributed to the study of social organization and social process. I offer an agenda for the future based on currently underdeveloped areas that have potential. These are inequality orders, institutional analysis, collective action across space and time, and the integration of temporal and spatial orders. The article concludes with calls for further efforts at cross‐perspective dialogues, more attention to feminist scholars, and an elaborated critical pragmatism.     

The behavior of the listener,generic extensions,and the communicative adequacy of verbal behavior

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Except for a few words, children first become listeners of a word before becoming speakers of the word. The analysis of listener behavior is therefore of...     

Joint Attention,Self‐Recognition,and Neurocognitive Function in Toddlers

Recent studies have attempted to understand the processes involved in joint attention because of its relevance to both atypical and normal development. Data from a recent study of young children with autism suggests that performance on a delay nonmatch to sample (DNMS) task associated with ventromedial prefrontal functions, but not an A‐not‐B/delayed response task associated with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was related to joint attention skills (Dawson et al., 2002). Recent research also suggests that joint attention is associated with dorsalmedial brain systems linked to self‐monitoring (Mundy, 2003). This study investigated the relations among joint attention, DNMS, and self‐recognition performance in a longitudinal study of 39 normally developing toddlers from 14 to 18 months. The results indicated that development on the DNMS and self‐recognition tasks, but not a means end task, predicted joint attention at 18 months. Further analysis showed that the model was only significant for initiating joint attention (IJA). The implications of these results for the neuro‐development of IJA are discussed.     

Seven ways of causing the less developed countries' population problem to disappear—in theory

The ways to minimize the difficulties due to population and its growth to be found in current literature have been grouped under seven heads in a far from exhaustive listing:

1. Apply the perspective of rates rather than absolute numbers.
2. Annul the direct negative effects of population with surprising positive indirect effects.
3. Show that neither land nor physical capital is important for development; only labour and human capital count.
4. Exhibit past record of zero correlation between income increase and population increase.
5. Calculate net externality of population increase, but underestimate the externalities falling on women and especially on later generations.
6. Make models of the economy omitting the environment, i.e. implicitly assume the environment is infinite.
7. When all else fails declare that population growth is not bad in itself, but that all evils are due to bad policies—economic, ecological, or urban. Marx thought population growth damaging only under capitalism; now population growth is said to be made innocuous by capitalism.

     

On the shrinkage of local linear curve estimators

Local linear curve estimators are typically constructed using a compactly supported kernel, which minimizes edge effects and (in the case of the Epanechnikov kernel) optimizes asymptotic performance in a mean square sense. The use of compactly supported kernels can produce numerical problems, however. A common remedy is ridging, which may be viewed as shrinkage of the local linear estimator towards the origin. In this paper we propose a general form of shrinkage, and suggest that, in practice, shrinkage be towards a proper curve estimator. For the latter we propose a local linear estimator based on an infinitely supported kernel. This approach is resistant against selection of too large a shrinkage parameter, which can impair performance when shrinkage is towards the origin. It also removes problems of numerical instability resulting from using a compactly supported kernel, and enjoys very good mean squared error properties.