DOES WHOM YOU KNOW MATTER? UNRAVELING THE INFLUENCE OF PEERS' NETWORK ATTRIBUTES ON ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE

This paper examines how students' network size, distance, prestige, and connections to influential individuals impact academic performance. Larger and closer networks facilitate information exchange, but may also increase distractions that decrease productivity. We resolve this ambiguity using administrative data from a business school that features random assignment of students to multiple overlapping sets of peers, allowing us to calculate degree, closeness, eigenvector, and Katz‐Bonacich centrality for each node. We find that increasing closeness centrality within the network negatively affects student performance measured by grade point average, suggesting that synergy reduction and information processing costs outweigh benefits from greater information access. (JEL I23, L14, L23)     

The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘digital glimpse’, which develops the existing framing of imaginative travel. Here it articulates the experiences of mobile workers digitally connecting into family life and everyday rituals when physically absent with work. The recent embedding of digital communication technologies into personal relationships and family life is reconfiguring how absence is experienced and practiced by workers on the move, and through this, new digital paradigms for life on-the-move are emerging. This paper explores how such social relationships are maintained at-a-distance through digital technology – using evidence from qualitative interviews with mobile workers and their families. Digital technology now enables expressive forms of ‘virtual travel’, including video calling, picture sharing, and instant messaging. This has implications for the ways in which families can manage the social and relational pressures of being apart. Experiences of imaginative travel created through novel media can enrich the experience and give a greater sense of connection for both those who are at home and those who are away. While technology is limited in its ability to replicate a sense of co-presence, ‘digital glimpses’ are an emergent set of sociotechnical practices that can reduce the negative impact of absence on family relationships.     

The Four S Model in action for de-escalation. An innovative state hospital-university collaborative endeavor

In this article, the Four S Model is presented as a working clinical framework for generating structured nursing interventions and treatment plans. The de-escalation process, formalized by the De-escalation/Alternative to Restraint Flowsheet, is one way in which the model is being operationalized to reduce seclusion and restraints. As shown by the flowsheet, the model allows for integration of mental health and mental illness. It spans the scope of nursing practice at all levels, from para-professional to advanced practice nurse, by integrating the mental health concepts of communication, leadership, clinical judgement, critical thinking, and caring within its framework. Most important, the flexibility to individualize treatment that is built into the model allows for generalization to all psychiatric presentations.     

Relations for reliability measures of weighted distributions

Relibility measures of weighted distribution of alifeistribution have been derived Sufficientconditions on the weight function have been obtained for the weighted distribution of an IFR distribution to be IFR. Length-biased and equilibrium distributions have been discussed as weighted distributions in the reliability context.     

Bayes estimators of the average failure rates

In the present paper we have proposed a Bayesian approach for making inferences from accelerated life tests which do not require distributional assumptions     

Perceived Inflation Persistence

This article constructs and estimates a measure called perceived inflation persistence that can be used to determine if professional forecasters’ inflation forecasts indicate there has been a change in inflation persistence. This measure is built via the implied autocorrelation function that follows from the estimates obtained using a forecaster-specific state-space model. Findings indicate that U.S. perceived inflation persistence has changed since the mid-1990s with more consensus among forecasters at lower levels of persistence. When compared to the autocorrelation function for actual inflation, forecasters typically react less to shocks to inflation than the actual inflation data would suggest.     

No city for migrant women: construction workers’ experiences of exclusion from urban governance and discrimination in labour markets in Ahmedabad

ABSTRACT

Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is one of the fastest growing cities in the world, and a reflection of India’s story of exclusionary economic growth. This article focuses on research carried out with women construction workers with the help of a migrant construction workers’ union in Ahmedabad. It describes the method used by women members of the union to make visible their experiences as migrants in the city – with men, local authorities, and employers – to highlight the additional burdens that they bear due to a negligent state and industry, advocate for better working and living conditions, and raise consciousness of gender inequalities that need to be integrated into the demands of the workers’ union.     

Doing disability research in a Southern context: challenges and possibilities

Research on disability issues in countries of the South is primarily dominated by a focus on generating large scale quantitative data sets. This paper discusses the many challenges, opportunities and dilemmas faced in designing and undertaking a qualitative research study in one district in India. The Disability, Education and Poverty Project (DEPP) aims at exploring the role of education in the lives of young people with disabilities living in poverty. A central focus of the research is to engage with the young people with disabilities themselves and to understand how they construed their lives and experiences. This paper discusses three issues which are of central concern to the project: identification of the sample group, appropriateness of the research methods and, finally, an examination of the assumptions underpinning the research process.