The determinants of transnational entrepreneurship and transnational ties’ dynamics among immigrant entrepreneurs in ICT sector in Italy

This article contributes to the rapidly growing literature on transnational immigrant entrepreneurship by analyzing the determinants of transnational entrepreneurial engagement among immigrants in the ICT sector in Italy. We investigate which factors influence the rise or decline of transnational entrepreneurial involvement with a home country. Our results indicate that longer residence in Italy is associated with smaller propensity to become a transnational entrepreneur. Moreover, we find that the type of transnational ties and the network size have a substantial impact on the dynamics of transnational entrepreneurial engagement.     

Talk-Aloud Protocols during Conditional Discrimination Training and Equivalence Class Formation

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - The primary focus of the present experiment was to study participants’ self-talk during conditional discrimination training and test for the emergence of...     

Lower bounds on the adaptivity gaps in variants of the stochastic knapsack problem

We consider stochastic variants of the NP-hard 0/1 knapsack problem in which item values are deterministic and item sizes are independent random variables with known, arbitrary distributions. Items are placed in the knapsack sequentially, and the act of placing an item in the knapsack instantiates its size. The goal is to compute a policy for insertion of the items, that maximizes the expected value of the set of items placed in the knapsack. These variants that we study differ only in the formula for computing the value of the final solution obtained by the policy. We consider both nonadaptive policies (that designate a priori a fixed subset or permutation of items to insert) and adaptive policies (that can make dynamic decisions based on the instantiated sizes of the items placed in the knapsack thus far). Our work characterizes the benefit of adaptivity. For this purpose we use a measure called the adaptivity gap: the supremum over instances of the ratio between the expected value obtained by an optimal adaptive policy and the expected value obtained by an optimal non-adaptive policy. We show that while for the variants considered in the literature this quantity is bounded by a constant there are other variants where it is unbounded.     

New Explicit Examples of Fixed Points of Poisson Shot Noise Transforms

The main objective of this paper is to establish a close relation between the fixed points of Poisson shot noise transforms and perpetuities of a special type. With this relation it is shown that the gamma distributions, the generalized positive Linnik distributions, and the S2 distributions are fixed points of Poisson shot noise transforms. The paper also proves that log‐convexity of the response functions is not needed for non‐negative Poisson shot noise distributions to be self‐decomposable. Finally, the problems of existence and uniqueness of the above mentioned perpetuities are investigated.     

THE HURWITZ ZETA DISTRIBUTION

This paper shows that a normalization of the Hurwitz zeta function is a characteristic function. This generalizes the 1938 result of Khinchine about the Riemann zeta function. The paper investigates the infinite divisibility of the resulting distribution.     

Use of multiple imputation in supersampled nested case-control and case-cohort studies

Nested case-control and case-cohort studies are useful for studying associations between covariates and time-to-event when some covariates are expensive to measure. Full covariate information is collected in the nested case-control or case-cohort sample only, while cheaply measured covariates are often observed for the full cohort. Standard analysis of such case-control samples ignores any full cohort data. Previous work has shown how data for the full cohort can be used efficiently by multiple imputation of the expensive covariate(s), followed by a full-cohort analysis. For large cohorts this is computationally expensive or even infeasible. An alternative is to supplement the case-control samples with additional controls on which cheaply measured covariates are observed. We show how multiple imputation can be used for analysis of such supersampled data. Simulations show that this brings efficiency gains relative to a traditional analysis and that the efficiency loss relative to using the full cohort data is not substantial.     

Wo lernen Kinder mit sonderpädagogischem Förderbedarf besser? Ein Vergleich schulischer Kompetenzen zwischen Regel- und Förderschulen in der Primarstufe

Promoted by the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, there is a trend towards the inclusive education of students with special educational needs (SEN) in regular classrooms. The present study addresses the question if achievement differences emerge between SEN students who attend a regular primary school and those who attend a school for special education. Based on data from the IQB-Ländervergleich Primarstufe 2011, a national assessment in German primary schools, the achievement of SEN students in regular schools (n?=?658) was compared to the achievement of students in special schools (n?=?413). Propensity score matching was applied to control for differences in achievement related characteristics between the two groups. After matching, SEN students in inclusive educational settings showed significantly higher test scores in German reading and listening comprehension as well as in mathematics than comparable SEN students in special schools. The effects were more pronounced for students with a special need of learning support than for students with speech and language-related special education support. Possible explanations for the higher achievement of SEN students in regular schools and for differential effects with regard to type of SEN are discussed.     

How to Maintain High Retention Rates in Long-Term Research on Addiction: A Case Report

High dropout rates threaten the validity of longitudinal studies involving participants suffering from substance use disorder (SUD). The objective of this article is to evaluate strategies to improve retention. The data analysis was based on an ongoing study of long-term recovery of neurocognitive and psychosocial functions. We used traditional strategies to enhance the contact rate. Common factors in psychosocial treatments and biweekly Short Message Service (SMS; text messaging) monitoring were added to further increase the contact rate. The participants (n = 146) were recruited from treatment facilities for SUD. Assessments were measured at 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and 12 months. This study was successful in retaining a cohort of participants who are typically characterized as having a negative prognosis because of their unstable living arrangements and incomes. Compared to those using GHB, addictive medications, and opiates, the retention rate was the lowest among participants with severe alcohol use disorder (42%).     

Power differentials and identity formation: Images of self and other on the Russian–Georgian boundary

This article looks at how Russia places herself in relation to one of her southern neighbours, Georgia, and vice versa. Russia and Georgia have recently been engaged in a short but full-fledged war, hence their interrelationship has been intensely debated in both countries. Both Russia and Georgia are, as it were, poised ‘between East and West’.

As a starting point, therefore, we hypothesized that Russians would present themselves as a European nation while they would orientalise the Georgians. Conversely, the Georgians would define themselves into and the Russians out of Europe. We found, however, that identity construction on the Russian-Georgian border is not symmetrical. While the Georigan discourse basically confirmed our assumption, in Russia the dominant discourse is that Russia and Georgia are closely related, fraternal peoples. This shows the importance of power relations in the study of reciprocal identity formations.

While hegemonic discourses often are discourses of exclusion our study shows that a discourse of inclusion—in our case a rhetoric of ‘brotherhood’—often may be a more effective technique of domination. The prevailing discourse in the weaker group, on the other hand, will focus more on cultural distance towards the more powerful Other.     

A psychosocial and biomedical comparison between men in six contrasting service occupations

A study of psychosocial job factors and physiological states was conducted using 150 men, aged between 25 and 60, working in six widely different occupations—freight handlers, aircraft mechanics, air traffic controllers, physicians, waiters and symphony musicians. The aim of the study was to characterize any differences in physiological parameters in relation to differences in psychosocial job characteristics. Analyses of variance were used to test differences between groups. The results indicated that waiters, the group reporting the most unfavourable working conditions, tended to have many cardiovascular risk factors. Physicians, who had relatively few cardiovascular risk factors, reported high decision latitude and many emotional reactions in their daily life and had relatively high cortisol and low prolactin levels in plasma.