Urban shade as a cryptic habitat: fern distribution in building gaps in Sapporo,northern Japan

Urban Ecosystems - Biodiversity conservation and restoration in cities is a global challenge for the 21st century. Unlike other common ecosystems, urban landscapes are predominantly covered by...     

Passing Encounters East and West: Comparing Japanese and American Pedestrian Interactions

This study examined the microinteractions of pedestrians in Japan and in the United States as they walked past a confederate. Specifically, the effects of culture, condition (avoid, look-only, and look plus smile) and sex of confederate on glances, smiles, nods, and greetings by passing pedestrians were examined in a field study on over 1000 participants. The hypotheses of (1) lower responsiveness in Japanese pedestrians than in American pedestrians and (2) increased responsiveness as a function of condition were supported in a series of log-linear analyses of pedestrian glances, smiles, nods, and greetings. Both of these main effects were, however, qualified by Culture X Condition interactions on smiles, nods, and greetings, with the large condition effects present in the American pedestrians, but absent in the Japanese pedestrians. The results are discussed in terms of the functions of glances, smiles, nods, and greetings in these brief encounters and how differing cultural norms affect Japanese and American responsiveness. Finally, the limitations of this study and the broader utility of this research paradigm are discussed.

Cognitive-Affective Processing System Analysis of Reactions to the O. J. Simpson Criminal Trial Verdict

Reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict were analyzed using the Cognitive-Affective Processing System (CAPS) model. Content analyses of participants' open-ended reactions to the verdict revealed that differences in the accessibility of cognitive-affective units and their subsequent activation pathways characterized respondents' reactions, but participants' race appeared to have no direct effect. The results were used to construct cognitive-affective domain maps that underlay elated, dismayed, and ambivalent reactions. By promoting a deeper understanding and appreciation of reactions to the verdict, we believe the domain maps facilitate overcoming the widespread tendency to attribute the cause of divergent reactions to an individual's race. The results have implications for the understanding of cultural differences.     

MINIMUM WAGES,IMPORT STATUS,AND FIRMS' INNOVATION: THEORY AND EVIDENCE FROM CHINA

This study explores the heterogeneous effects of minimum wage on innovation of different types of firms. We develop an open‐economy R&D‐based growth model and obtain the following result: raising the minimum wage reduces innovation of firms that use domestic inputs but increases innovation of firms that import foreign inputs. We test this result using city‐level data on minimum wages and firm‐level patent data in China. In accordance with our theory, we find that raising the minimum wage is associated with more innovation by importing firms and less by non‐importing firms. This result survives a battery of robustness checks. (JEL E24, F43, O31)     

Joint Modeling of Survival and Longitudinal Ordered Data Using a Semiparametric Approach

Medical research frequently focuses on the relationship between quality of life (QoL) and survival time of subjects. QoL may be one of the most important factors that could be used to predict survival, making it worth identifying factors that jointly affect survival and QoL. We propose a semiparametric joint model that consists of item response and survival components, where these two components are linked through latent variables. Several popular ordinal models are considered and compared in the item response component, while the Cox proportional hazards model is used in the survival component. We estimate the baseline hazard function and model parameters simultaneously, through a profile likelihood approach. We illustrate the method using an example from a clinical study.     

On the Asymptotic Optimality of Empirical Likelihood for Testing Moment Restrictions

We show by example that empirical likelihood and other commonly used tests for moment restrictions are unable to control the (exponential) rate at which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero unless the possible distributions for the observed data are restricted appropriately. From this, it follows that for the optimality claim for empirical likelihood in Kitamura (2001) to hold, additional assumptions and qualifications are required. Under stronger assumptions than those in Kitamura (2001), we establish the following optimality result: (i) empirical likelihood controls the rate at which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero and (ii) among all procedures for which the probability of a Type I error tends to zero at least as fast, empirical likelihood maximizes the rate at which the probability of a Type II error tends to zero for most alternatives. This result further implies that empirical likelihood maximizes the rate at which the probability of a Type II error tends to zero for all alternatives among a class of tests that satisfy a weaker criterion for their Type I error probabilities.     

Recurrence relations of coefficients of the generalized hypergeometric function in multivariate analysis

James(1960) defined the zonal polynomials and used it to represent the joint distributions of latent roots of VVisfiart matrix. The zonal polviionnals played an important role to define the generalized hypergeometric function of symmetric matrix argument Since then, many density functions and moments based on Wishart matrix have been expressed in terms of the generalized hy¬pergeometric Function. The purpose of this paper is to get the recurrence relations for the coefficients of it. In Section 1 we derive a partial differen¬tial equations having the generalized hypergeometric function as the unique solution. Then we ubtain the recurrence relations until order 7 in Section 2.     

Property testing for cyclic groups and beyond

This paper studies the problem of testing if an input (Γ,°), where Γ is a finite set of unknown size and ° is a binary operation over Γ given as an oracle, is close to a specified class of groups. Friedl et al. (Proc. of STOC, 2005) have constructed an efficient tester using poly(log|Γ|) queries for the class of abelian groups. We focus in this paper on subclasses of abelian groups, and show that these problems are much harder: Ω(|Γ|^1/6) queries are necessary to test if the input is close to a cyclic group, and Ω(|Γ| ^c ) queries for some constant c are necessary to test more generally if the input is close to an abelian group generated by k elements, for any fixed integer k≥1. We also show that knowledge of the size of the ground set Γ helps only for k=1, in which case we construct an efficient tester using poly(log|Γ|) queries; for any other value k≥2 the query complexity remains Ω(|Γ| ^c ). All our upper and lower bounds hold for both the edit distance and the Hamming distance. These are, to the best of our knowledge, the first nontrivial lower bounds for such group-theoretic problems in the property testing model and, in particular, they imply the first exponential separations between the classical and quantum query complexities of testing closeness to classes of groups.     

A Contextual Approach to the Development of Self-regulatory Competencies: The Role of Maternal Unresponsivity and Toddlers' Negative Affect in Stressful Situations

A prospective study examined the effects of maternal unresponsivity and of toddlers’ own negative affect on the child's subsequent ability to use effective attentional control strategies in preschool. Maternal and child behaviors were measured in situations that varied in the level of stress to test the hypothesis that behaviors in high stress situations would be more diagnostic of children's subsequent self‐regulatory behavior. As predicted, both maternal unresponsivity and toddlers’ negative affect, particularly in a high stress as opposed to a low stress situation, predicted children's later use of ineffective attentional control strategies. Similarly, maternal disengagement that occurred contingent to toddlers’ distress predicted ineffective attentional control strategies whereas maternal disengagement in response to toddlers’ non‐distress behaviors did not. The findings supported the utility of a contextual approach to understanding the impact of maternal and child characteristics on the development of self‐regulatory skills.