Between Spatial and Social Segregation among Immigrants: The Case of Immigrants from the FSU in Israel

Studies on immigrants' residential concentration have reported mixed findings. Some have argued that immigrants' residential concentration is a necessary step in the process of their social integration because there the newcomers find housing and employment opportunities as well as social support. As they learn the language and improve their socioeconomic status, they move to neighborhoods where they share space with the native population. Others have argued that the ethnic neighborhood delays the process of social integration in the new society because it nurtures informal ethnic social networks that provide incomplete information and retard the process of language acquisition. The study reported here investigated the effect of motivations, perceptions of attitudes of the host society, acculturation and socioeconomic factors on immigrants' residential concentration. It also sought to expand previous research by examining the relationship between immigrants'residential concentration and social relationships with nonimmigrants. Data for the study were collected in 1999 through a survey of immigrants from the FSU who had settled in one northern city in Israel after 1989. The results show a negative relationship of socioeconomic status and fluency in Hebrew with the percentage of immigrants residing in a given neighborhood. The higher the socioeconomic status and the more fluent the immigrant in Hebrew, the lower the percentage of immigrants in his or her neighborhood. Immigrants who expressed a proactive motivation for migration resided in neighborhoods with a low percentage of immigrants. Immigrants' residential concentration was not found to be related to the development of social relationships with the local population. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

PATTERN RECOGNITION VIA ROBUST SMOOTHING WITH APPLICATION TO LASER DATA

Nowadays airborne laser scanning is used in many territorial studies, providing point data which may contain strong discontinuities. Motivated by the need to interpolate such data and preserve their edges, this paper considers robust nonparametric smoothers. These estimators, when implemented with bounded loss functions, have suitable jump‐preserving properties. Iterative algorithms are developed here, and are equivalent to nonlinear M‐smoothers, but have the advantage of resembling the linear Kernel regression. The selection of their coefficients is carried out by combining cross‐validation and robust‐tuning techniques. Two real case studies and a simulation experiment confirm the validity of the method; in particular, the performance in building recognition is excellent.     

A Stochastic Model to Assess the Effect of Meat Inspection Practices on the Contamination of the Pig Carcasses

The objective of meat inspection is to promote animal and public health by preventing, detecting, and controlling hazards originating from animals. With the improvements of sanitary level in pig herds, the hazards profile has shifted and the inspection procedures no longer target major foodborne pathogens (i.e., not risk based). Additionally, carcass manipulations performed when searching for macroscopic lesions can lead to cross‐contamination. We therefore developed a stochastic model to quantitatively describe cross‐contamination when consecutive carcasses are submitted to classic inspection procedures. The microbial hazard used to illustrate the model was Salmonella, the data set was obtained from Brazilian slaughterhouses, and some simplifying assumptions were made. The model predicted that due to cross‐contamination during inspection, the prevalence of contaminated carcass surfaces increased from 1.2% to 95.7%, whereas the mean contamination on contaminated surfaces decreased from 1 logCFU/cm² to ?0.87 logCFU/cm², and the standard deviations decreased from 0.65 to 0.19. These results are explained by the fact that, due to carcass manipulations with hands, knives, and hooks, including the cutting of contaminated lymph nodes, Salmonella is transferred to previously uncontaminated carcasses, but in small quantities. These small quantities can easily go undetected during sampling. Sensitivity analyses gave insight into the model performance and showed that the touching and cutting of lymph nodes during inspection can be an important source of carcass contamination. The model can serve as a tool to support discussions on the modernization of pig carcass inspection.     

Predicting Children's Prosocial and Co‐operative Behavior from Their Temperamental Profiles: A Person‐centered Approach

The goal of this study was to examine how aspects of self‐regulation and negative emotionality predicted children's co‐operative and prosocial behavior concurrently and longitudinally using the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. Mothers completed measures of children's temperamental proneness to negative emotionality and self‐regulation at 54 months. Teachers and parents completed measures of children's co‐operative and prosocial behavior at 54 months, first grade, and third grade. A latent profile analysis of the temperamental variables revealed four profiles of children: those high in regulation and low in negative emotionality, those moderate in regulation and moderate in negative emotionality, those low in regulation and high in negative emotionality, and finally those who were very low in regulation but high in anger emotionality. Generally, children with profiles that were high or moderate in terms of regulation and low or moderate in terms of negative emotionality were rated as the most prosocial and co‐operative. Children with profiles that were less well regulated and who were high in negative emotionality (particularly anger proneness) were rated as less co‐operative and prosocial by parents and teachers.     

Predictors of Antisocial and Prosocial Behavior in an Adolescent Sports Context

This study examined antisocial and prosocial behavior of N = 439 adolescent athletes between 14 and 17 years of age (67 teams). Multi‐level analyses showed that team membership explained 20 and 13 percent of the variance in antisocial and prosocial behavior in the sports context, respectively. The team effects suggest that aggregating antisocial or prosocial adolescents within teams may partially explain differences in antisocial and prosocial behavior among athletes in the sports context. A trend was found toward a relation between higher levels of moral reasoning within teams, and less antisocial behavior in the sports context. Favorable moral atmosphere was positively associated with more prosocial behavior in the sports context. Finally, supportive coach–athlete relationships were associated with both less antisocial and more prosocial behavior in the sports context.     

Bayesian Conditional Mean Estimation in Log‐Normal Linear Regression Models with Finite Quadratic Expected Loss

Log‐normal linear regression models are popular in many fields of research. Bayesian estimation of the conditional mean of the dependent variable is problematic as many choices of the prior for the variance (on the log‐scale) lead to posterior distributions with no finite moments. We propose a generalized inverse Gaussian prior for this variance and derive the conditions on the prior parameters that yield posterior distributions of the conditional mean of the dependent variable with finite moments up to a pre‐specified order. The conditions depend on one of the three parameters of the suggested prior; the other two have an influence on inferences for small and medium sample sizes. A second goal of this paper is to discuss how to choose these parameters according to different criteria including the optimization of frequentist properties of posterior means.     

Analysis of the spread of Rhynchophorus ferrugineus in an urban area,using GIS techniques: a study case in Central Italy

Urban Ecosystems - The spread of the red palm weevil is now a very severe problem on a global scale. In this paper, we investigate its spread during the 2007–2013 period in a coastal urban...     

External Constraint and the Labour Oriented Supply-side Policies in Italy

ABSTRACT: This paper attempts to estimate the relative importance of various factors that, under an increasing external constraint, have contributed to the competitiveness and output growth in the Italian industry during the last eighteen years. In particular, it tries to evaluate the effectiveness of the few relevant supply-side policies adopted in Italy, which were based essentially on labour oriented policy instruments. It is found that technological change was far more important than policy factors for restructuring and reconverting industrial activities and increasing the level of production.     

Inequality in digital skills and the adoption of online safety behaviors

ABSTRACT

Cyber-safety behaviors are important in preventing the loss of an individual's digital assets and ensuring the safety of important daily online activities. Individuals’ cyber-safety is also critical for national cybersecurity. The issue is highly relevant for Israel, a country that relies on the digital capabilities of its workers for its major technology industries and is also often a target of cyberwarfare and cybercrime attacks. The purpose of this study is to identify the determinants of cyber-safety behavior. We investigate the role of age, gender and education in the use of safety-related digital skills and antivirus software. Using a 2014 survey of a national sample of Internet users in Israel (N?=?1850), we found that age, gender, education and quality of access are associated with the level of users’ digital security skills. In addition, these skills and the frequency of conducting financial activities online are the main determinants of antivirus behaviors. Our results expand the understanding of cyber-safety by showing that social and digital disparities are reproduced in the use of measures to prevent online threats, putting the digitally disadvantaged at greater risk of becoming victims of online threats.     

Occupational closure and immigrant entrepreneurship: Russian Jews in Israel

The recent wave of Jews emigrating from countries of the former Soviet Union to Israel has created structural conditions for immigrant entrepreneurship. The large size of the migrant population and its spatial concentration create a demand for services and products that can be provided by immigrants. This paper investigates the factors associated with intentions to open a small business in a sample of Jewish immigrants from the countries of the former Soviet Union. It was found that intentions to open a small business are related to previous business experience, education, income, and length of residence in the country. Immigrants become interested in entrepreneurship after learning that their prospects of finding a job in their profession are meager and explain their motivation to open a small business as being to increase their income. The findings seem to support the disadvantage theory that conceptualizes entrepreneurship as an adaptive mechanism to structural barriers in the primary labor market that create an occupational closure for immigrants possessing low and middle levels of education and income.