Does family structure affect children's educational outcomes?

In this paper we examine the effect of family structure on children’s educational outcomes by exploiting the sibling structure in the NLSY and NLSY-Child to control for unobserved heterogeneity across families and individuals. We also compare outcomes for children within the same family—stepchildren with their half-siblings in the same blended family who are the biological children of both parents. Using panel data methods to control for unobserved heterogeneity across families, we find that family structure effects are statistically insignificant. Finally, comparing half-siblings in our data, we find no difference in educational outcomes as a function of family structure. Our empirical results are consistent with at least two interpretations. First, they can be interpreted as evidence that estimates of family structure effects reflect selection rather than causation. Second, they can be interpreted as evidence that the presence of stepchildren disrupts families.Child care ; Demography ; Education ; Human capital

SN 1999ga: a low-luminosity linear type II supernova?

Type II-linear supernovae are thought to arise from progenitors that have lost most of their H envelope by the time of the explosion, and they are poorly understood because they are only occasionally discovered. It is possible that they are intrinsically rare, but selection effects due to their rapid luminosity evolution may also play an important role in limiting the number of detections. In this context, the discovery of a subluminous type II-linear event is even more interesting. We investigate the physical properties and characterise the explosion site of the type II SN 1999ga, which exploded in the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 2442. Spectroscopic and photometric observations of SN 1999ga allow us to constrain the energetics of the explosion and to estimate the mass of the ejected material, shedding light on the nature of the progenitor star in the final stages of its life. The study of the environment in the vicinity of the explosion site provides information on a possible relation between these unusual supernovae and the properties of the galaxies hosting them. Despite the lack of early-time observations, we provide reasonable evidence that SN 1999ga was probably a type II-linear supernova that ejected a few solar masses of material, with a very small amount of radioactive elements of the order of 0.01 solar masses.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A (March 28, 2009

Responder Identification in Clinical Trials with Censored Data

We present a newly developed technique for identification of positive and negative responders to a new treatment which was compared to a classical treatment (or placebo) in a randomized clinical trial. This bump-hunting-based method was developed for trials in which the two treatment arms do not differ in survival overall. It checks in a systematic manner if certain subgroups, described by predictive factors do show difference in survival due to the new treatment. Several versions of the method were discussed and compared in a simulation study. The best version of the responder identification method employs martingale residuals to a prognostic model as response in a stabilized through bootstrapping bump hunting procedure. On average it recognizes 90% of the time the correct positive responder group and 99% of the time the correct negative responder group

Coarse, Intermediate and High Resolution Numerical Simulations of the Transition of a Tropical Wave Critical Layer to a Tropical Storm

Recent work has hypothesized that tropical cyclones in the deep Atlantic and eastern Pacific basins develop from within the cyclonic Kelvin cat's eye of a tropical easterly wave critical layer located equatorward of the easterly jet axis. The cyclonic critical layer is thought to be important to tropical cyclogenesis because its cat's eye provides (i) a region of cyclonic vorticity and weak deformation by the resolved flow, (ii) containment of moisture entrained by the developing flow and/or lofted by deep convection therein, (iii) confinement of mesoscale vortex aggregation, (iv) a predominantly convective type of heating profile, and (v) maintenance or enhancement of the parent wave until the developing proto-vortex becomes a self-sustaining entity and emerges from the wave as a tropical depression. This genesis sequence and the overarching framework for describing how such hybrid wave-vortex structures become tropical depressions/storms is likened to the development of a marsupial infant in its mother's pouch, and for this reason has been dubbed the "marsupial paradigm". Here we conduct the first multi-scale test of the marsupial paradigm in an idealized setting by revisiting the Kurihara and Tuleya problem examining the transformation of an easterly wave-like disturbance into a tropical storm vortex using the WRF model. An analysis of the evolving winds, equivalent potential temperature, and relative vertical vorticity is presented from coarse (28 km), intermediate (9 km) and high resolution (3.1 km) simulations. The results are found to support key elements of the marsupial paradigm by demonstrating the existence of rotationally dominant region with minimal strain/shear deformation near the center of the critical layer pouch that contains strong cyclonic vorticity and high saturation fraction. This localized region within the pouch serves as the "attractor" for an upscale "bottom up" development process while the wave pouch and proto-vortex move together

Нобелівська лекція як віддзеркалення світогляду лауреата

Статтю присвячено дослідженню змістової складової такого специфічного мовленнєвого жанру як Нобелівська лекція. Увагу зосереджено на проблемно-тематичних характеристиках англомовних лекцій, які були прочитані лауреатами в галузі літератури. Проаналізовано чинники, що впливають на зміст лекції. Встановлено взаємозв’язок між темою доповіді та офіційним обґрунтуванням нагороди членами Шведської академії

Contacts With Negative Work of “Adhesion” and Superlubricity

Van der Waals forces between solids in vacuum are always attractive and are considered as the main source of adhesion. However, in the presence of an intermediate medium, they can also be repelling (Dzyaloshinskii et al., 1961) which means that the “work of adhesion” becomes negative. Similarly to the case of adhesion, the interaction range of these forces can be either comparable (or larger) than the minimum characteristic length scale of the contact problem or it can be negligible compared with all characteristic length scales. We call this latter case the “JKR-approximation,” as the JKR theory of adhesion (Johnson et al., 1971) is also valid in this limit. The repelling interaction can also be due to the presence (and squeezing out) of a thin fluid layer between solids as considered in Müser (2014). In the papers Popov and Hess (2018) and Heß and Popov (2019), it was shown that the contact of two oppositely charged surfaces at a constant voltage is equivalent to the adhesive contact with an effective van der Waals interaction. Similarly, the contact of the bodies with the same charge would be equivalent to repelling van der Waals forces with a negative work of adhesion. Further kinds of repelling forces may be solvation, structural, and hydration forces (Israelachvili, 2011). In the following, we speak about van der Waals forces, but they are thought as representative for a larger class of long range repelling forces. We argue that in the JKR approximation, the Hertz' solution of the contact problem with a repelling van der Waals interaction, remains practically unchanged. However, the contact area falls apart into the area of “weak (van der Waals) interaction” and “strong (rigid wall) interaction.” It is speculated that if the normal force is smaller than a critical value at which the core region of strong interaction disappears, a macroscopic superlubricity state of the contact may be observed.DFG, 414044773, Open Access Publizieren 2019 - 2020 / Technische Universität Berli

First results of a GNSS-R experiment from a stratospheric balloon over boreal forests

The empirical results of a global navigation satellite systems reflectometry (GNSS-R) experiment onboard the Balloon EXperiments for University Students (BEXUS) 17 stratospheric balloon performed north of Sweden over boreal forests show that the power of the reflected signals is nearly independent of the platform height for a high coherent integration time T-c = 20 ms. This experimental evidence shows a strong coherent component in the forward scattered signal, as compared with the incoherent component, that allows to be tracked. The bistatic coherent reflectivity is also evaluated as a function of the elevation angle, showing a decrease of similar to 6 dB when the elevation angle increases from 35. to 70 degrees. The received power presents a clearly multimodal behavior, which also suggests that the coherent scattering component may be taking place in different forest elements, i.e., soil, canopy, and through multiple reflections canopy-soil and soil-trunk. This experiment has provided the first GNSS-R data set over boreal forests. The evaluation of these results can be useful for the feasibility study of this technique to perform biomass monitoring that is a key factor to analyze the carbon cycle.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft