Book review: environment and development economics: essays in honour of Sir Partha Dasgupta, edited by Scott Barrett et al.

This volume of twenty essays seeks to honour Sir Partha Dasgupta and the field he helped establish: environment and development economics. With contributions by some of the world’s leading economists, including five recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economics, in addition to scholars based in developing countries, this collection without any doubt leads the reader to desire more knowledge of Sir Partha Dasgupta and his body of work, writes Stuart Astill

NNLOPS accurate associated HW production

We present a next-to-next-to-leading order accurate description of associated HW production consistently matched to a parton shower. The method is based on reweighting events obtained with the HW plus one jet NLO accurate calculation implemented in POWHEG, extended with the MiNLO procedure, to reproduce NNLO accurate Born distributions. Since the Born kinematics is more complex than the cases treated before, we use a parametrization of the Collins-Soper angles to reduce the number of variables required for the reweighting. We present phenomenological results at 13 TeV, with cuts suggested by the Higgs Cross Section Working Group.Comment: Minor changes, plots updated, matches the version published in JHE

An exploration of the relationships between food lifestyle and vegetable consumption

A short questionnaire was completed by 276 South Australian consumers, which examined postulated relationships between personal values, food lifestyle, demographics and their usual consumption of 24 vegetables. Principal components analyses showed that consumers\u27 vegetable consumption could be divided into several categories, most notably salad and boiled vegetables. In multiple regression analyses different sets of values and lifestyle factors predicted intakes of overall vegetable (Rsq=27 per cent), salad (16 per cent) and boiled (27 per cent) vegetables. Path analysis revealed a complex set of pathways leading from values and personal demographics through motives, perceived food attributes and cooking skills to consumption. These partly confirmed the food lifestyle model proposed by Grunert et al. The findings show that vegetable consumption has a number of contextual and cognitive antecedents but strongly suggest that other likely predictive variables require investigation.<br /

The relationship between perfectionistic self-presentation and reactions to impairment and disability following spinal cord injury

Univariate and multivariate relationships between perfectionistic self-presentation and reactions to impairment and disability following spinal cord injury were examined. One hundred and forty-four adults with spinal cord injury (M = 48.18 years, SD = 15.96) completed self-report measures. Analyses revealed that, after controlling for time since injury and gender, perfectionistic self-presentation predicted six of eight reactions, shock, depression, and internalised anger particularly strongly. In addition, at multivariate level, perfectionistic self-presentation was positively related to non-adaptive reactions and negatively related to adaptive reactions. The findings suggest that perfectionistic self-presentation may contribute to poorer psychosocial adaptation to spinal cord injury

Design Of A Low-Impact Wastewater Collection And Treatment System For Siladen Island In Indonesia

Untreated wastewater is highly destructive to human health and the environment. Choosing an island location, Pulau Siladen, which has no wastewater treatment solution, the design team embarked upon designing a centralized collection and treatment system to treat the island population\u27s wastewater, in the interests of preserving human health and the sensitive coral reefs surrounding the island. This system features a gravity sewer system, flow equalization, sequencing batch reactor, sand filter and disinfection as part of the treatment process. This project will emphasize the reduction in use of highly specialized and manufactured components, in an effort to minimize the economic, environmental and societal impacts of implementing this project. Due to the large scale of this project, it is estimated that 1 more year of work by a senior design project team will be necessary to see this design in a state ready to be implemented on the island

Bimanual reach to grasp movements after cervical spinal cord injury

Injury to the cervical spinal cord results in bilateral deficits in arm/hand function reducing functional independence and quality of life. To date little research has been undertaken to investigate control strategies of arm/hand movements following cervical spinal cord injury (cSCI). This study aimed to investigate unimanual and bimanual coordination in patients with acute cSCI using 3D kinematic analysis as they performed naturalistic reach to grasp actions with one hand, or with both hands together (symmetrical task), and compare this to the movement patterns of uninjured younger and older adults. Eighteen adults with a cSCI (mean 61.61 years) with lesions at C4-C8, with an American Spinal Injury Association (ASIA) grade B to D and 16 uninjured younger adults (mean 23.68 years) and sixteen uninjured older adults (mean 70.92 years) were recruited. Participants with a cSCI produced reach-to-grasp actions which took longer, were slower, and had longer deceleration phases than uninjured participants. These differences were exacerbated during bimanual reach-to-grasp tasks. Maximal grasp aperture was no different between groups, but reached earlier by people with cSCI. Participants with a cSCI were less synchronous than younger and older adults but all groups used the deceleration phase for error correction to end the movement in a synchronous fashion. Overall, this study suggests that after cSCI a level of bimanual coordination is retained. While there seems to be a greater reliance on feedback to produce both the reach to grasp, we observed minimal disruption of the more impaired limb on the less impaired limb. This suggests that bimanual movements should be integrated into therapy

Robust Tests for Deterministic Seasonality and Seasonal Mean Shifts

We develop tests for the presence of deterministic seasonal behaviour and seasonal mean shifts in a seasonally observed univariate time series. These tests are designed to be asymptotically robust to the order of integration of the series at both the zero and seasonal frequencies. Motivated by the approach of Hylleberg, Engle, Granger and Yoo [1990, Journal of Econometrics vol. 44, pp. 215-238], we base our approach on linear filters of the data which remove any potential unit roots at the frequencies not associated with the deterministic component(s) under test. Test statistics are constructed using the filtered data such that they have well defined limiting null distributions regardless of whether the data are either integrated or stationary at the frequency associated with the deterministic component(s) under test. In the same manner as Vogelsang [1998, Econometrica vol. 66, pp. 123-148], Bunzel and Vogelsang [2005, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics vol. 23, pp. 381-394] and Sayginsoy and Vogelsang [2011, Econometric Theory vol. 27, pp. 992-1025], we scale these statistics by a function of an auxiliary seasonal unit root statistic. This allows us to construct tests which are asymptotically robust to the order of integration of the data at both the zero and seasonal frequencies. Monte Carlo evidence suggests that our proposed tests have good finite sample size and power properties. An empirical application to U.K. GDP indicates the presence of seasonal mean shifts in the data