Estimating Net Child Care Price Elasticities of Partnered Women With Pre-School Children Using a Discrete Structural Labour Supply-Child Care Model

The purpose of this paper is to improve our understanding of the relationship between child care price and women's labour supply. We specify and estimate a discrete, structural model of the joint household decision over women's labour supply and child care demand. Parents care about the well-being and development of their children and we capture this by including child care directly in household utility. Our model improves on previous papers in that we allow formal child care to be used for reasons other than freeing up time for mothers to work (such as child development) and we allow mothers’ work hours to exceed formal child care hours. As informal and paternal care are important features of the data, this second relaxation of previous hour constraints is particularly important. We estimate the model using data from 2005 to 2007 from the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. We find that on average a one percent increase in the net price of child care leads to a decrease in hours of labour provided by partnered women of 0.10 per cent and a decrease in the employment rate of 0.06 per cent. These estimates are statistically significant. Furthermore, we find that labour supply responses are larger for women with lower wages, less education, and lower income.Child care demand; child care price; women's labour supply; elasticities; discrete choice model

Problematizing Critical Pedagogy

This article presents the results from a qualitative research study that examined the ways in which 17 self-identified critical pedagogues actually define critical pedagogy and their identification of its central aims and purposes. This article problematizes the overlapping and contradictory definitions of critical pedagogy and its historical roots. It critically examines the ways in which professors explicitly communicate the “critical” or justice-oriented intent of critical pedagogy

Partnered women’s labour supply and child care costs in Australia: measurement error and the child care price

We show that measurement error in the constructed price of child care can explain why previous Australian studies have found partnered women’s labour supply to be unresponsive to child care prices. Through improved data and improved construction of the child care price variable, we find child care price elasticities that are statistically significant, negative and in line with elasticities found in other developed countries.Labour supply; child care; local area effects

Use of Acellular Dermal Matrix to Prevent Recurrence of Radioulnar Heterotopic Ossification.

Radioulnar heterotopic ossification is a rare occurrence found in approximately 2% of all forearm injuries. Treatment is complicated by relatively high recurrence rates. Strategies to decrease recurrence have included the range of motion exercises and the interposition of inert or autogenous barriers. We report on the interposition of human acellular dermal matrix (ADM) for the treatment of distal radioulnar synostosis. We report a novel technique for the treatment of distal radioulnar heterotopic ossification. After resection, ADM in a cigar-shaped construct is interposed between the radius and ulna. Patients are followed clinically and radiographically. Two female patients were treated. Both patients had significant improvement in the range of motion in supination and pronation of the affected wrist postoperatively with an average follow-up of 36 months. There were no postoperative complications. Neither patient had recurrent disease. We describe the successful treatment of 2 patients with distal radioulnar heterotopic ossification with the use of human ADM. The ADM provides a barrier between the radius and ulna to prevent the recurrent formation of heterotopic ossification. ADM usage results in no donor site morbidity and is theoretically more resistant to infection when compared with nonbiologic barriers such as silicone and Integra. This technique is a simple, safe, and effective way to treat and prevent the recurrence of radioulnar heterotopic ossification

Electricity Demand Forecasting with Hybrid Statistical and Machine Learning Algorithms: Case Study of Ukraine

This article presents a novel hybrid approach using statistics and machine learning to forecast the national demand of electricity. As investment and operation of future energy systems require long-term electricity demand forecasts with hourly resolution, our mathematical model fills a gap in energy forecasting. The proposed methodology was constructed using hourly data from Ukraine's electricity consumption ranging from 2013 to 2020. To this end, we analysed the underlying structure of the hourly, daily and yearly time series of electricity consumption. The long-term yearly trend is evaluated using macroeconomic regression analysis. The mid-term model integrates temperature and calendar regressors to describe the underlying structure, and combines ARIMA and LSTM ``black-box'' pattern-based approaches to describe the error term. The short-term model captures the hourly seasonality through calendar regressors and multiple ARMA models for the residual. Results show that the best forecasting model is composed by combining multiple regression models and a LSTM hybrid model for residual prediction. Our hybrid model is very effective at forecasting long-term electricity consumption on an hourly resolution. In two years of out-of-sample forecasts with 17520 timesteps, it is shown to be within 96.83 \% accuracy.Comment: 31 pages, 13 figures, submitted to Applied Energ

Comparing costs for different conservation strategies of garlic (Allium sativum L.) germplasm in genebanks

The maintenance of plant genetic resources in living plant collections (genebanks) causes costs due to employment of staff, usage of buildings, equipment and consumables. Since this is especially challenging in vegetatively propagated material, studies were performed for the case of garlic, which is one of the major vegetatively maintained crops in the genebank of IPK Gatersleben. Data were recorded to compare various scenarios of the main strategies field maintenance and cryopreservation. A spreadsheet tool was developed to be used for cost assessment and for drawing conclusions concerning the most effective way of maintenance. Field culture is cheaper in the short term, whereas after a break-even point cryopreservation becomes the more efficient storage method in the long term. This break-even point depends on the particular scenario, which is determined by various factors such as field and in vitro multiplication rates of various genotypes, presence of bulbils in a part of the genepool, the sample size of the accessions as well as the number of stored accessions in cryopreservation. The comparative discussion is exemplified for a 1-year field rotation versus cryopreservation using either in vitro plantlets or a combination of bulbils and unripe inflorescence bases as organ sources. For the more expensive use of in vitro plants cryopreservation becomes less costly than field culture only after 13 years, whereas this is the case already after 8-9 years when using a combination of bulbils in winter and inflorescence bases in summer

Talking topically to the artificial agent Max

Breuing A, Waltinger U, Wachsmuth I. Talking topically to the artificial agent Max. In: Postersession at the Interdisciplinary College. Sankt Augustin, Germany; 2011: 488

Interfacing virtual agents with collaborative knowledge: Open domain question answering using Wikipedia-based topic models

Waltinger U, Breuing A, Wachsmuth I. Interfacing virtual agents with collaborative knowledge: Open domain question answering using Wikipedia-based topic models. In: Walsh T, ed. Proceedings of the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI–11). Barcelona, Spain: AAAI Press; 2011: 1896-1902.This paper is concerned with the use of conversational agents as an interaction paradigm for accessing open domain encyclopedic knowledge by means of Wikipedia. More precisely, we describe a dialog-based question answering system for German which utilizes Wikipedia-based topic models as a reference point for context detection and answer prediction. We investigate two different perspectives to the task of interfacing virtual agents with collaborative knowledge. First, we exploit the use of Wikipedia categories as a basis for identifying the broader topic of a spoken utterance. Second, we describe how to enhance the conversational behavior of the virtual agent by means of a Wikipedia-based question answering component which incorporates the question topic. At large, our approach identifies topic-related focus terms of a user’s question, which are subsequently mapped onto a category taxonomy. Thus, we utilize the taxonomy as a reference point to derive topic labels for a user’s question. The employed topic model is thereby based on explicitly given concepts as represented by the document and category structure of the Wikipedia knowledge base. Identified topic categories are subsequently combined with different linguistic filtering methods to improve answer candidate retrieval and reranking. Results show that the topic model approach contributes to an enhancement of the conversational behavior of virtual agents

Talking topically to artificial dialog partners: Emulating humanlike topic awareness in a virtual agent

Breuing A, Wachsmuth I. Talking topically to artificial dialog partners: Emulating humanlike topic awareness in a virtual agent. In: Filipe J, Fred A, eds. Agents and Artificial Intelligence: 4th International Conference, ICAART 2012, Vilamoura, Portugal, February 6-8, 2012. Revised Selected Papers. Communications in Computer and Information Science. Vol 358. Berlin: Springer; 2013: 392-406.During dialog, humans are able to track ongoing topics, to detect topical shifts, to refer to topics via labels, and to decide on the appropriateness of potential dialog topics. As a result, they interactionally produce coherent sequences of spoken utterances assigning a thematic structure to the whole conversation. Accordingly, an artificial agent that is intended to engage in natural and sophisticated human-agent dialogs should be endowed with similar conversational abilities. This paper presents how to enable topically coherent conversations between humans and interactive systems by emulating humanlike topic awareness in the virtual agent Max. Therefore, we firstly realized automatic topic detection and tracking on the basis of contextual knowledge provided by Wikipedia and secondly adapted the agent’s conversational behavior by means of the gained topic information. As a result, we contribute to improve human-agent dialogs by enabling topical talk between human and artificial interlocutors. This paper is a revised and extended version of A. Breuing and I. Wachsmuth. Let’s talk topically with artificial agents! providing agents with humanlike topic awareness in everyday dialog situations. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), pages 62–71, 2012