Maintaining (locus of) control? : Assessing the impact of locus of control on education decisions and wages

This paper establishes that individuals with an internal locus of control, i.e., who believe that reinforcement in life comes from their own actions instead of being determined by luck or destiny, earn higher wages. However, this positive effect only translates into labor income via the channel of education. Factor structure models are implemented on an augmented data set coming from two different samples. By so doing, we are able to correct for potential biases that arise due to reverse causality and spurious correlation, and to investigate the impact of premarket locus of control on later outcomes

One thousand plant transcriptomes and the phylogenomics of green plants

Abstract: Green plants (Viridiplantae) include around 450,000–500,000 species1, 2 of great diversity and have important roles in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Here, as part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, we sequenced the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span the diversity of plants in a broad sense (Archaeplastida), including green plants (Viridiplantae), glaucophytes (Glaucophyta) and red algae (Rhodophyta). Our analysis provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining the evolution of green plants. Most inferred species relationships are well supported across multiple species tree and supermatrix analyses, but discordance among plastid and nuclear gene trees at a few important nodes highlights the complexity of plant genome evolution, including polyploidy, periods of rapid speciation, and extinction. Incomplete sorting of ancestral variation, polyploidization and massive expansions of gene families punctuate the evolutionary history of green plants. Notably, we find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of green plants, land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications are inferred to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns. The increasing availability of high-quality plant genome sequences and advances in functional genomics are enabling research on genome evolution across the green tree of life

Locus of control and its intergenerational implications forearly childhood skill formation

This paper builds upon Cunha’s (2015) subjective rationality model in which parents have a subjective belief about the impact of their investment on the early skill formation of their children. We propose that this subjective belief is determined in part by locus of control (LOC), i.e., the extent to which individuals believe that their actions can influence future outcomes. Consistent with the theory, we show that maternal LOC measured at the 12th week of gestation strongly predicts maternal attitudes towards parenting style, maternal time investments, as well as early and late cognitive outcomes. We also utilize the variation in inputs and outputs by maternal LOC to help improve the specification typically used in the estimation of skill production function parameters

Effects of Applied Electrical Field on Biochemical Parameters and Erythrocytes of Rats

The purpose of this study was to determine whether there was any effect of some biochemical parameters and erythrocyte carbonic anhydrase on electric field stimulation in female rat. ...

Unsteady flow around two square cylinders in staggered arrangements

Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Turkey, 19-21 July, 2010.In this study, the flow around two staggered square cylinders, placed in a uniform flow field, has been studied. The numerical simulations have been performed by use of a commercial CFD software Fluent. The Reynolds number, defined as a function of cylinder width D, has been chosen as 100 and 200. In the simulations, the dimensionless distance P/D, between the cylinder centers was changed from 2 to 5, and the incidence angle 8 also has been changed from 0' to 90' by 25' increments. In order to evaluate the flow field, isovorticity curves were obtained at different values of dimensionless distance P/D and incidence angle 8. The deviation of the mean drag coefficients and of the square root values of the lift coefficient with P/D and 8 also determined. The power spectrums of the lift coefficient have been obtained for different flow fields.ksb201

Supplementary Material for: Progression of Coronary Artery Calcification in Living Kidney Donors: A Follow-Up Study

<p><b><i>Background:</i></b> Data on the long-term mortality and morbidity of living kidney donors are scarce. In the general population, coronary artery calcification (CAC) and progression of CAC are predictors of future cardiac risk. We conducted a study to determine the progression of CAC in renal transplant donors. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We used multidetector computed tomography to examine CAC in 75 former renal transplant donors. A baseline and a follow-up scan were performed and changes in CAC scores were evaluated in each subject individually to calculate the incidence of CAC progression. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Baseline CAC prevalence was 16% and the mean CAC score was 5.3 ± 25.8. At the follow-up scan that was performed after an average of 4.8 ± 0.3 years, CAC prevalence increased to 72% and the mean CAC score to 12.5 ± 23.4. Progression of the individual CAC score was found between 18.7 and 26.7%, depending on the method used to define progression. In patients with baseline CAC, the mean annualized rate of CAC progression was 2.1. Presence of hypertension, high systolic blood pressure and an increase in BMI were the determinants of CAC progression. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> The rate of CAC progression does not seem to be high in carefully selected donors.</p