How Does Household Income Affect Child Personality Traits and Behaviors?

Existing research has investigated the effect of early childhood educational interventions on the child's later-life outcomes. These studies have found limited impact of supplementary programs on children's cognitive skills, but sustained effects on personality traits. We examine how a positive change in unearned household income affects children's emotional and behavioral health and personality traits. Our results indicate that there are large beneficial effects of improved household financial wellbeing on children's emotional and behavioral health and positive personality trait development. Moreover, we find that these effects are most pronounced for children who are lagging behind their peers in these measures before the intervention. Increasing household incomes reduce differences across adolescents with different levels of initial emotional-behavioral symptoms and personality traits. We also examine potential channels through which the increased household income may contribute to these positive changes. Parenting and relationships within the family appear to be an important mechanism. We also find evidence that a sub-sample of the population moves to census tracts with better income levels and educational attainment

Objective dysphonia quantification in vocal fold paralysis: comparing nonlinear with classical measures

Clinical acoustic voice recording analysis is usually performed using classical perturbation measures including jitter, shimmer and noise-to-harmonic ratios. However, restrictive mathematical limitations of these measures prevent analysis for severely dysphonic voices. Previous studies of alternative nonlinear random measures addressed wide varieties of vocal pathologies. Here, we analyze a single vocal pathology cohort, testing the performance of these alternative measures alongside classical measures.

We present voice analysis pre- and post-operatively in unilateral vocal fold paralysis (UVFP) patients and healthy controls, patients undergoing standard medialisation thyroplasty surgery, using jitter, shimmer and noise-to-harmonic ratio (NHR), and nonlinear recurrence period density entropy (RPDE), detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and correlation dimension. Systematizing the preparative editing of the recordings, we found that the novel measures were more stable and hence reliable, than the classical measures, on healthy controls.

RPDE and jitter are sensitive to improvements pre- to post-operation. Shimmer, NHR and DFA showed no significant change (p > 0.05). All measures detect statistically significant and clinically important differences between controls and patients, both treated and untreated (p < 0.001, AUC > 0.7). Pre- to post-operation, GRBAS ratings show statistically significant and clinically important improvement in overall dysphonia grade (G) (AUC = 0.946, p < 0.001).

Re-calculating AUCs from other study data, we compare these results in terms of clinical importance. We conclude that, when preparative editing is systematized, nonlinear random measures may be useful UVFP treatment effectiveness monitoring tools, and there may be applications for other forms of dysphonia.
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Exploiting Nonlinear Recurrence and Fractal Scaling Properties for Voice Disorder Detection

Background: Voice disorders affect patients profoundly, and acoustic tools can potentially measure voice function objectively. Disordered sustained vowels exhibit wide-ranging phenomena, from nearly periodic to highly complex, aperiodic vibrations, and increased "breathiness". Modelling and surrogate data studies have shown significant nonlinear and non-Gaussian random properties in these sounds. Nonetheless, existing tools are limited to analysing voices displaying near periodicity, and do not account for this inherent biophysical nonlinearity and non-Gaussian randomness, often using linear signal processing methods insensitive to these properties. They do not directly measure the two main biophysical symptoms of disorder: complex nonlinear aperiodicity, and turbulent, aeroacoustic, non-Gaussian randomness. Often these tools cannot be applied to more severe disordered voices, limiting their clinical usefulness.

Methods: This paper introduces two new tools to speech analysis: recurrence and fractal scaling, which overcome the range limitations of existing tools by addressing directly these two symptoms of disorder, together reproducing a "hoarseness" diagram. A simple bootstrapped classifier then uses these two features to distinguish normal from disordered voices.

Results: On a large database of subjects with a wide variety of voice disorders, these new techniques can distinguish normal from disordered cases, using quadratic discriminant analysis, to overall correct classification performance of 91.8% plus or minus 2.0%. The true positive classification performance is 95.4% plus or minus 3.2%, and the true negative performance is 91.5% plus or minus 2.3% (95% confidence). This is shown to outperform all combinations of the most popular classical tools.

Conclusions: Given the very large number of arbitrary parameters and computational complexity of existing techniques, these new techniques are far simpler and yet achieve clinically useful classification performance using only a basic classification technique. They do so by exploiting the inherent nonlinearity and turbulent randomness in disordered voice signals. They are widely applicable to the whole range of disordered voice phenomena by design. These new measures could therefore be used for a variety of practical clinical purposes.
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The Economic Value of Rebuilding Fisheries

The global demand for protein from seafood –- whether wild, caught or cultured, whether for direct consumption or as feed for livestock –- is high and projected to continue growing. However, the ocean's ability to meet this demand is uncertain due to either mismanagement or, in some cases, lack of management of marine fish stocks. Efforts to rebuild and recover the world's fisheries will benefit from an improved understanding of the long-term economic benefits of recovering collapsed stocks, the trajectory and duration of different rebuilding approaches, variation in the value and timing of recovery for fisheries with different economic, biological, and regulatory characteristics, including identifying which fisheries are likely to benefit most from recovery, and the benefits of avoiding collapse in the first place. These questions are addressed in this paper using a dynamic bioeconomic optimisation model that explicitly accounts for economics, management, and ecology of size-structured exploited fish populations. Within this model framework, different management options (effort controls on small-, medium-, and large-sized fish) including management that optimises economic returns over a specified planning horizon are simulated and the consequences compared. The results show considerable economic gains from rebuilding fisheries, with magnitudes varying across fisheries

A comparison of student cognitive and social achievement for handicapped and regular education students who are educated in an integrated versus a substantially separate classroom.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of integration on both regular and special needs kindergarten students in Boston Public Schools\u27 East Zone district. A comparative study of the cognitive and social achievement of kindergarten students in the pilot program and their counterparts who were not in the pilot program was conducted. In order to test the hypotheses presented the following comparisons were carried out for both instruments: Experimental group 1 versus control group 1. Integrated regular education kindergarten I students were compared with segregated regular education kindergarten students. Experimental group 2 versus control group 2. Integrated special education kindergarten I students were compared with segregated special education kindergarten I students. Experimental group 3 versus control group 3. Integrated regular education kindergarten II students were compared with segregated regular education kindergarten II students. Experimental group 4 versus control group 4. Integrated special education kindergarten II students were compared with segregated special education kindergarten II students. The kindergarten I integrated regular education experimental groups\u27 change scores were significantly higher in both cognitive and social testing. The kindergarten I integrated special education experimental groups\u27 change scores were significantly higher in cognitive testing but there was no difference on the improvement of social test scores in integrated versus segregated classrooms. The integrated group improved more than the segregated group on the test of social achievement but the significance level was not high enough to reject the null hypothesis. For kindergarten II students, regular and special education students achieved more on a test of social achievement when taught in an integrated classroom. Special education students achieved more cognitively when taught in an integrated classroom. Regular education students\u27 cognitive achievement improved when taught in an integrated setting but not to an acceptable significance in order to reject the null hypothesis. The overall outcome indicated that kindergarten students achieve more in integrated settings on tests of cognitive and social achievement. Results indicate there may be a better way to educate both regular and special education children. System wide and school based strategies may need to be developed to explore these options. (Abstract shortened with permission of author.

Saving a dog's life over a refugee- the charity marketing flaw

There is a reported decrease in public interest and engagement in charity work, with many academics blaming the use of charity appeals that use the emotions guilt and pity to drive donations. Even though the approach is heavily criticized, this technique is still prominent in advertisements. With UK citizens being statistically more likely to donate to save a dog's life over a refugee’s life, understanding how emotions may impact charitable giving may help non-profits in their marketing appeals for this important social issue. Consequently, this study examines the underlying motivations of individuals to engage in public service motivated acts through public service motivation theory (PSM) in order to impact charitable donations. Furthermore, we draws upon emotions of hope and happiness to see if it will influence the relation. Using a vignette survey based on Stanford’s 1997 public good game experiment, 328 respondents had the option to spend money on a dog rescue charity, a Syrian refugee charity and then decide amongst the two which to donate to. The study found a positive relation between PSM and monetary giving. However, the relations differed with individual PSM dimensions were taken into account across the two beneficiaries. Furthermore, when emotions were included in the moderation tests, results were contrary to what was expected. These findings suggest non-profit marketers target audiences with high levels of PSM, but that hope and happiness may not be effective emotions to generate donations

Deriving Good LDPC Convolutional Codes from LDPC Block Codes

Low-density parity-check (LDPC) convolutional codes are capable of achieving excellent performance with low encoding and decoding complexity. In this paper we discuss several graph-cover-based methods for deriving families of time-invariant and time-varying LDPC convolutional codes from LDPC block codes and show how earlier proposed LDPC convolutional code constructions can be presented within this framework. Some of the constructed convolutional codes significantly outperform the underlying LDPC block codes. We investigate some possible reasons for this "convolutional gain," and we also discuss the --- mostly moderate --- decoder cost increase that is incurred by going from LDPC block to LDPC convolutional codes.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, April 2010; revised August 2010, revised November 2010 (essentially final version). (Besides many small changes, the first and second revised versions contain corrected entries in Tables I and II.