The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment.

Job loss is an involuntary disruptive life event with a far-reaching impact on workers' life trajectories. Its incidence among growing segments of the workforce, alongside the recent era of severe economic upheaval, has increased attention to the effects of job loss and unemployment. As a relatively exogenous labor market shock, the study of displacement enables robust estimates of associations between socioeconomic circumstances and life outcomes. Research suggests that displacement is associated with subsequent unemployment, long-term earnings losses, and lower job quality; declines in psychological and physical well-being; loss of psychosocial assets; social withdrawal; family disruption; and lower levels of children's attainment and well-being. While reemployment mitigates some of the negative effects of job loss, it does not eliminate them. Contexts of widespread unemployment, although associated with larger economic losses, lessen the social-psychological impact of job loss. Future research should attend more fully to how the economic and social-psychological effects of displacement intersect and extend beyond displaced workers themselves

Job displacement among single mothers: effects on children's outcomes in young adulthood.

Given the recent era of economic upheaval, studying the effects of job displacement has seldom been so timely and consequential. Despite a large literature associating displacement with worker well-being, relatively few studies focus on the effects of parental displacement on child well-being, and fewer still focus on implications for children of single-parent households. Moreover, notwithstanding a large literature on the relationship between single motherhood and children's outcomes, research on intergenerational effects of involuntary employment separations among single mothers is limited. Using 30 years of nationally representative panel data and propensity score matching methods, the authors find significant negative effects of job displacement among single mothers on children's educational attainment and social-psychological well-being in young adulthood. Effects are concentrated among older children and children whose mothers had a low likelihood of displacement, suggesting an important role for social stigma and relative deprivation in the effects of socioeconomic shocks on child well-being

Teachers of mathematics teach mathematics differently : a case study of two teachers

This thesis investigates the different approaches adopted by two teachers for teaching mathematical content at the upper primary level of education. Questions have been raised by researchers about the impact teachers\u27 philosophical background may have on their perception of how mathematics should be taught. Similarly questions have been asked about the role of content in mathematics education in relation to the process of education. The two teachers held different beliefs about what they were doing when they were teaching mathematics and why they were teaching that way. Their methodological emphases were different; one could be described as being more learner-centred and the other as more content-centred. This case study research analysed classroom observations, and interviews with the teachers and the students, collected over a twelve month period. The results indicated a difference in perception being expressed by the students in each class, about the mathematics they were being taught and its function in their own lives. The outcomes of this study were concerned with the impact of each teaching methodology. The qualitative nature of the research provides readers with data which may help them to make informed choices about approaches to teaching mathematics. Most importantly this study highlights the factors which may have an impact on how a teacher elects and/or feels constrained to deliver set mathematics curriculum

Parental divorce is not uniformly disruptive to children's educational attainment.

Children whose parents divorce tend to have worse educational outcomes than children whose parents stay married. However, not all children respond identically to their parents divorcing. We focus on how the impact of parental divorce on children's education varies by how likely or unlikely divorce was for those parents. We find a significant negative effect of parental divorce on educational attainment, particularly college attendance and completion, among children whose parents were unlikely to divorce. Families expecting marital stability, unprepared for disruption, may experience considerable adjustment difficulties when divorce occurs, leading to negative outcomes for children. By contrast, we find no effect of parental divorce among children whose parents were likely to divorce. Children of high-risk marriages, who face many social disadvantages over childhood irrespective of parental marital status, may anticipate or otherwise accommodate to the dissolution of their parents' marriage. Our results suggest that family disruption does not uniformly disrupt children's attainment

Effect of high and low glycaemic index recovery diets on intramuscular lipid oxidation during aerobic exercise

Intramyocellular lipid (IMCL) and plasma NEFA are important skeletal muscle fuel sources. By raising blood insulin concentrations, carbohydrate ingestion inhibits lypolysis and reduces circulating NEFA. We hypothesised that differences in the postprandial glycaemic and insulin response to carbohydrates (i.e. glycaemic index; GI) could alter NEFA availability and IMCL use during subsequent exercise. Endurance-trained individuals (n 7) cycled for 90 min at 70 % V?O2peak and then consumed either high GI (HGI) or low GI (LGI) meals over the following 12 h. The following day after an overnight fast, the 90 min cycle was repeated. IMCL content of the vastus lateralis was quantified using magnetic resonance spectroscopy before and after exercise. Blood samples were collected at 15 min intervals throughout exercise and analysed for NEFA, glycerol, glucose, insulin, and lactate. Substrate oxidation was calculated from expired air samples. The 90 min cycle resulted in >2-fold greater reduction in IMCL in the HGI trial (3·5 (sem 1·0) mm/kg wet weight) than the LGI trial (1·6 (sem 0·3) mm/kg wet weight, P < 0·05). During exercise, NEFA availability was reduced in the HGI trial compared to the LGI trial (area under curve 2·36 (sem 0·14) mEq/l per h v. 3·14 (sem 0·28) mEq/l per h, P < 0·05 respectively). No other differences were significant. The findings suggest that HGI carbohydrates reduce NEFA availability during exercise and increase reliance on IMCL as a substrate source during moderate intensity exercise

El docente lector como formador de ciudadanos

El presente es un estudio cualitativo por teorización, que discurre desde el planteamiento del problema de la lectura como recurso básico para la formación de ciudadanos a través de la educación. Se parte de la definición de la capacidad lectora, seguida de la revisión de las características generales del cerebro lector propuestas por Stalisnas Dehaene (2014), así como las revoluciones en los materiales y dispositivos utilizados para la escritura, además de los cambios en las formas de leer, desde las tablillas sumerias hasta las tecnologías digitales. Se plantea el proceso de Educación para el Desarrollo y los rasgos distintivos de la ciudadanía digital, que son: inmediatez en la producción, transmisión y recepción de mensajes; la interactividad entre receptor y productor; la multiautoría, que da nacimiento a “los prosumidores”; la accesibilidad del medio; la libertad de expresión; la democratización del acceso y la apropiación de un espacio público. Todo esto permite contextualizar las nuevas formas de lectura y los nuevos perfiles de lectores, así como generar los espacios virtuales de lectura en donde se forman comunidades de diálogo e intercambio. El estudio llega hasta los docentes y sus biografías lectoras, las cuales definen, en gran medida, su competencia para fomentar la lectura entre sus estudiantes y su capacidad de movilizarlos hacia la responsabilidad ciudadana a través de la lectura.// The present is a qualitative study by theorizing, from the approach of the problem of reading as a basic resource for the formation of citizens through educa¬tion. It starts from the definition of the reading capacity, followed by the revision of the general characteristics of the reading brain proposed by Stalisnas Dehaene (2014), as well as the revolutions in the materials and devices used for the writing, besides the changes in the form of reading, from Sumerian tablets to digital tech¬nologies. The process of Education for Development and the distinctive features of digital citizenship are presented, which are: immediacy in the production, transmission and reception of messages; interactivity between receiver and producer; the multi-authoritar¬ian, which gives birth to “the prosumers”; the acces¬sibility of the environment; freedom of expression; the democratization of access and the appropriation of a public space. All this allows contextualizing new forms of reading and new profiles of readers, as well as the generation of virtual reading spaces where communi¬ties of dialogue and exchange are formed. The study reaches the teachers and their reading biographies, which largely define their competence to encourage reading among their students and their ability to mobi¬lize them towards citizen responsibility through reading

Uncovering Sociological Effect Heterogeneity using Machine Learning

Individuals do not respond uniformly to treatments, events, or interventions. Sociologists routinely partition samples into subgroups to explore how the effects of treatments vary by covariates like race, gender, and socioeconomic status. In so doing, analysts determine the key subpopulations based on theoretical priors. Data-driven discoveries are also routine, yet the analyses by which sociologists typically go about them are problematic and seldom move us beyond our expectations, and biases, to explore new meaningful subgroups. Emerging machine learning methods allow researchers to explore sources of variation that they may not have previously considered, or envisaged. In this paper, we use causal trees to recursively partition the sample and uncover sources of treatment effect heterogeneity. We use honest estimation, splitting the sample into a training sample to grow the tree and an estimation sample to estimate leaf-specific effects. Assessing a central topic in the social inequality literature, college effects on wages, we compare what we learn from conventional approaches for exploring variation in effects to causal trees. Given our use of observational data, we use leaf-specific matching and sensitivity analyses to address confounding and offer interpretations of effects based on observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We encourage researchers to follow similar practices in their work on variation in sociological effects

The Carnivore Connection Hypothesis: Revisited

The “Carnivore Connection” hypothesizes that, during human evolution, a scarcity of dietary carbohydrate in diets with low plant : animal subsistence ratios led to insulin resistance providing a survival and reproductive advantage with selection of genes for insulin resistance. The selection pressure was relaxed at the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution when large quantities of cereals first entered human diets. The “Carnivore Connection” explains the high prevalence of intrinsic insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes in populations that transition rapidly from traditional diets with a low-glycemic load, to high-carbohydrate, high-glycemic index diets that characterize modern diets. Selection pressure has been relaxed longest in European populations, explaining a lower prevalence of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes, despite recent exposure to famine and food scarcity. Increasing obesity and habitual consumption of high-glycemic-load diets worsens insulin resistance and increases the risk of type 2 diabetes in all populations