199 research outputs found
The effective limits of agency: the role of effort in school achievement
Given the cards one is dealt in life, what can one do to improve one's prospects? And does where you come from matter for what you get out of your efforts? With an eye on exploring these general questions this paper explores the effects of changes in school effort levels on mathematics academic achievement trajectories. Findings support a substantially positive, but limited, role for effort in determining achievement growth through secondary school. Lastly, some suggestive evidence points to stratification of the effects of effort in schooling by socioeconomic status
Social inequalities in the kidney transplantation system
Although transplantation is not a traditional topic of sociological research, these realms of inquiry have much to offer each other. This dissertation adopts a sociological perspective which situates transplant candidates as participants in an allocative system with clearly defined distributive rules, while recognizing the permeation of other social institutions into this system. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to research on social disparities in the kidney transplantation system, and is intended to introduce non-specialists to this topic. Chapter 2 investigates the determinants of racial inequalities in kidney transplantation outcomes. Using administrative data, this analysis finds that racial inequalities in this system are primarily the result of differences in living donor kidney transplants, geographic residency, and the distribution of immunologically important genes. Because these inequalities are largely rooted outside the institutional confines of the kidney transplantation system, these findings illustrate the difficulty of constructing a race-neutral institution in a racially stratified society. Chapter 3 adopts a similar research design to investigate socioeconomic inequalities in kidney transplantation. Educational attainment is linked to transplant outcomes primarily through the type of transplants obtained. Higher educated candidates are advantaged by their higher rates of living donor kidney transplantation and higher probability of genetic compatibility with deceased donors, whereas lower educated persons are advantaged by their places of residence and the dynamics of immunological crossmatching. Chapter 4 uses data on the attributes of the kidney transplant waiting list and population data on the distribution of biologically-informed kinship ties and health statuses to investigate the likely distribution of suitable living donors within the kinship networks of persons on the kidney transplant waiting list. The results suggest that black-white disparities in living donor kidney transplantation are not the result of group differences in the availability of suitable donors in their kinship networks. Given the sparse number of potential donors most transplant candidates have evaluated, however, it is likely that the higher probability that white kin are suitable donors is a major determinant of racial differences in living donor kidney transplantation rates. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by discussing the primary themes of this research
The influence of three genes on whether adolescents use contraception, USA 1994–2002
In a further contribution to recent investigations of the relevance of genetic processes for demographic outcomes, we investigate genetic associations with whether adolescents use contraception. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we find that variants in the dopamine transporter gene DAT1, the dopamine receptor gene DRD2, and the monoamine oxidase gene MAOA are associated with unprotected sexual intercourse. Consistent with previous analyses of these data, the genotypes DRD2*A1/A2, DRD2*A2/A2, DAT1*9R/10R, and MAOA*2R/ are associated with higher odds of unprotected sexual intercourse than other genotypes at these loci. The DRD2 associations apply to both men and women, whereas the other associations apply to women only. These results are robust to controls for population stratification by continental ancestry, do not vary by contraceptive type, and are consistent with previous research showing that these genetic variants are associated with higher rates of impulsivity
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Boredom, Information-Seeking and Exploration
Any adaptive organism faces the choice between taking
actions with known benefits (exploitation), and sampling new
actions to check for other, more valuable opportunities
available (exploration). The latter involves information-
seeking, a drive so fundamental to learning and long-term
reward that it can reasonably be considered, through evolution
or development, to have acquired its own value, independent
of immediate reward. Similarly, behaviors that fail to yield
information may have come to be associated with aversive
experiences such as boredom, demotivation, and task
disengagement. In accord with these suppositions, we propose
that boredom reflects an adaptive signal for managing the
exploration-exploitation tradeoff, in the service of optimizing
information acquisition and long-term reward. We tested
participants in three experiments, manipulating the
information content in their immediate task environment, and
showed that increased perceptions of boredom arise in
environments in which there is little useful information, and
that higher boredom correlates with higher exploration. These
findings are the first step toward a model formalizing the
relationship between exploration, exploitation and boredom
A Novel, Contactless, Portable “Spot-Check” Device Accurately Measures Respiratory Rate
Respiratory rate (RR) is an important vital sign used in the assessment of acutely ill patients. It is also used as to predict serious deterioration in a patient's clinical condition. Convenient electronic devices exist for measurement of pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and temperature. Although devices which measure RR exist, none has entered everyday clinical practice.
We developed a contactless portable respiratory rate monitor (CPRM) and evaluated the agreement in respiratory rate measurements between existing methods and our new device. The CPRM uses thermal anemometry to measure breath signals during inspiration and expiration.
RR data were collected from 52 healthy adult volunteers using respiratory inductance plethysmography (RIP) bands (established contact method), visual counting of chest movements (established non-contact method) and the CPRM (new method), simultaneously. Two differently shaped funnel attachments were evaluated for each volunteer.
Data showed good agreement between measurements from the CPRM and the gold standard RIP, with intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC): 0.836, mean difference 0.46 and 95% limits of agreement of -5.90 to 6.83. When separate air inlet funnels of the CPRM were analysed, stronger agreement was seen with an elliptical air inlet; ICC 0.908, mean difference 0.37 with 95% limits of agreement -4.35 to 5.08.
A contactless device for accurately and quickly measuring respiratory rate will be an important triage tool in the clinical assessment of patients. More testing is needed to explore the reasons for outlying measurements and to evaluate in the clinical setting
Genetic Sensitivity to Peer Behaviors: 5HTTLPR, Smoking, and Alcohol Consumption
We investigate whether the serotonin transporter-linked polymorphic region (5HTTLPR), a gene associated with environmental sensitivity, moderates the association between smoking and drinking patterns at adolescents' schools and their corresponding risk for smoking and drinking themselves. Drawing on the school-based design of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health in conjunction with molecular genetic data for roughly 15,000 respondents (including over 2,000 sibling pairs), we show that adolescents smoke more cigarettes and consume more alcohol when attending schools with elevated rates of tobacco and alcohol use. More important, an individual's susceptibility to school-level patterns of smoking or drinking is conditional on the number of short alleles he or she has in 5HTTLPR. Overall, the findings demonstrate the utility of the differential susceptibility framework for medical sociology by suggesting that health behaviors reflect interactions between genetic factors and the prevalence of these behaviors in a person's context
Nurture net of nature: Re-evaluating the role of shared environments in academic achievement and verbal intelligence
Prominent authors in the behavioral genetics tradition have long argued that shared environments do not meaningfully shape intelligence and academic achievement. However, we argue that these conclusions are erroneous due to large violations of the additivity assumption underlying behavioral genetics methods – that sources of genetic and shared and nonshared environmental variance are independent and non-interactive. This is compounded in some cases by the theoretical equation of the effective and objective environments, where the former is defined by whether siblings are made more or less similar, and the latter by whether siblings are equally subject to the environmental characteristic in question. Using monozygotic twin fixed effects models, which compare outcomes among genetically identical pairs, we show that many characteristics of objectively shared environments significantly moderate the effects of nonshared environments on adolescent academic achievement and verbal intelligence, violating the additivity assumption of behavioral genetic methods. Importantly, these effects would be categorized as nonshared environmental influences in standard twin models despite their roots in shared environments. These findings should encourage caution among those who claim that the frequently trivial variance attributed to shared environments in behavioral genetic models means that families, schools, and neighborhoods do not meaningfully influence these outcomes
Siblings, friends, course-mates, club-mates: How adolescent health behavior homophily varies by race, class, gender, and health status
Many unhealthy behaviors develop during adolescence, and these behaviors can have fundamental consequences for health and mortality in adulthood. Social network structure and the degree of homophily in a network affect how health behaviors and innovations are spread. However, the degree of health behavior homophily across different social ties and within subpopulations is unknown. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by using a novel regression model to document the degree of homophily across various relationship types and subpopulations for behaviors of interest that are related to health outcomes. These patterns in health behavior homophily have implications for which behaviors and ties should be the subjects of future research and for predicting how homophily may shape health programs focused on specific subpopulations (gender, race, class, health status) or a specific social context (families, peer groups, classrooms, or school activities)
Disentangling Abstraction from Statistical Pattern Matching in Human and Machine Learning
The ability to acquire abstract knowledge is a hallmark of human intelligence
and is believed by many to be one of the core differences between humans and
neural network models. Agents can be endowed with an inductive bias towards
abstraction through meta-learning, where they are trained on a distribution of
tasks that share some abstract structure that can be learned and applied.
However, because neural networks are hard to interpret, it can be difficult to
tell whether agents have learned the underlying abstraction, or alternatively
statistical patterns that are characteristic of that abstraction. In this work,
we compare the performance of humans and agents in a meta-reinforcement
learning paradigm in which tasks are generated from abstract rules. We define a
novel methodology for building "task metamers" that closely match the
statistics of the abstract tasks but use a different underlying generative
process, and evaluate performance on both abstract and metamer tasks. In our
first set of experiments, we found that humans perform better at abstract tasks
than metamer tasks whereas a widely-used meta-reinforcement learning agent
performs worse on the abstract tasks than the matched metamers. In a second set
of experiments, we base the tasks on abstractions derived directly from
empirically identified human priors. We utilize the same procedure to generate
corresponding metamer tasks, and see the same double dissociation between
humans and agents. This work provides a foundation for characterizing
differences between humans and machine learning that can be used in future work
towards developing machines with human-like behavior
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