The total marital fertility rate and its extensions

What we will call the age-based TMFR is computed conventionally by adding up age-specific marital fertility rates in the hope of estimating the number of children ever born to a woman who is married throughout her childbearing years. Demographers have long been strongly skeptical about this quantity because it normally indicates implausibly many children. Our analysis of data from the Romanian GGS confirms this finding, and we propose an alternative duration-based TMFR computed in the spirit of parity-progression ratios. At the same time, we extend the method to cover any type of living arrangement (cohabitation, marriage, non-partnered arrangement, and so on). Because each resulting total union-type fertility rate (TUFR) explicitly accounts for the living arrangement, it improves on the conventional total fertility rate (TFR), which does not. We embed the investigation in an event-history analysis with fixed and time-varying control covariates and find patterns of relative risks for such variables that reveal interesting features of childbearing behavior in the Romanian data, which we use to illustrate the method. In most cases, these patterns are quite robust against model re-specification, including the shift from the age-based to the duration-based approach. Since, the number of female respondents is “only” about 6,000 (minus records that cannot be used for the current purpose) in a normal single-round GGS, there is considerable inherent random variation in the data set, but we show that simple few-term moving average graduation suffices to overcome this problem.Le taux de fécondité totale en mariage (TFTM) selon l’âge est calculé par convention en sommant les taux de fécondité par âge dans le mariage en vue d’obtenir une estimation du nombre total d’enfants nés d’une femme qui aurait été mariée tout au long de sa vie reproductive. Depuis longtemps les démographes considèrent cette mesure avec scepticisme car elle aboutit souvent à un nombre total d’enfants beaucoup trop élevé. Notre analyse des données du EGG roumain confirme cette constatation et nous proposons dès lors, comme alternative, un TFTM selon la durée, dans l’esprit des probabilités d’agrandissement des familles. Par ailleurs, nous étendons la méthode à tous types de situation de couple (cohabitation, mariage, sans partenaire, etc.). Comme le taux de fécondité totale selon le type d’union (TFTU) tient compte explicitement de la situation de couple, il doit être préféré au TFTM qui ne tient pas compte de ce critère. Notre étude est conduite dans le cadre d’une analyse biographique tenant compte de covariables fixes ou dépendantes du temps. Les résultats de l’analyse nous permettent de découvrir des caractéristiques intéressantes de la fécondité roumaine, que nous utilisons pour illustrer la méthode. Dans la plupart des cas, ces caractéristiques sont robustes face à une re-spécification du modèle, notamment le passage de l’approche basée sur l’âge à l’approche tenant compte de la durée. Comme le nombre de répondants à l’enquête EGG à un passage n’est ‘que’ de l’ordre de 6000 (moins les cas qui n’ont pas pu être utilisés pour le présent travail), il existe une fluctuation aléatoire importante dans les données. Nous montrons toutefois qu’un lissage par moyenne mobile à quelques termes seulement nous permet de surmonter cette difficulté

Traces of the Second Demographic Transition in Four Selected Countries in Central and Eastern Europe: Union Formation as a Demographic Manifestation

Using data from the first round of the national Gender and Generations Surveys of Russia, Romania, and Bulgaria, and from a similar survey of Hungary, which were all collected in recent years, we study rates of entry into marital and non-marital unions. We have used elements from the narrative of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) as a vehicle to give our analysis of the data from the four countries some coherence, and find what can be traces of the SDT in these countries. The details vary by country; in particular, latter-day developments in union formation patterns did not start at the same time in all the countries, but in our assessment it began everywhere before communism fell, that is, before the societal transition to a market economy got underway in 1990

Damage control surgery in abdominal traumatology. Three cases report

Clinica Chirurgie II, Spitalul Clinic Judeţean de Urgenţă MureşScopul principal al studiului clinic este de a accentua importanța chirurgiei de control lezional în traumele majore abdominale. Cu toate că nu am realizat un studiu retrospectiv al experienţei noastre în domeniu, am considerat util să prezentăm trei situaţii clinice în care pentru leziuni diferite chirurgia de control lezional a fost urmată de rezultate favorabile, atrăgând atenția asupra indicațiilor, criteriilor clinice, paraclinice și operatorii care determină utilizarea metodei.The main purpose of this clinical study is to emphasize the importance of the damage control surgery in major abdominal trauma. Although we do not made a statistical retrospective analysis of our experience in this issue, we describe here three of our cases where we performed damage control surgery with good postoperative results, drawing attention upon indications, clinical, paraclinical and operative criteria which indicate the method

Glassy carbon electrode modified with graphene oxide and gold nanoparticles for ascorbic acid detection

Glassy carbon electrodes modified with graphene oxide (GO), gold nanoparticles (AuNP) and methylene blue (MB) were produced by drop casting method for ascorbic acid (AA) determination. Nafion was used as a polymeric immobilizing matrix. The GCE/GO-AuNP-MB-Nafion and GCE/GO-AuNP-Nafion electrodes were characterized by using cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to investigate electrocatalytic effect, stability and reproductibility. After optimization, the analytical parameters of the modified electrodes were determined by amperometry. The limit of detection for ascorbic acid at GCE/GO-AuNP-Nafion modified electrode was 2.4 µM and the linear domain from 5 to 50 µM. The electrodes showed significant electrocatalytic effect with good stability and reproductibility

Investigation of Corrosion Protection by Chemically Applied Patina on Artistic Bronzes

Increase of pollution in recent years, requires monitoring of the corrosion behavior of artistic bronzes coated with syntetic patina, in urban atmosphere. This present work aims to investigate the corrosion rezistance of various artificial patina currently used in bronze sculpture. Electrochemical and microscopic methods were used to investigate the protective effect of several chemically produced patinas on artistic bronze

Visual Exploration and Object Recognition by Lattice Deformation

Mechanisms of explicit object recognition are often difficult to investigate and require stimuli with controlled features whose expression can be manipulated in a precise quantitative fashion. Here, we developed a novel method (called “Dots”), for generating visual stimuli, which is based on the progressive deformation of a regular lattice of dots, driven by local contour information from images of objects. By applying progressively larger deformation to the lattice, the latter conveys progressively more information about the target object. Stimuli generated with the presented method enable a precise control of object-related information content while preserving low-level image statistics, globally, and affecting them only little, locally. We show that such stimuli are useful for investigating object recognition under a naturalistic setting – free visual exploration – enabling a clear dissociation between object detection and explicit recognition. Using the introduced stimuli, we show that top-down modulation induced by previous exposure to target objects can greatly influence perceptual decisions, lowering perceptual thresholds not only for object recognition but also for object detection (visual hysteresis). Visual hysteresis is target-specific, its expression and magnitude depending on the identity of individual objects. Relying on the particular features of dot stimuli and on eye-tracking measurements, we further demonstrate that top-down processes guide visual exploration, controlling how visual information is integrated by successive fixations. Prior knowledge about objects can guide saccades/fixations to sample locations that are supposed to be highly informative, even when the actual information is missing from those locations in the stimulus. The duration of individual fixations is modulated by the novelty and difficulty of the stimulus, likely reflecting cognitive demand

Mean ergodicity and spectrum of the Cesàro operator on weighted c0 spaces

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