Small area estimation of general parameters with application to poverty indicators: A hierarchical Bayes approach

Poverty maps are used to aid important political decisions such as allocation of development funds by governments and international organizations. Those decisions should be based on the most accurate poverty figures. However, often reliable poverty figures are not available at fine geographical levels or for particular risk population subgroups due to the sample size limitation of current national surveys. These surveys cannot cover adequately all the desired areas or population subgroups and, therefore, models relating the different areas are needed to 'borrow strength" from area to area. In particular, the Spanish Survey on Income and Living Conditions (SILC) produces national poverty estimates but cannot provide poverty estimates by Spanish provinces due to the poor precision of direct estimates, which use only the province specific data. It also raises the ethical question of whether poverty is more severe for women than for men in a given province. We develop a hierarchical Bayes (HB) approach for poverty mapping in Spanish provinces by gender that overcomes the small province sample size problem of the SILC. The proposed approach has a wide scope of application because it can be used to estimate general nonlinear parameters. We use a Bayesian version of the nested error regression model in which Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures and the convergence monitoring therein are avoided. A simulation study reveals good frequentist properties of the HB approach. The resulting poverty maps indicate that poverty, both in frequency and intensity, is localized mostly in the southern and western provinces and it is more acute for women than for men in most of the provinces.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/13-AOAS702 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Bacterial Active Community Cycling in Response to Solar Radiation and Their Influence on Nutrient Changes in a High-Altitude Wetland

Indexación: Web of Science; Scopus.Microbial communities inhabiting high-altitude spring ecosystems are subjected to extreme changes in solar irradiance and temperature throughout the diel cycle. Here, using 16S rRNA gene tag pyrosequencing (cDNA) we determined the composition of actively transcribing bacteria from spring waters experimentally exposed through the day (morning, noon, and afternoon) to variable levels of solar radiation and light quality, and evaluated their influence on nutrient recycling. Solar irradiance, temperature, and changes in nutrient dynamics were associated with changes in the active bacterial community structure, predominantly by Cyanobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, Proteobacteria, and 35 other Phyla, including the recently described Candidate Phyla Radiation (e.g., Parcubacteria, Gracilibacteria, OP3, TM6, SR1). Diversity increased at noon, when the highest irradiances were measured (3.3-3.9 H', 1125 W m(-2)) compared to morning and afternoon (0.6-2.8 H'). This shift was associated with a decrease in the contribution to pyrolibraries by Cyanobacteria and an increase of Proteobacteria and other initially low frequently and rare bacteria phyla (< 0.5%) in the pyrolibraries. A potential increase in the activity of Cyanobacteria and other phototrophic groups, e.g., Rhodobacterales, was observed and associated with UVR, suggesting the presence of photo activated repair mechanisms to resist high levels of solar radiation. In addition, the percentage contribution of cyanobacterial sequences in the afternoon was similar to those recorded in the morning. The shifts in the contribution by Cyanobacteria also influenced the rate of change in nitrate, nitrite, and phosphate, highlighted by a high level of nitrate accumulation during hours of high radiation and temperature associated with nitrifying bacteria activity. We did not detect ammonia or nitrite oxidizing bacteria in situ, but both functional groups (Nitrosomona and Nitrospira) appeared mainly in pyrolibraries generated from dark incubations. In total, our results reveal that both the structure and the diversity of the active bacteria community was extremely dynamic through the day, and showed marked shifts in composition that influenced nutrient recycling, highlighting how abiotic variation affects potential ecosystem functioning.http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fmicb.2016.01823/ful

Normalizing the Topic of Menstruation through the #Prideintheperiod Campaign

Since shame is embedded in the discourse of menstruation, the researcher chose to naturalize the conversation of menstruation since it is an innate bodily function that menstruators should not be embarrassed about. Granted the improper sex education and the continuous genderization of menstruation promoted societal menstrual shame, the researcher found that both genders needed to be re-educated on menstrual stigma and be included in menstruation conversations. Through a needs assessment, the researcher created five campaign messages that allowed participants to see varying perspectives on periods. Both a questionnaire and a survey evaluated if the campaign changed the participants’ perceptions of menstruation. The campaign results vocalized that participants previously viewed menstruation as ‘embarrassing’ based on being uninformed of the other gender’s relationship to menstruation. To normalize menstruation, participants stressed that education and conversations need to value both genders’ perspectives and display menstruation realistically

Late time tails of the massive vector field in a black hole background

We investigate the late-time behavior of the massive vector field in the background of the Schwarzschild and Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes. For Schwarzschild black hole, at intermediately late times the massive vector field is represented by three functions with different decay law $\Psi_{0} \sim t^{-(\ell + 3/2)} \sin{m t}$, $\Psi_{1} \sim t^{-(\ell + 5/2)} \sin{m t}$, $\Psi_{2} \sim t^{-(\ell + 1/2)} \sin{m t}$, while at asymptotically late times the decay law $\Psi \sim t^{-5/6} \sin{(m t)}$ is universal, and does not depend on the multipole number $\ell$. Together with previous study of massive scalar and Dirac fields where the same asymptotically late-time decay law was found, it means, that the asymptotically late-time decay law $\sim t^{-5/6} \sin{(m t)}$ \emph{does not depend} also \emph{on the spin} of the field under consideration. For Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes it is observed two different regimes in the late-time decay of perturbations: non-oscillatory exponential damping for small values of $m$ and oscillatory quasinormal mode decay for high enough $m$. Numerical and analytical results are found for these quasinormal frequencies.Comment: one author and new material are adde

Bulk and surface magnetoinductive breathers in binary metamaterials

We study theoretically the existence of bulk and surface discrete breathers in a one-dimensional magnetic metamaterial comprised of a periodic binary array of split-ring resonators. The two types of resonators differ in the size of their slits and this leads to different resonant frequencies. In the framework of the rotating-wave approximation (RWA) we construct several types of breather excitations for both the energy-conserved and the dissipative-driven systems by continuation of trivial breather solutions from the anticontinuous limit to finite couplings. Numerically-exact computations that integrate the full model equations confirm the quality of the RWA results. Moreover, it is demonstrated that discrete breathers can spontaneously appear in the dissipative-driven system as a results of a fundamental instability.Comment: 10 pages, 16 figure

Photo-induced volume changes in selenium. Tight-binding molecular dynamics study

Tight-binding molecular dynamics simulations of photo-excitations in small Se clusters (isolated Se$_8$ ring and helical Se chain) and glassy Se networks (containing 162 atoms) were carried out in order to analyse the photo induced instability inside the amorphous selenium. In the cluster systems after taking an electron from the highest occupied molecular orbital to the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital a bond breaking occurs. In the glassy networks photoinduced volume expansion was observed and at the same time the number of coordination defects changed significantly due to illumination

Scalar field evolution in Gauss-Bonnet black holes

It is presented a thorough analysis of scalar perturbations in the background of Gauss-Bonnet, Gauss-Bonnet-de Sitter and Gauss-Bonnet-anti-de Sitter black hole spacetimes. The perturbations are considered both in frequency and time domain. The dependence of the scalar field evolution on the values of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ and the Gauss-Bonnet coupling $\alpha$ is investigated. For Gauss-Bonnet and Gauss-Bonnet-de Sitter black holes, at asymptotically late times either power-law or exponential tails dominate, while for Gauss-Bonnet-anti-de Sitter black hole, the quasinormal modes govern the scalar field decay at all times. The power-law tails at asymptotically late times for odd-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet black holes does not depend on $\alpha$, even though the black hole metric contains $\alpha$ as a new parameter. The corrections to quasinormal spectrum due to Gauss-Bonnet coupling is not small and should not be neglected. For the limit of near extremal value of the (positive) cosmological constant and pure de Sitter and anti-de Sitter modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravity we have found analytical expressions.Comment: 10 pages, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Effect of nonlinearity on the dynamics of a particle in dc field-induced systems

Dynamics of a particle in a perfect chain with one nonlinear impurity and in a perfect nonlinear chain under the action of dc field is studied numerically. The nonlinearity appears due to the coupling of the electronic motion to optical oscillators which are treated in adiabatic approximation. We study for both the low and high values of field strength. Three different range of nonlinearity is obtained where the dynamics is different. In low and intermediate range of nonlinearity, it reduces the localization. In fact in the intermediate range subdiffusive behavior in the perfect nonlinear chain is obtained for a long time. In all the cases a critical value of nonlinear strength exists where self-trapping transition takes place. This critical value depends on the system and the field strength. Beyond the self-trapping transition nonlinearity enhances the localization.Comment: 9 pages, Revtex, 6 ps figures include