Explaining the socio-economic gradient in child outcomes: the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills

Papers in this volume and elsewhere consistently find a strong relationship between children's cognitive abilities and their parents' socio-economic position (SEP). Most studies seeking to explain the paths through which SEP affects cognitive skills suffer from a potentially serious omitted variables problem, as they are unable to account for an important determinant of children's cognitive abilities, namely parental cognitive ability. A range of econometric strategies have been employed to overcome this issue, but in this paper, we adopt the very simple (but rarely available) route of using data that includes a range of typically unobserved characteristics, such as parental cognitive ability and social skills. In line with previous work on the intergenerational transmission of cognitive skills, we find that parental cognitive ability is a significant predictor of children's cognitive ability; moreover, it explains one sixth of the socio-economic gap in those skills, even after controlling for a rich set of demographic, attitudinal and behavioural factors. Despite the importance of parental cognitive ability in explaining children's cognitive ability, however, the addition of such typically unobserved characteristics does not alter our impression of the relative importance of other factors in explaining the socio-economic gap in cognitive skills. This is reassuring for studies that are unable to control for parental cognitive ability.

Strategic approaches to science and technology in development

Watson, Crawford, and Farley examine the ways in which science and technology (S&T) support poverty alleviation and economic development and how these themes have been given emphasis or short shrift in various areas of the World Bank's work. Central to their thesis is the now well-established argument that development will increasingly depend on a country's ability to understand, interpret, select, adapt, use, transmit, diffuse, produce, and commercialize scientific and technological knowledge in ways appropriate to its culture, aspirations, and level of development. The authors go beyond this tenet, analyzing the importance of S&T for development within specific sectors. They present policy options for enhancing the effectiveness of S&T systems in developing countries, review previous experience of the World Bank and other donors in supporting S&T, and suggest changes that the World Bank and its partners can adopt to increase the impact of the work currently undertaken in S&T. The authors'main messages are: 1) S&T has always been important for development, but the unprecedented pace of advancement of scientific knowledge is rapidly creating new opportunities for and threats to development. 2) Most developing countries are largely unprepared to deal with the changes that S&T advancement will bring. 3) The World Bank's numerous actions in various domains of S&T could be more effective in producing the needed capacity improvements in client countries. 4) The World Bank could have a greater impact if it paid increased attention to S&T in education, health, rural development, private sector development, and the environment. The strategy emphasizes four S&T policy areas: education and human resources development, the private sector, the public sector, and information communications technologies.Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Decentralization,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Agricultural Research

Advertising

Sydney is Australia’s advertising capital and the relationship between the city and the advertising industry stretches back to the earliest years of European settlement. Advertising helped propel commercial activity in Sydney and the advertising industry has been no less active in shaping Sydney, illuminating the city’s skyline and streetscape, and influencing the lives of all Sydneysiders – from suburban consumers to esteemed artists. Moreover, advertising has promoted the city itself as a must-see destination for tourists or a backdrop for the latest blockbuster film

The Latvians in Sydney

People of various ethnic backgrounds who left the regions that comprise modern-day Latvia have long been in Sydney. The two major inflows of ethnic Latvians into Sydney occurred in the aftermath of the 1905 revolution in Tsarist Russia and then in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The organisation and activities of Latvians in Sydney reflect the changing nature of the local community as well as Latvia’s changing political situation

Energy and greenhouse gas emissions implications of alternative housing types for Australia

Many cities around the world are looking for ways to reduce their per capita greenhouse gas emissions. The outward growth of cities from a central business district, typical of many cities around the world, is often seen as working against this goal and as unsustainable. This is especially the case in circumstances where this growth is not supported by the necessary infrastructure, often resulting in an increase in the use of private transport. However, alternative scenarios to contain the outward growth are being proposed. This paper provides a comparison of the energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions between typical detached outer-suburban housing currently being built in Australia\u27s major cities and inner-city and -suburban apartments, which are increasingly seen as a legitimate alternative to the housing that is currently being built on our outer city fringes. By analysing the energy demand associated with the construction and operation of each housing type and for occupant travel it was found that the location of the housing and its size are the dominant factors determining energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. The findings from this analysis provide useful information for policy-makers in planning the development of our cities into the future, when faced with a growing population and an increasing need to minimise greenhouse gas emissions

Behavior and weight correlates of weight-control efforts in Australian women living in disadvantage : the READI study

BackgroundWith increasing obesity rates worldwide, more and more people are actively attempting to lose weight or avoid weight gain, but relatively little is known about what specific behaviors comprise these efforts and which, if any, are associated with better weight control over time.MethodsThis paper reports relationships between body weight, weight-control efforts and related behaviors over a three-year period in 1,634 Australian women. The women were purposefully recruited from 80 disadvantaged neighborhoods in Victoria, Australia. Weight loss efforts were categorized as trying to lose weight, trying to prevent weight gain and no weight-control efforts. Behavioral correlates examined included different kinds of physical activity and consumption of a number of specific foods types.Results and discussionSelf-reported body weight at baseline was higher in women trying to lose weight. Frequency of consumption of low energy density foods was positively associated with reported weight-control efforts, as was frequency of reported total and leisure-time physical activity. Longitudinal associations between changes in weight-control efforts and changes in behaviors were consistent with the cross-sectional findings. At three-year follow up, however, weight-control efforts were not associated with change in body weight. More detailed analyses of specific food choices suggested that part of the explanation of no effect of reported weight-control efforts and weight over time might be that people are not as well-informed as they should be about the energy density of some common foods. In particular, those reporting engagement in weight-control efforts reported reducing consumption of carbohydrate-containing foods such as bread and potatoes more than is justified by their energy content, while they reported increasing consumption of some high energy density foods (e.g., cheese and nuts).ConclusionIt is tentatively concluded that women living in disadvantaged neighborhoods understand messages about weight-control (more activity and foods with lower fat and lower energy density) but that some foods eaten more by women engaged in weight control may reduce the effectiveness of these efforts.<br /

Outside the Melting Pot: Reflections on Hypervisibility Abroad

The United States is known, perhaps more than any other country in the world, as the definition of a \u27melting pot\u27 - a place with a vast mixture of people from all different nationalities, races and walks of life. One of the most interesting aspects of studying abroad, then, is witnessing how members of other nations that do not exactly satisfy the criteria of a melting pot interact with you if they are not extremely familiar with people of your race

Mode of Operations: A Critique of the Agonistic View of Greek Musical Modes in Plato and Aristotle

Music has the power to transcend the confines of mere spatial geometry into the bounds of philosophy and emotion. In the views of the ancient philosophers Plato and Aristotle, music, namely the Greek modes, is valuable pedagogically in two ways: first, as a means to knowing the Good, e.g., the Dorian and Phrygian modes, and second as a means for suiting people for political life. Since their goal is to educate future rulers, Plato and Aristotle need to heighten some but censor other musical modes, e.g., the Lydian and Aeolian modes, due to some of the unsavory feelings, or affects, which those modes produce. Since musical modes take on moral and social roles, the emotions they evoke become vastly important due to the ancient connection between the “beautiful and the good” (καλόν ἀγαθόν). By contrast, a purely aesthetic view of the modes provides a much more inclusive experience of all the modes, but disassociates the beautiful from the Good. This focus on intellectualism downplays the emotional effects which are felt in the arts, e.g., the musical modes. Analyses of both Platonic-Aristotelian and aesthetic views of the modes results in the need for a middle ground that presents a more holistic approach as opposed to a competitively agonistic understanding of the philosophic and musical intersections of the modes

Sex, lies and self-reported counts: Bayesian mixture models for heaping in longitudinal count data via birth-death processes

Surveys often ask respondents to report nonnegative counts, but respondents may misremember or round to a nearby multiple of 5 or 10. This phenomenon is called heaping, and the error inherent in heaped self-reported numbers can bias estimation. Heaped data may be collected cross-sectionally or longitudinally and there may be covariates that complicate the inferential task. Heaping is a well-known issue in many survey settings, and inference for heaped data is an important statistical problem. We propose a novel reporting distribution whose underlying parameters are readily interpretable as rates of misremembering and rounding. The process accommodates a variety of heaping grids and allows for quasi-heaping to values nearly but not equal to heaping multiples. We present a Bayesian hierarchical model for longitudinal samples with covariates to infer both the unobserved true distribution of counts and the parameters that control the heaping process. Finally, we apply our methods to longitudinal self-reported counts of sex partners in a study of high-risk behavior in HIV-positive youth.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/15-AOAS809 in the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org