How do you celebrate the dead?

This article was originally published in The Prophet -- a journal created by and for the students at the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) to amplify the voices of STH students by promoting and sharing a range of perspectives on matters of concern including, but not limited to, spiritual practices, faith communities and society, the nature of theology, and current affairs. It serves as a platform for STH students to share their academic work, theological reflections, and life experiences with one another and the wider community

Movers or Stayers? Heterogeneity of Older Adults' Residential Profiles Across Continental Europe

Traditionally, the emotional attachment older adults have to their homes and the economic and health burden caused by residential moves have had a deterrent effect on mobility during old age. In spite of this static general trend, 20% of older Europeans change their residential location after the age of 65. Some studies point out that this percentage will increase in the coming decades along with the onset of baby-boom cohorts reaching older ages. The main objective of this article is to describe the residential mobility trends during old age in some European countries and identify the main features of those elderly that move after 65, using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)

The electrochemical stability of thiols on gold surfaces

In this paper we present a comparative analysis of the electrochemical stability of alkanethiols, aromatic and heterocyclic thiols on the Au(111) and Au(100) faces in relation to the theoretical energetic data. The peak potential and surface coverage are used as the key parameters to estimate the electrochemical stability while work function changes, adsorption energies and surface free energies calculated from periodic DFT, including van der Waals interactions, are used for the theoretical estimation. We find that the peak potentials do not correlate with work function changes and adsorption energies in particular for aromatic and heterocyclic thiols. In contrast, the reductive desorption potentials for the different thiols show a good correlation with the surface free energy of the SAMs estimated by density functional theory calculations. Surface coverage is a key factor that controls reductive desorption through van der Waals interactions.Fil: Salvarezza, Roberto Carlos. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Instituto de Investigaciones Fisicoquímicas Teóricas y Aplicadas; ArgentinaFil: Carro, Pilar. Universidad de La Laguna; Españ

Correcting the bias in the estimation of a dynamic ordered probit with fixed effects of self-assessed health status

This paper considers the estimation of a dynamic ordered probit with fixed effects, with an application to self-assessed health status. The estimation of nonlinear panel data models with fixed effects by MLE is known to be biased when T is not very large. The problem is specially severe in our model because of the dynamics and because it contains two fixed effects: one in the linear index equation, interpreted as unobserved health status, and another one in the cut points, interpreted as heterogeneity in reporting behavior. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly this paper contributes to the recent literature on bias correction in nonlinear panel data models by applying and studying the finite sample properties of two of the existing proposals to the ordered probit case. The most direct and easily applicable correction to our model is not the best one and still has important biases in our sample sizes. Secondly, we contribute to the literature that study the determinants of Self-Assesed Health measures by applying the previous analysis on estimation methods to the British Household Panel Survey

Dynamic binary outcome models with maximal heterogeneity

Most econometric schemes to allow for heterogeneity in micro behaviour have two drawbacks: they do not fit the data and they rule out interesting economic models. In this paper we consider the time homogeneous first order Markov (HFOM) model that allows for maximal heterogeneity. That is, the modelling of the heterogeneity does not impose anything on the data (except the HFOM assumption for each agent) and it allows for any theory model (that gives a HFOM process for an individual observable variable). `Maximal' means that the joint distribution of initial values and the transition probabilities is unrestricted. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the point identification of our heterogeneity structure and show how it depends on the length of the panel. A feasible ML estimation procedure is developed. Tests for a variety of subsidiary hypotheses such as the assumption that marginal dynamic effects are homogeneous are developed. We apply our techniques to a long panel of Danish workers who are very homogeneous in terms of observables. We show that individual unemployment dynamics are very heterogeneous, even for such a homogeneous group. We also show that the impact of cyclical variables on individual unemployment probabilities differs widely across workers. Some workers have unemployment dynamics that are independent of the cycle whereas others are highly sensitive to macro shocks

Heterogeneity and Microeconometrics Modelling

Presented at the 2005 Econometric Society World Congress Plenary Session on "Modelling Heterogeneity". We survey the treatment of heterogeneity in applied microeconometrics analyses. There are three themes. First, there is usually much more heterogeneity than empirical researchers allow for. Second, the inappropriate treatment of heterogeneity can lead to serious error when estimating outcomes of interest. Finally, once we move away from the traditional linear model with a single 'fixed effect', it is very difficult to account for heterogeneity and fit the data and maintain coherence with theory structures. The latter task is one for economists: "heterogeneity is too important to be left to the statisticians". The paper concludes with a report of our own research on dynamic discrete choice models that allow for maximal heterogeneity.heterogeneity; applied microeconometrics; fixed effects; dyanamic discrete choice

A simple approach to distributed objects in prolog

We present the design of a distributed object system for Prolog, based on adding remote execution and distribution capabilities to a previously existing object system. Remote execution brings RPC into a Prolog system, and its semantics is easy to express in terms of well-known Prolog builtins. The final distributed object design features state mobility and user-transparent network behavior. We sketch an implementation which provides distributed garbage collection and some degree of tolerance to network failures. We provide a preliminary study of the overhead of the communication mechanism for some test cases

Experimenting with independent and-parallel prolog using standard prolog

This paper presents an approximation to the study of parallel systems using sequential tools. The Independent And-parallelism in Prolog is an example of parallel processing paradigm in the framework of logic programming, and implementations like <fc-Prolog uncover the potential performance of parallel processing. But this potential can also be explored using only sequential systems. Being the spirit of this paper to show how this can be done with a standard system, only standard Prolog will be used in the implementations included. Such implementations include tests for parallelism in And-Prolog, a correctnesschecking meta-interpreter of <fc-Prolog and a simulator of parallel execution for <fc-Prolog