The Role of Desicion Making Processes in the Correlation between Wealth and Health

There are many pathways explaining the relationship between socioeconomic status and health; one possibility is that some normally unobservable characteristic causes people to invest both in their financial well-being and their health. Here we consider the possibility that the decision making processes are similar across domains and that the steps individuals take to make decisions can help to explain the correlation in outcomes across domains. We focus particularly on retirement savings decisions and decisions in the health domain. Choices in both domains have long-term consequences and therefore require foresight and the ability to process complex information. Our results suggest that up to 44% of the correlation between wealth and health is due to the processes that people use to make these choices.Health;Wealth;Decision Making

How Real People Make Long-Term Decisions: The Case of Retirement Preparation

A canonical but untested assumption in economics is that choices are determined only by preferences and budget constraints, but not by how people approach decision making. In particular, it is believed that people behave “as if they optimized”, even if they do not engage in any formal planning. We test this empirically in the domain of retirement saving using a specifically designed survey. We find that people who rely on a rule of thumb indeed behave like literal planners/optimizers. However, people without any systematic approach save substantially less. We discuss the implications of this finding.Decision process;planning;rule of thumb;retirement saving;household finance

The Miracle of Compound Interest: Does our Intuition Fail?

When it comes to estimating the benefits of long-term savings, many people rely on their intuition. Focusing on the domain of retirement savings, we use a randomized experiment to explore people’s intuition about how money accumulates over time. We ask half of our sample to estimate future consumption given savings (the forward perspective). The other half of the sample is asked to estimate savings given future consumption (the backward perspective). From an economic point of view, both subsamples are asked identical questions. However, we discover a large “direction bias”: the perceived benefits of long-term savings are substantially higher when individuals adopt a backward perspective. Our findings have important impli- cations for economic modeling, in general, and for structuring advice and financial literacy programs, in particular.Behavioral economics;financial intuition;financial literacy;com- pound interest;retirement saving

Effective Marketing of Hass Avocados: The Impacts of Changing Trade Policy and Promotion/Information Programs

avocado, promotion, Mexico, Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Demand and Price Analysis, Financial Economics, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Production Economics,

Passive geodetic satellite canister assemblies

Passive geodetic satellite /PAGEOS/ canister assemblie

Cloning crops in a CELSS via tissue culture: Prospects and problems

Micropropagation is currently used to clone fruits, nuts, and vegetables and involves controlling the outgrowth in vitro of basal, axillary, or adventitious buds. Following clonal multiplication, shoots are divided and rooted. This process has greatly reduced space and energy requirements in greenhouses and field nurseries and has increased multiplication rates by greater than 20 fold for some vegetatively propagated crops and breeding lines. Cereal and legume crops can also be cloned by tissue culture through somatic embryogenesis. Somatic embryos can be used to produce 'synthetic seed', which can tolerate desiccation and germinate upon rehydration. Synthetic seed of hybrid wheat, rice, soybean and other crops could be produced in a controlled ecological life support system. Thus, yield advantages of hybreds over inbreds (10 to 20 percent) could be exploited without having to provide additional facilities and energy for parental-line and hybrid seed nurseries

Predictions of the emergence of vaccine-resistant hepatitis B in The Gambia using a mathematical model

Vaccine escape variants of hepatitis B virus (HBV) have been identified world-wide. A mathematical model of HBV transmission is used to investigate the potential pattern of emergence of such variants. Attention is focused on The Gambia as a country with high quality epidemiological data, universal infant immunization and in which escape mutants after childhood infections have been observed. We predict that a variant cannot become dominant for at least 20 years from the start of vaccination, even when using a vaccine which affords no cross protection. The dominant factor responsible for this long time scale is the low rate of infectious contacts between infected and susceptible individuals (we estimate the basic reproduction number of hepatitis B in The Gambia to be 1·7). A variant strain that achieves high prevalence will also take many years to control, and it is questionable whether emergence will be identifiable by sero-surveillance until of high prevalence. The sensitivity of the model predictions to epidemiological and demographic factors is explored

Predictions of the emergence of vaccine-resistant hepatitis B in The Gambia using a mathematical model

Vaccine escape variants of hepatitis B virus (HBV) have been identified world-wide. A mathematical model of HBV transmission is used to investigate the potential pattern of emergence of such variants. Attention is focused on The Gambia as a country with high quality epidemiological data, universal infant immunization and in which escape mutants after childhood infections have been observed. We predict that a variant cannot become dominant for at least 20 years from the start of vaccination, even when using a vaccine which affords no cross protection. The dominant factor responsible for this long time scale is the low rate of infectious contacts between infected and susceptible individuals (we estimate the basic reproduction number of hepatitis B in The Gambia to be 1·7). A variant strain that achieves high prevalence will also take many years to control, and it is questionable whether emergence will be identifiable by sero-surveillance until of high prevalence. The sensitivity of the model predictions to epidemiological and demographic factors is explored

Plane strain fracture toughness and mechanical properties of 5Al-2.5Sn ELI titanium at room and cryogenic temperatures Final report

Plane strain fracture toughness and mechanical properties of titanium alloy at room and cryogenic temperature

Plane strain fracture toughness of 2219-T87 aluminum alloy at room and cryogenic temperatures

Tensile strength, yield strength, and plane strain fracture toughness of aluminum alloy at room and cryogenic temperature