Listening to Life’s Lessons: Using music Lyrics and Poetry to Face Issues of Aging in the Classroom

The use of poetry and music in college courses on aging is discussed. The format can help instructors reach their students in new ways. Poetry and music can be used to engage students in material that may be emotionally charged. In addition, poetry and music can be used to help students confront stereotypes about the elderly

THE IMPACT OF MICRONUTRIENTS ON LABOR PRODUCTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM RURAL INDIA

Micronutrient malnutrition, particularly of iron, is widespread on the South Asian subcontinent and economic losses due to reduced productivity of afflicted population groups are believed to be substantial. This paper examines the impact of micronutrient intake on productivity of house-hold engaged in agricultural labor in India by applying a two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation technique. The micronutrient under investigation is iron. The results indicate that productivity, measured in wages is indeed affected through insufficient intake, and that wages would on average be 5 to 17.3 percent higher, if households would achieve recommended intake levels of the micronutrient discussed here. The results demonstrate that policy interventions that aim at enhancing micronutrient intake can be regarded as investments in improved productivity and higher household incomes. Enhancing micronutrient intake will contribute significantly to overall economic growth and development.Micronutrient malnutrition, iron, productivity, India, Labor and Human Capital,

Early Competitive Game Playing in Same- and Mixed-Gender Peer Groups

Sixty-four kindergarten children participated in a bead-collecting game. Their competitive, noncompetitive, and other moves were measured. Gender and gender composition of the group affected competition in the context of playing this game with known peers. The boys were more competitive than the girls. Girls in the same-gender groups, but not mixed-gender groups, had low levels of competitive moves overall. Similar rates of strategic moves and game understanding suggest that the noted gender differences were not due to lack of game skill. However, the experience of playing the game can differ for boys and girls, and this difference may be emphasized when girls are playing exclusively with other girls

Channel Detection in Coded Communication

We consider the problem of block-coded communication, where in each block, the channel law belongs to one of two disjoint sets. The decoder is aimed to decode only messages that have undergone a channel from one of the sets, and thus has to detect the set which contains the prevailing channel. We begin with the simplified case where each of the sets is a singleton. For any given code, we derive the optimum detection/decoding rule in the sense of the best trade-off among the probabilities of decoding error, false alarm, and misdetection, and also introduce sub-optimal detection/decoding rules which are simpler to implement. Then, various achievable bounds on the error exponents are derived, including the exact single-letter characterization of the random coding exponents for the optimal detector/decoder. We then extend the random coding analysis to general sets of channels, and show that there exists a universal detector/decoder which performs asymptotically as well as the optimal detector/decoder, when tuned to detect a channel from a specific pair of channels. The case of a pair of binary symmetric channels is discussed in detail.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor