International product life cycles,trade and development stages

The Journal of Technology Transfer - In this paper we first propose a proxy for early stage activity in a country’s exports based on product life cycle theory. Employing a conditional latent...     

Public capital stock and interstate variations in manufacturing efficiency

This study focuses on the role of public capital stock in contributing to interstate differences in productive efficiency in manufacturing. Our motivation is to assess the role of public capital as a source of persistent regional variations in efficiency, and thus determine if public infrastructure policies might reasonably be expected to alter the competitive environment of a state's manufacturing sector. We use a stochastic frontier production function model, explicitly incorporating infrastructure capital, to examine the relative performance of the aggregate manufacturing sector across states and over time. We calculate an index of productive efficiency and estimate the determinants of statewide variations in it. These results show that variations in per capita infrastructure stocks significantly affect manufacturing efficiency. Considering the behavior of public capital as both a direct and an indirect input furthers our understanding of the role of infrastructure and its implications for regional economic development policies.     

Racial Stereotypes and Asian American Youth Paradox

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Asian Americans are simultaneously stereotyped as a perpetual foreigner and a model minority. This cross-sectional study of 308 Filipino American youth (mean age...     

Metrological framework for selecting morphological characters to identify species and estimate developmental maturity of forensically significant insect specimens

Accurate age estimates of immature necrophagous insects associated with a human or animal body can provide evidence of how long the body has been dead. These estimates are based on species-specific details of the insects’ aging processes, and therefore require accurate species identification and developmental stage estimation. Many professionals who produce or use identified organisms as forensic evidence have little training in taxonomy or metrology, and appreciate the availability of formalized principles and standards for biological identification. Taxonomic identifications are usually most readily and economically made using categorical and qualitative morphological characters, but it may be necessary to use less convenient and potentially more ambiguous characters that are continuous and quantitative if two candidate species are closely related, or if identifying developmental stages within a species. Characters should be selected by criteria such as taxonomic specificity and metrological repeatability and relative error. We propose such a hierarchical framework, critique various measurements of immature insects, and suggest some standard approaches to determine the reliability of organismal identifications and measurements in estimating postmortem intervals. Relevant criteria for good characters include high repeatability (including low scope for ambiguity or parallax effects), pronounced discreteness, and small relative error in measurements. These same principles apply to individuation of unique objects in general.

Key points

• Metrological rigour can increase in forensic entomology by selecting measurements based on their metrological qualities.
• Selection of high-quality features for morphological identification of organisms should consider these criteria: (1) pronounced discreteness of features (minimising group overlap or maximizing interval); (2) high repeatability of assessment (such as symmetrical width rather than asymmetrical length); (3) small relative error in measurement (selecting the physically largest continuous rigid feature for measurement).
• These metrological principles also apply to individuation of unique objects in general.

     

Body mass and suicide risk

Body mass has been neglected as a possible predictor of suicidal behavior. The present investigation explores the association between body mass index and completed suicide. Data are from the National Mortality Followback Survey and refer to 373 suicides, and 518 deaths from motor vehicle accidents as controls. The results of a logistic regression analysis indicated that, for females, the greater the BMI the greater the suicide risk. However, this relationship did not hold up under controls for race and other covariates of BMI. For males, the BMI was not significantly related to suicide risk either at the bivariate or multivariate levels of analysis. The best predictors of suicide were living alone for females, and alcohol abuse for males.     

Turf wars: Using social media network analysis to examine the suspected astroturfing campaign for the Adani Carmichael Coal mine on Twitter

This article uses social media network analysis (SMNA) to examine whether there was an astroturfing campaign on Twitter in support of the Adani Carmichael coal mine in 2017. It shows that SMNA can be used to visualize and analyze outsider lobbying activity in issue arenas and is capable of identifying networks of fake opinion. This study found that in April 2017, there was a small network of accounts that made a series of suspiciously similar pro‐Adani tweets that could be considered a form of duplicitous lobbying. However, this study concludes that these posts were likely a weak influence on public opinion in Australia and largely ineffectual as a lobbying tactic. Nevertheless, this analysis shows how communitas public interests can be subverted by covert social media campaigns used in support of corporatas goals, as well as the role digital research methods can play in protecting the integrity on public debates by exposing disingenuous actors.     

Conditions for complex innovations: evidence from public organizations

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Despite the growing interest in understanding innovative activities, an important limitation of the current literature on innovation—both public and...