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Human development, inequality, and their associations with brain structure across 29 countries
No full textBackground: The macro-social and environmental conditions in which people live, such as the level of a country’s development or inequality, are associated with brain-related disorders. However, the relationship between these systemic environmental factors and the brain remains unclear. We aimed to determine the association between the level of development and inequality of a country and the brain structure of healthy adults. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional study pooling brain imaging (T1-based) data from 145 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies in 7,962 healthy adults (4,110 women) in 29 different countries. We used a meta-regression approach to relate the brain structure to the country’s level of development and inequality. Results: Higher human development was consistently associated with larger hippocampi and more expanded global cortical surface area, particularly in frontal areas. Increased inequality was most consistently associated with smaller hippocampal volume and thinner cortical thickness across the brain. Conclusions: Our results suggest that the macro-economic conditions of a country are reflected in its inhabitants’ brains and may explain the different incidence of brain disorders across the world. The observed variability of brain structure in health across countries should be considered when developing tools in the field of personalized or precision medicine that are intended to be used across the world
The double-edged nature of Whiteness for multiracial people with White ancestry in the US and UK
No full textThe privileges of Whiteness have been theorized and debated for some decades. Because White privilege has been manifested, historically, in myriad forms, it has been possible to treat the privileges of Whiteness as a given, even when its changing manifestations are acknowledged. The continuing growth of multiracial people with White ancestry in the US (and other societies) provides an opportunity for scholars to rethink what we mean by White privilege, and how the workings of White privilege for multiracial people and families may differ from those associated with traditional understandings of Whiteness. One of the important questions posed in this special issue concerns the question of how multiracial people may benefit from the unearned privileges of their genealogical and lived proximity to Whiteness, including a White appearance, White relatives and networks, and White spaces. The key question I address in this review article is this: How is White ancestry and proximity to Whiteness and White people experienced by part-White multiracial people, and how does it differ from traditional forms of White privilege? First, I review various bodies of literature to address this question, and second, I draw upon examples from my research on racially mixed people with White ancestry in both the US and Britain. I argue that although many multiracial people benefit from their White ancestry (in a variety of ways), not enough attention has been given to the double-edged and negative aspects of Whiteness for multiracial people with White ancestry
Communication about economic inequality: a systematic review
No full textWhat do we know about representations of economic inequality in media, and how well does this account for media transformations like hybridization? This article uses a systematic review of academic literature on mediated communication about economic inequality, in order to assess the current state of research around salience, framing, explanatory factors and effects of this kind of inequality discourse. We find an overwhelming focus on legacy newspapers and a small number of Global North countries. We argue for research which builds further links between studies of economic inequality and the contemporary study of communication, including moving past obsolete models of media systems, decentering a small selection of Global North countries, and building a more comparative perspective on nationally-grounded inequality discourses
The impacts of climate change and air pollution on children's education outcomes: evidence from Vietnam
No full textVery few studies have examined the impacts of both climate change and air pollution on student education outcomes, particularly in a developing country setting. Analyzing a rich database consisting of household and school surveys, test scores, and temperature and air pollution data over the past decade for Viet Nam, we find that a 1 µg/m3 increase in PM2.5 concentration in the month preceding exams leads to 0.015 and 0.010 standard deviation decreases in math and reading scores, respectively. We also find some indicative evidence of stronger impacts of air pollution for younger, primary school students who reside in urban areas and in districts with higher temperatures. While we find some mixed effects of temperature, we do not find significant effects on students' test scores for temperature extremes and air pollution over the past 12 months. Our findings offer policy-relevant inputs for the country's ongoing efforts to fight air pollution
Synthesis of evaluation studies of media literacy and digital skills interventions
No full textThis report details the REMEDIS findings for Media Literacy and Digital Skills (ML&DS) interventions, where before and after measures were available. In general, the interventions increased participants’ digital literacy and internet use. However, the impact of interventions on increased benefits of use (i.e. outcomes) was not as clear.1 Most interventions reported significant changes in digital literacy levels. Improvements were greater when participants reported higher digital literacy levels before the intervention. However, digital literacy improvements were not consistently related to breadth of or the outcomes achieved from ICT use before the intervention. All interventions showed significant changes in ICT use post-intervention, mostly these were increases. Larger increases in ICT use post-intervention were related to higher digital literacy levels. Increases tended to be smaller for interventions where participants used ICTs more broadly before the intervention, suggesting ceiling effects. There was substantially less evidence that ML&DS interventions increased beneficial outcomes of ICT use. In most evaluations, interventions had no (short-term) impact on the benefits participants achieved from ICT use. Also, digital literacy levels and ICT use preintervention did not appear to be related to whether a person received more satisfactory outcomes post-intervention. In comparison to those with better ICT access, those with lower quality access to ICT were more likely to improve their digital literacy skills and broaden their ICT use, but were not more likely to improve the outcomes achieved from ICT use. Two main conclusions can be drawn about who benefits most from interventions: 1) Improvements in digital literacy, uses and outcomes were more consistent for interventions aimed at participants with more socio-economic resources. 2) Interventions aimed at educators or carers were the ones that reported improvements in outcomes, interventions with vulnerable groups as beneficiaries showed fewer improvements in outcomes
Stronger voices: Ofcom's role in protecting women and girls online
No full textKey messages: • Women and girls face disproportionately high risk of online harm, such as misogyny, harassment, image-based abuse, and tech-enabled domestic abuse—risks that are compounded by intersecting factors like race and disability. • The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) mandates Ofcom to address these harms, but their proposed guidance takes a cautious and non-binding approach, relying heavily on repurposed measures from child and illegal content protections rather than setting specific standards for women’s safety. • Ofcom proposes vague reporting and assessment measures, without providing any useful guidance on what harms to measure. • Ofcom’s failures to set clear standards will undermine platforms attempts to develop consistent approaches to safety by design, undermining accountability and limiting platforms' ability to act meaningfully on the guidance
Asset pricing with contrastive adversarial variational Bayes
No full textMachine learning techniques have gained considerable attention in the field of empirical asset pricing. Conditioning on a broad set of firm characteristics, one of the most popular no-arbitrage workhorses is a nonlinear conditional asset pricing model that consists of two modules within a neural network structure, i.e., factor and beta estimates, for which we propose a novel contrastive adversarial variational Bayes (CAVB) framework. To exploit the factor structure, we employ adversarial variational Bayes that transforms the maximum-likelihood problem into a zero-sum game between a variational autoencoder (VAE) and a generative adversarial network (GAN), where an auxiliary discriminative network brings in arbitrary expressiveness to the inference model. To tackle the problem of learning indistinguishable feature representations in the beta network, we introduce a contrastive loss to learn distinctive hidden features of the factor loadings in correspondence to conditional quantiles of return distributions. CAVB establishes a robust relation between the cross-section of asset returns and the common latent factors with nonlinear factor loadings. Extensive experiments show that CAVB not only significantly outperforms prominent models in the existing literature in terms of total and predictive R-squares, but also delivers superior Sharpe ratios after transaction costs for both long-only and long-short portfolios
A qualitative study of the IPS employment specialist role in the context of Nav employment in Norway
No full textBackground: Employment is recognised as a fundamental human right. Still, many people experiencing severe mental illness are outside the workforce. Appropriate employment has several benefits for mental health and is central to recovery and citizenship. Individual Placement and Support (IPS) integrates treatment and employment support and is an evidence-based model for supporting people experiencing severe mental illness to gain and maintain employment. Employment specialists are front-line workers of IPS. In Norway, the implementation of IPS is in a later phase and employment specialists are employed outside health services. This study explores and describes employment specialists’ job situation within this new context. Methods: Qualitative data were collected through field notes and five focus group interviews. The study participants were 36 IPS employment specialists located at 13 different sites in Northern Norway. Transcripts and field notes were analysed by thematic analyses. Results: Our findings show that the IPS structures are settled in Norway, but some challenges remain. The most prominent consequence of the new context is the challenge of integration within health teams. Nonetheless, employment specialists find their work with clients meaningful and having great impact with opportunities for personal and professional development. Conclusion: IPS is anchored in Norwegian policy and several of the early intervention challenges are resolved. Our study provides increased understanding of the employment specialists job situation within the new IPS context in Norway. Employment specialists are “front-line-workers” in enacting the IPS principles, and their perspectives on the contextual change are crucial in the development of IPS
Density of monochromatic infinite subgraphs II
No full textIn 1967, Gerencsér and Gyárfás [16] proved a result which is considered the starting point of graph-Ramsey theory: In every 2-coloring of Kn, there is a monochromatic path on ⌈(2n+1)/3⌉ vertices, and this is best possible. There have since been hundreds of papers on graph-Ramsey theory with some of the most important results being motivated by a series of conjectures of Burr and Erdős [2, 3] regarding the Ramsey numbers of trees (settled in [31]), graphs with bounded maximum degree (settled in [5]), and graphs with bounded degeneracy (settled in [23]). In 1993, Erdős and Galvin [13] began the investigation of a countably infinite analogue of the Gerencsér and Gyárfás result: What is the largest d such that in every 2-coloring of KN there is a monochromatic infinite path with upper density at least d? Erdős and Galvin showed that 2/3≤d≤8/9, and after a series of recent improvements, this problem was finally solved in [7] where it was shown that d=12+√8)/17. This paper begins a systematic study of quantitative countably infinite graph-Ramsey theory, focusing on infinite analogues of the Burr-Erdős conjectures. We obtain some results which are analogous to what is known in finite case, and other (unexpected) results which have no analogue in the finite case