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Interpersonal dynamics of women in midlife living with involuntary childlessness
Get PDFBecoming a parent creates a new phase in adult development where the creation of a family brings new meanings and relational dimensions to one’s life. For people who are involuntarily childless, however, the absence of children can have a multifaceted impact on their everyday lives. Although extensive studies concerning childlessness have been conducted, past work has tended to have a clinical focus on women's infertility and fertility treatments and much less attention has been paid to how involuntarily childless people live beyond the phase of trying for a child while contemporaries pursue their lives with children. This study explores the experience of 11 White, heterosexual British women in midlife living with involuntary childlessness. To gain experiential insights, semi-structured interviews were conducted and transcripts analyzed using interpretive phenomenological analysis. Analysis reveals two interrelated key patterns exemplifying intrapersonal and interpersonal features. This paper focuses on the latter. The findings bring to light not only layers of complex relational issues caused by being involuntarily childless, but also different ways of reconstructing meaning in relational reconnections that impacted positively on developing generativity. The paper presents the dynamics unique to each woman and offers micro-level understandings helpful for health professionals, family therapists, life coaches, and researchers looking into childlessness and midlife/adult development
Maximum Likelihood Estimation in Markov Regime-Switching Models with Covariate-Dependent Transition Probabilities
No full textThis paper considers maximum likelihood (ML) estimation in a large class of models with hidden Markov regimes. We investigate consistency of the ML estimator and local asymptotic normality for the models under general conditions which allow for autoregressive dynamics in the observable process, Markov regime sequences with covariate-dependent transition matrices, and possible model misspecification. A Monte Carlo study examines the finite-sample properties of the ML estimator in correctly specified and misspecified models. An empirical application is also discussed
Big data, big challenges: risk management of financial market in the digital economy
Get PDFPurpose: The purpose of the research is to assess the risk of the financial market in the digital economy through the quantitative analysis model in the big data era. It is a big challenge for the government to carry out financial market risk management in the big data era.
Design/methodology/approach: In this study, a generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity-vector autoregression (GARCH-VaR) model is constructed to analyze the big data financial market in the digital economy. Additionally, the correlation test and stationarity test are carried out to construct the best fit model and get the corresponding VaR value.
Findings: Owing to the conditional heteroscedasticity, the index return series shows the leptokurtic and fat tail phenomenon. According to the AIC (Akaike information criterion), the fitting degree of the GARCH model is measured. The AIC value difference of the models under the three distributions is not obvious, and the differences between them can be ignored.
Originality/value: Using the GARCH-VaR model can better measure and predict the risk of the big data finance market and provide a reliable and quantitative basis for the current technology-driven regulation in the digital economy
Monkey king: journey to the West
No full textBook synopsis: Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng'en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk's quest for Buddhist scriptures in the 7th century AD, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong, one of the most memorable characters in all of literature.
Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight, and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment
Regional technological capabilities and the access to H2020 funds
Get PDFThis contribution provides fresh evidence on the factors facilitating the access to H2020 funds by EU regions focussing on the role played by pre-existing technological endowments of regions. The empirical analysis aims at assessing if, and the extent to which, the regional distribution of such resources strictly reflects the technological capabilities of regions (with the risk of a perpetuation or even a deepening of pre-existing technological gaps) or, alternatively, whether a rebalancing allocation mechanism (able to mitigate technological asymmetries) is at work. We show that an overall rebalancing effect of H2020 seems to dominate thanks to the “collaborative-inclusive logic” of the Research & innovation actions (RIA) and the Innovation actions (IA). The latter have been able to more than compensate the “elitarian” nature of the other two pillars of H2020, namely the European Research Council (ERC) and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
Optimism where there is none: asymmetric belief updating observed with valence-neutral life events
Get PDFHow people update their beliefs when faced with new information is integral to everyday life. A sizeable body of literature suggests that people’s belief updating is optimistically biased, such that their beliefs are updated more in response to good news than bad news. However, recent research demonstrates that findings previously interpreted as evidence of optimistic belief updating may be the result of flaws in experimental design, rather than motivated reasoning. In light of this controversy, we conduct three pre-registered variations of the standard belief updating paradigm (combined N = 300) in which we test for asymmetric belief updating with neutral, non-valenced stimuli using analytic approaches found in previous research. We find evidence of seemingly biased belief updating with neutral stimuli — results that cannot be attributed to a motivational, valence-based, optimism account — and further show that there is uninterpretable variability across samples and analytic techniques. Jointly, these results serve to highlight the methodological flaws in current optimistic belief updating research
Gambling in professional sport: the enabling role of regulatory legitimacy
Get PDFPurpose: This article seeks to explain why organisations remain vulnerable to financial failure despite increasing financial regulation to improve governance. Using a case study of gambling and regulation in professional football in England, it introduces the concept of ‘regulatory legitimacy’ to show how this enables football clubs to gamble.
Design/methodology/approach: The article quantifies the extent to which football clubs in the Championship of the English Football League (EFL) adopt a conventionally economically irrational decision to run a loss-making budget in the hope of achieving sporting success. The article postulates criteria for evidence of this form of gambling by overspending on playing talent with data from the clubs’ published financial statements. A pay-off matrix is developed to compare the intended and actual outcomes.
Findings: The research finds that this strategy was both prevalent and the most successful to achieve promotion.
Originality/value: This article makes three contributions. The first is the quantification of the prevalence of this form of gambling. The second is the finding that, despite regulations to limit spending on wages, gambling is rational in the non-economic sense because it is almost a necessary strategy to achieve promotion if the club had not been relegated from the Premier League in the previous season. The third contribution is the development of the concept of ‘regulatory legitimacy’ as a way to understand the process through which regulations are implemented yet are ineffective at curbing financial gambling
Reducing cybersickness in 360-degree virtual reality
Get PDFDespite the technological advancements in Virtual Reality (VR), users are constantly combating feelings of nausea and disorientation, the so-called cybersickness. Cybersickness symptoms cause severe discomfort and hinder the immersive VR experience. Here we investigated cybersickness in 360-degree head-mounted display VR. In traditional 360-degree VR experiences, translational movement in the real world is not reflected in the virtual world, and therefore self-motion information is not corroborated by matching visual and vestibular cues, which may trigger symptoms of cybersickness. We evaluated whether a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) software designed to supplement the 360-degree VR experience with artificial six-degrees-of-freedom motion may reduce cybersickness. Explicit (simulator sickness questionnaire and Fast Motion Sickness (FMS) rating) and implicit (heart rate) measurements were used to evaluate cybersickness symptoms during and after 360-degree VR exposure. Simulator sickness scores showed a significant reduction in feelings of nausea during the AI-supplemented six-degrees-of-freedom motion VR compared to traditional 360-degree VR. However, six-degrees-of-freedom motion VR did not reduce oculomotor or disorientation measures of sickness. No changes were observed in FMS and heart rate measures. Improving the congruency between visual and vestibular cues in 360-degree VR, as provided by the AI-supplemented six-degrees-of-freedom motion system considered, is essential for a more engaging, immersive and safe VR experience, which is critical for educational, cultural and entertainment applications
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