336 research outputs found
Longitudinal relationships between prospective memory, executive functions, and metacognition in young elementary school children
No full textProspective Memory (PM), executive functions (EF) and metacognition (MC) are relevant cognitive abilities for everyday functioning. They all seem to develop gradually in childhood and appear to be theoretically closely related; however, their empirical links remain unclear, especially in children.
As a recent study revealed significant cross-sectional links between PM and EF, and a weaker but close link between PM and MC in 2nd graders (Spiess, Meier, & Roebers, submitted), this study focused on their short-term relationships and on their development.
119 children (MT1 =95 months, SDT1, = 4.8 months) completed the same tasks (one PM, three EF, one MC task) twice with a time-lag of 7 months. T-tests showed significant improvements in all tasks, except in the updating task. Different structural equation models were contrasted (AMOS); the best fitting model revealed that PMT2 was similarly predicted by PMT1 (r = .33) and EFT1 (r = .34). Additionally, EFT1 predicted MCT2 (r = .44), chi2(118, 119) = 128.91, p = .23, TLI = .968, CFI = .978, RMSEA = .028.
Results show that PM, EF, and MC develop during childhood and also demonstrate that they are linked not only cross-sectionally, but longitudinally. Findings are discussed in a broader developmental framework
Spatial mismatch in Cape Town : business location and the impacts on workers
No full textIncludes bibliographical references (leaves 66-69).The south east and cape flats regions of Cape Town is home to abundant supplies of cheap and available unskilled labour. With the awareness that Cape Town may be slowly following the developmental path of Johannesburg and many other cities of the world, as decentralization, suburbanization, and the overall processes of economic 'tertiarisation' and urban transformation encompass the entire structure and culture of the city, we wonder about how the cities unskilled workforces are faring. Development has focused on the north of the city while the south east has been bypassed, causing residents to have to travel far out to find jobs and work. There is a clear spatial mismatch between places of work and places of residence for the workers of the South east, and overcoming this disconnection is challenged further by an inefficient and expensive public transport service, upon which they are fully dependent. By way of the interviews with businesses from various industrial areas in Cape Town, this thesis shows that many owners and management do not place much importance on where their workers, in particular unskilled and semi-skilled manual workers live and how they travel. It seems that when choosing a location for their businesses, size, price, and availability may limit owners' options of location choice and interviews reveal that owners may be responding to rather than driving development. Findings reveal that unskilled manual workers typically reside in the south east, while business owners, management and other white collar workers typically live in the northern and southern suburbs, as well as other central areas. Furthermore, transport patterns were evaluated and it is clear that the unskilled workers rely heavily on public transport while higher skilled occupational groups either have their own car, or are part of lift-clubs. The problem of a spatial mismatch is clearly skewed towards workers of the south east who rely on public transport, by intensifying the burdens of commuting times and costs. A further finding is that many businesses resort to highly informal methods of recruitment, such as word-of-mouth and internal referral techniques, revealing the significance of social networks in gaining access to job opportunities. This is especially important for workers trying to find employment in areas outside of the traditional economic nodes as it is expensive to commute to those areas regularly in search of employment. Having access to those businesses through employed family members, neighbours and relatives, is therefore critical
Crowding Out Voluntary Contributions to Public Goods
No full textWe test the null hypothesis that involuntary transfers for the provision of a public good will completely crowd out voluntary transfers against the warm-glow hypothesis that crowding-out will be incomplete because individuals care about giving. Our design differs from the related design used by Andreoni in considering two levels of the involuntary transfer and a wider range of contribution possibilities, and in mixing groups every period instead of every four periods. We analyse the data with careful attention to boundary effects. We retain the null hypothesis of complete crowding-out in two of three pairwise comparisions, but reject it in favour of incomplete crowding-out in the comparison most closely akin to Andreoni's design. Thus we confirm the existence of incomplete crowding-out in some environments, but suggest that the warm-glow hypothesis is inadequate in explaining it.
Characterization in populations of Coffea arabica L. for resistance to CBD using molecular markers
No full textCoffee berry disease (CBD) is caused by the fungus Colletotrichum kahawae Waller and Bridge. This disease is restricted to the African continent, where it can cause production losses of more than 80% when susceptible varieties are used or when the indicated chemical control is not carried out. For this reason, since 1970, Cenicafé has developed lines resistant to this disease in the absence of the pathogen, a process that has been favored by the discovery and validation of microsatellite markers associated with the Ck-1 gene for resistance to CBD. In this research, 12 populations of Coffea arabica were characterized for their resistance to CBD using the molecular markers Sat235, Sat207 and FR34-6CTG. The molecular markers allowed us to identify that the same allelic form of resistance to CBD is present in lines derived from Timor Hybrid CIFC 1343 (HdT CIFC 1343). Furthermore, the allelic form of resistance associated with the three molecular markers was identified in one line derived from Coffea canephora. In lines derived from Caturra x HdT CIFC 1343 it was evident that, when the plants present the allelic forms of resistance identified by the molecular markers, high percentages of hypocotyls resistant to different isolates of C. kahawae are observed in the progeny.
Key words: CBD; Coffea spp; resistance genes; marker-assisted selection
Precautionary saving and old-age provisions: Do subjective saving motives measures work?
No full textThe literature on precautionary saving provides contradictory views on the importance of precautionary saving. The SAVE data offer the possibility to generate some of the frequently used instruments known from the literature in order to measure the extent of precautionary savings. This paper compares the influence of these instruments on long-run and short-run saving measures. In addition, SAVE contains information on a broad range of saving motives. This paper uses these short-run and long-run savings motives to describe differences in savings, saving rates and wealth accumulation.
Efeito disposição na bolsa de valores de São Paulo
No full textTCC (graduação) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Centro Sócio-Econômico. Economia.Este trabalho tem como referencial teórico a Teoria das Finanças Comportamentais. Esta teoria estuda as decisões financeiras do indivíduo a partir do conceito de racionalidade limitada (bounded rationality), principalmente, quando este se defronta com situações de perdas e ganhos. Durante estas escolhas as decisões do indivíduo nem sempre são consideradas racionais, sendo assim, tal comportamento pode revelar padrões (ilusões cognitivas). Portanto, este estudo está mais especificamente relacionado à verificação do conceito de efeito disposição no mercado acionário brasileiro. Este efeito se refere ao comportamento irracional do investidor quando tende a reter ativos depreciados (losers), e a vender ativos apreciados (winners), contrariando a Teoria da Utilidade Esperada (a qual tem como base a racionalidade do agente econômico). Assim, tendo como escopo a comprovação da existência do efeito disposição na Bolsa de Valores de São Paulo, esta monografia utiliza dados sobre o turnover de títulos negociados mensalmente de uma amostra contendo as 20 ações mais negociadas na bolsa de valores, e o turnover total de títulos negociados mensalmente do mercado durante o período de 2000 a 2007. A metodologia empregada foi inspirada no trabalho de Lakonishok e Smidt (1986), onde foi possível analisar o comportamento dos investidores durante sua tomada de decisão no momento da venda de suas ações, e se este comportamento apresentaria características significativas da influência do efeito disposição. Os resultados encontrados foram positivos para a existência do efeito disposição no mercado acionário brasileiro, contudo o grau de significância, e a freqüência com que o efeito foi observado, ficaram abaixo dos resultados de outros estudos (Karsten et al (2004), Milanez (2003), Lakonishok e Smidt (1986)). Não houve significância para o teste t de todas as ações em conjunto, contudo foi observado significância para algumas ações da amostra analisadas individualmente, como Itaúsa e Bradesco
Sex, Drugs & Rock'n'Roll: Psychological, Legal and Cultural Examinations of Sex and Sexuality
No full textOne topic is guaranteed to polarise any group that discusses it, and
that is sex. What other word is guaranteed to make the person you say it to
hot and bothered? Ask the people around you what is the most perverted
thing you can think of and there would be as many answers as there are
people present. One of the world’s favourite authors, Terry Pratchett, musing
on the difference between erotic and perverted, suggested that erotic would
be using feathers during the sexual act, whereas perverted means using the
whole chickeni. Some of the following chapters stretch this distinction to its
limit.
The perception of what is sexually perverted shifts dependent on
who is talking about it. A person’s profession, gender, age, race, proclivities,
education and even which century they live in, have all effected the
viewpoint on sex and sexual perversions. For example, homosexuality has
long been stigmatised as sexually perverted, (and remains so among some
portions of society), but in most of the world it is no longer considered
pathological. However, in some individual minds and religious dogma,
atypical sex and sexualities are still judged as wrong, unnatural, or immoral.
So what is bad sex? Indeed, do we even have an understanding of
what is good sex? The papers collected in this volume reflect debate and
discussion about these very questions that took place in Prague at the 2nd
Global Conference Good Sex, Bad Sex, Sex Law, Crime, and Ethics in May
2010. The deliberations covered issues of defining sex, sexual consent,
sexual law and its agencies and sexual crimes. Some papers are deliberately
provocative, designed to stimulate dialogue and debate. Others are intended
to be informative, or to signal areas of potential empirical investigation. All
of them address the vexed and vexing topic of sex.
In the section Defining Sex and Sex Crime, the editors’ paper on
sexual deviancy asks what exactly is bad sex? If it is an issue of consent, then
why do we still have intensely negative views about extreme, but consensual
sexual acts that involve no (clear) victim, such as necrophilia, or in which
lack of consent cannot be assumed, such as autassinophilia? We also explore
the background to sexual intolerance as one of state-controlled intrusion and
hypocrisy. In her paper, Claudia Lodia goes further, and suggests that
society’s pathologising of sex that is outside the strict binary of adult
heterosexuality is akin to other undesirable perspectives, such as racism. Just
as racism refuses to acknowledge the benefits of diversity, so does sexual
intolerance and inequality. The argument is extended to zoophilia by Brian
Cutteridge, who points out that the animal husbandry and harvesting
practices that we accept as normal, are exceedingly more harmful to ani
Persistence of Power, Elites and Institutions
No full textWe construct a model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercise of de jure and de facto political power. A change in political institutions, for example a move from nondemocracy to democracy, alters the distribution of de jure political power, but the elite can intensify their investments in de facto political power, such as lobbying or the use of paramilitary forces, to partially or fully offset their loss of de jure power. In the baseline model, equilibrium changes in political institutions have no effect on the (stochastic) equilibrium distribution of economic institutions, leading to a particular form of persistence in equilibrium institutions, which we refer to as invariance. When the model is enriched to allow for limits on the exercise of de facto power by the elite in democracy or for costs of changing economic institutions, the equilibrium takes the form of a Markov regime-switching process with state dependence. Finally, when we allow for the possibility that changing political institutions is more difficult than altering economic institutions, the model leads to a pattern of captured democracy, whereby a democratic regime may survive, but choose economic institutions favoring the elite. The main ideas featuring in the model are illustrated using historical examples from the U.S. South, Latin America and Liberia.
When Information Dominates Comparison: A Panel Data Analysis Using Russian Subjective Data
No full textWe propose a micro-econometric investigation into the relation between subjective life satisfaction and income distribution, using a balanced panel survey of the Russian population (RLMS), running from 1994 to 2000, including 4096 individuals. We show that in the context of the Russian very volatile environment, Hirschman’s (1973) “tunnel effect” conjecture seems to be validated : variables reflecting income distribution do not influence satisfaction through social comparisons; individuals rather seem to use their informational content in order to form their expectations. The reference group’s income exerts a positive influence on individual satisfaction, which contrasts with other studies on the subject. Inequality indices do not affect individual welfare.subjective welfare, relative income, inequality, transition, panel data
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