Global Externalities, Local Policies, and Firm Selection

How to fight global problems with local tools? When only firms know what externality-producing activities can be relocated, policies shape the location distribution of firm types with different social values. We find that, because of this selection effect, the optimal local policies confront firms’ mobility with elevated corrective externality prices, in contrast with the common remedies for the relocation risk. Our mechanism incentivizes also moving firms to limit the externality, and it influences strategically the distribution of moving firms that comply with policies elsewhere. The magnitude of these effects is illustrated by a quantification for the key sectors in the EU emissions trading system.

The Road Less Taken

This chapter argues that atheists are academically successful but for a different reason. Rather than being motivated to please God by being well behaved, atheists are intrinsically motivated to pursue knowledge, think critically, and are open to new experiences. This turns out to be even more important for academic performance than being conscientious and cooperative. Disavowing a belief in God is not what causes teens to do well academically. Instead, it’s a selection effect—the kinds of people who are exceptionally curious and therefore engage in self-directed behavior tend to be the kinds of people who are willing to go against the grain and take an unpopular religious view. Some of the most academically accomplished adolescents were those who grew up with religious restraint but moved away from religion by their mid-twenties. The chapter also discusses the role of parents in transmitting beliefs about God to their children.

Dominance Structure Plays a Leading Role In Shaping Community Stability In The Northern Tibetan Grasslands

Dominant species may strongly influence biotic conditions and interact with other species, and thus are important drivers of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning, particularly in the stressed environment of alpine grasslands. However, the effects of dominant species and its derived dominance structure on the community stability remain poorly understood. We examined the temporal stability of above-ground productivity (2014-2020 year) and biotic stability mechanisms in the Northern Tibetan grasslands with changing species composition and dominance structure along a precipitation gradient. Our results showed that community stability was significantly higher in the alpine meadow than the other types of grasslands. This difference was mainly attributed to higher compensatory effect and selection effect of dominant species in the mesic meadows. Furthermore, dominant structure strongly affected community stability through increasing dominant species stability and species asynchrony. However, species richness had almost little effect. Our findings demonstrate that dominant species, as foundation species, may play leading roles in shaping community stability in the alpine grasslands, highlighting the importance of conserving dominant species for stable ecosystem functioning in these fragile ecosystems under increasing environmental fluctuations.

Handling unstable analytes: literature review and expert panel survey by Japan Bioanalysis Forum Discussion Group

Analyzing unstable small molecule drugs and metabolites in blood continues to be challenging for bioanalysis. Although scientific countermeasures such as immediate cooling, immediate freezing, addition of enzyme inhibitors, pH adjustment, dried blood spot or derivatization have been developed, selecting the best practices has become an issue in the pharmaceutical industry as the number of drugs with such problems is increasing, even for generic drugs. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and a questionnaire survey to determine a suitable practice for evaluating instability and implementing countermeasures. Three areas of focus, matrix selection, effect of hemolysis and selection of esterase inhibitors, are discussed.

Socioeconomic Status and Later-Life Health: Longitudinal Evidence From Europe and China

Scholars are divided as to how the protective effect of SES on health (the SES-health gradient) varies over the later-life course: The age-as-leveler perspective suggests that the SES-health gradient weakens with age, whereas the cumulative (dis)advantages perspective suggests that it strengthens with age. To clarify this, we used SHARE 2004-2017 (73,407 respondents from 19 European countries) and CHARLS 2011-2018 (8,370 Chinese respondents). Congruent with the age-as-leveler perspective, growth curve models revealed that the overall protective effect of SES on multimorbidity was weaker for older than younger adults (the country-specific effects were significant in two thirds of the case). We interpret this as a selection effect. However, the within-participant protective effect of SES on multimorbidity did not vary over the later-life course (the country-specific effects were nonsignificant in the majority of the case). Findings suggest that extant cross-sectional studies should be interpreted with caution and that longitudinal, cross-national studies are needed.

Benefits of Wise Organizations on Employees’ Well-Being: A Comparison of Younger and Older Workers

Research has shown a positive relation between personal wisdom and well-being, particularly in old age. Yet, it is unknown whether wisdom in the workplace also has a positive impact on workers’ well-being. We created a wise organization index for nine organizations based on 74 to 390 average employees’ ratings of perceived flexibility at work, work opportunities for training and development, satisfaction with work benefits, absence of time pressure at work, work-life balance, job fulfillment, and job security. We predicted a stronger relation of wise organization on well-being for older workers (N=269; age range 50-74, M=56.08, SD=5.04) than for younger workers (N=552; age range 19-49, M=35.10, SD=8.17) who can more easily change jobs. Results of multigroup analyses in LISREL 9.30 showed that the wise organization index had significant indirect effects on employees’ physical and subjective well-being at the second wave of data collection, mediated by employees’ perception of wise (fair and supportive) leadership assessed six months earlier and overall work satisfaction (career as calling, satisfaction with career progress, enthusiasm at work, and great workplace) at Wave 2. Contrary to expectations, the effects were not statistically different between the two age groups. However, physical well-being had a statistically stronger association with subjective well-being among younger rather than older workers, possibly indicating a positive health selection effect in the older age group. It appears that wise organizations encourage wise leadership and enable workers to work longer by contributing to their work-related, physical, and subjective well-being.

Combining Genetic Gain and Diversity in Plant Breeding: Heritability of Root Selection in Wheat Populations

To increase the resilience of agroecological farming systems against weeds, pests, and pathogens, evolutionary breeding of diversified crop populations is highly promising. A fundamental challenge in population breeding is to combine effective selection and breeding progress while maintaining intraspecific diversity. A hydroponic system was tested for its suitability to non-destructively select root traits on a population level in order to achieve genetic gain and maintain diversity. Forty wheat progenies were selected for long seminal root length (SRL) and 40 for short SRL from a wheat composite cross population grown in a hydroponic system. Wheat progenies were multiplied, and a subset evaluated again in a hydroponic system. Preliminary tests in soil and competition experiments with a model weed were performed. The hydroponic selection for long SRL led to an increase of SRL by 1.6 cm (11.6%) in a single generation. Heritability for selection of SRL was 0.59. Selecting for short SRL had no effect. The preliminary soil-based test confirmed increased shoot length but not increased SRL. Preliminary competition experiments point to slightly improved competitive response of wheat progenies but no improved competitive effect on mustard. These results indicate a heritable selection effect for SRL on a population level, combining genetic gain and intraspecific diversity.

Deep Graph Convolutional Networks for Accurate Automatic Road Network Selection

The selection of road networks is very important for cartographic generalization. Traditional artificial intelligence methods have improved selection efficiency but cannot fully extract the spatial features of road networks. However, current selection methods, which are based on the theory of graphs or strokes, have low automaticity and are highly subjective. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) combine graph theory with neural networks; thus, they can not only extract spatial information but also realize automatic selection. Therefore, in this study, we adopted GCNs for automatic road network selection and transformed the process into one of node classification. In addition, to solve the problem of gradient vanishing in GCNs, we compared and analyzed the results of various GCNs (GraphSAGE and graph attention networks [GAT]) by selecting small-scale road networks under different deep architectures (JK-Nets, ResNet, and DenseNet). Our results indicate that GAT provides better selection of road networks than other models. Additionally, the three abovementioned deep architectures can effectively improve the selection effect of models; JK-Nets demonstrated more improvement with higher accuracy (88.12%) than other methods. Thus, our study shows that GCN is an appropriate tool for road network selection; its application in cartography must be further explored.

Shortest Path Selection Algorithm for Cold Chain Logistics Transportation Based on Improved Artificial Bee Colony

Aiming at the problems of low shortest path selection accuracy, longer response time, and poor selection effect in current cold chain logistics transportation methods, a cold chain logistics transportation shortest path selection algorithm based on improved artificial bee colony is proposed. The improved algorithm is used to initialize the food source, reevaluate the fitness value of the food source, generate a new food source, optimize the objective function and food source evaluation strategy, and get an improved artificial bee colony algorithm. Based on the improved artificial bee colony algorithm, the group adaptive mechanism of particle swarm algorithm is introduced to initialize the position and velocity of each particle randomly. Dynamic detection factor and octree algorithm are adopted to dynamically update the path of modeling environment information. According to the information sharing mechanism between individual particles, the group adaptive behavior control is performed. After the maximum number of cycles, the path planning is completed, the shortest path is output, and the shortest path selection of cold chain logistics transportation is realized. The experimental results show that the shortest path selection effect of the cold chain logistics transportation of the proposed algorithm is better, which can effectively improve the shortest path selection accuracy and reduce the shortest path selection time.

In-Person Versus Online Learning in Relation to Students’ Perceptions of Mattering During COVID-19: A Brief Report

We examined students’ perceptions of mattering during the pandemic in relation to in-person versus online learning in a sample of 6578 Canadian students in Grades 4–12. We found that elementary school students who attended school in-person reported mattering the most, followed by secondary school students who learned part-time in-person and the rest of the time online (blended learning group). The students who felt that they mattered the least were those who learned online full-time during the pandemic (elementary and secondary students). These results were not driven by a selection effect for school choice during the pandemic—our experimental design showed that students’ perceptions of mattering did not differ by current learning modality when they were asked to reflect on their experiences before the pandemic even though some were also learning online full-time at the time they responded to our questions. No gender differences were found. As a validity check, we examined if mattering was correlated with school climate, as it has in past research. Results were similar in that a modest association between mattering and positive school climate was found in both experimental conditions. The results of this brief study show that in-person learning seems to help convey to students that they matter. This is important to know because students who feel like they matter are more protected, resilient, and engaged. Accordingly, mattering is a key educational indicator that ought to be considered when contemplating the merits of remote learning.