In: Alcohol and alcoholism: the international journal of the Medical Council on Alcoholism (MCA) and the journal of the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ESBRA), Band 39, Heft 4, S. 290-296
Climate change has already begun to profoundly alter the relationship betweenhumans and their environment for the vast majority of the world's population. How-ever, history has demonstrated that human are nothing if not responsive: as theclimate changes, so too will economies, governments, and individuals. This disser-tation examines impacts and responses to climate change with an eye towards un-derstanding how future societies might adapt to substantial climatic changes. Thefirst chapter measures the welfare cost of changes in amenity values due to climatechange by proxying for temperature preferences using contemporaneous changes inmood, as detected from posts on the social media platform Twitter. The secondchapter examines the response of electricity demand to changes in temperature asa means to project patterns of future energy consumption and large-scale capitalinvestments. The third chapter makes a methodological contribution to test threequasi-experimental methods of estimating electricity savings in dynamic pricing pro-grams versus an empirical "gold standard": the results from this chapter will aidpolicymakers in quantifying the effects these programs on curbing future increasesin electricity generation due to climate change.The first chapter is motivated by a gap in the climate impacts literature: thechange in amenity values resulting from temperature increases may be a substantialunaccounted-for cost of climate change. Without an explicit market for climate, priorwork has relied on cross-sectional variation or survey data to identify this cost. Thispaper presents an alternative method of estimating preferences over nonmarket goodswhich accounts for unobserved cross-sectional and temporal variation and allows forprecise estimates of nonlinear effects. Specifically, I create a rich panel dataset onhedonic state: a geographically and temporally dense collection of updates from thesocial media platform Twitter, scored using a set of both human- and machine-trainedsentiment analysis algorithms. Using this dataset, I find strong evidence of a sharpdeclines in hedonic state above and below 20 ◦ C (68 ◦ F). This finding is robust acrossall measures of hedonic state and to a variety of specifications.The second chapter simulates the effect of climate change on future electricitydemand in the United States. We combine fine-scaled hourly electricity load datawith observations of weather to estimate the response of both average and peakelectricity demand to changes in temperature. Applying these estimates to a set oflocally downscaled climate projections, we project regional end-of-century changesin electricity load. The results document increases in average hourly load across thecountry, with more pronounced changes occurring in the southern United States.Importantly, we find changes in peak demand to be larger than changes in aver-age demand, which has implications for public policy choices around future capitalinvestment.The third chapter compares quasi-experimental designs to experimental designs inthe context of a dynamic pricing setting designed to encourage customers to save en-ergy. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are widely viewed as the "gold standard"for evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention. However, because are percievedto be prohibitively expensive and challenging to implement successfully, they arenot broadly executed in policy settings. In particular, analysis of the effect of energypricing has largely been conducted through a two commonly used quasi-experimentalmethodologies: difference-in-differences and propensity score matching. Using a rareset of large-scale randomized field evaluations of electricity pricing, we compare theestimates obtained from these quasi-experimental designs and from a regression dis-continuity design to the true estimates obtained through the experimental method.We demonstrate empirical evidence in favor of four stylized facts that highlight theimportance of understanding selection bias and spillover effects in this context. First,difference-in-differences and propensity-score methods mis-estimate the true effectby up to 5% of mean peak hour usage. Second, propensity score estimates resembledifference-in-difference findings, but standard errors tend to be larger and point esti-mates are more biased for opt-out models. Third, regression discontinuity methodscan be heavily biased relative to the true average treatment effect. Finally, we findstrong evidence that biases are more pronounced in opt-in vs. opt-out designs.
Action research and arts-based activities were used to investigate the experiences of youths, ages 16-20 years, in the Guelph community who identified as being socially marginalized through poverty and/or unstable housing. The focus of the group was on identifying the influences of structural violence in their lives. As part of their discussions, they identified the ways in which their personal safety and well-being, their sense of feeling comfortable and included in the broader community, and their presence and role within this community were influenced by the ways others in their neighbourhoods and social networks treated them. In particular, they described the assumptions and treatment by others that were based on classism and ageism as excluding them and threatening their feelings of safety and well-being when living on the street and/or receiving social assistance. The youth group expressed these ideas through discussion, photovoice, and drawing their version of a 'community map.' This paper includes examples of these participant-produced arts projects to demonstrate their observations and ideas.
Abstract This essay engages with the mounting published criticism of neo-institutionalism, but from the point of view of the institutional logical approach, one of its descendants. By addressing each of the main critiques: (1) institutional logical theory is tautological; (2) everything is institutional; (3) the absence of politics and power, and (4) its lack of a critical theory - the essay attempts to think how to build a theoretical apparatus able to engage with the current institutional crises of the world.
In: CESifo economic studies: a joint initiative of the University of Munich's Center for Economic Studies and the Ifo Institute, Band 62, Heft 1, S. 68-87
Microdamage in the form of microcracks has been observed in cortical bone following in vivo and in vitro fatigue loading. It has been suggested that bone has an inherent ability to repair microdamage at physiological activity levels. If the biological remodelling and repair process cannot keep up with the rate of damage accumulation, as in ageing bone and in individuals such as athletes and military recruits, microdamage may accumulate even at physiological activity levels. Such microdamage accumulation is thought to contribute to stress and fragility fractures. It is therefore important to obtain quantitative data on the rate of damage accumulation so as to understand the etiology of skeletal fractures. Sequential labelling of microdamage using fluorochrome stains at different stages of mechanical loading is becoming standard for assessing damage evolution. Although verification of this staining technique is provided in the literature, it has not yet been reported if the stains change the mechanical properties of cortical bone. In this study, monotonic tensile tests were performed to investigate the effect of the staining on the monotonic tensile mechanical properties of cortical bone. Forty-eight specimens were machined from human femora obtained from three male subjects, aged 52–55 years, and all 48 specimens were systematically divided into one control and three treatment groups. Specimens in the first (n = 12) and second treatment groups (n = 12) were stained with alizarin complexone and calcein (0.0005 m), respectively, for 16 h under 50 mmHg vacuum. Specimens in the third treatment group (n = 12) were kept in calcium-supplemented saline solution under the same conditions of the first and second treatment groups. Specimens in the control group (n = 12) were removed from the freezer prior to testing and allowed to thaw at room temperature in saline solution. Differences among the mean values of the mechanical properties for four testing groups were determined by the Mann–Whitney test at a significance level ...
How does the expectation that a child will receive government benefits in adulthood affect parental investments in the child's human capital? Most parents whose children receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. We present randomly selected families with the predicted likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood. Reducing parents' expectations that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children's human capital. This zero effect is precisely estimated. Likely explanations include parents working more themselves, nonfinancial goals influencing investment, and families facing investment constraints. (JEL G52, I26, I38, J13, J24, J31)
Botnets, the remotely controlled networks of computers with malicious aims, have significantly affected the international order from Ukraine to the United States in recent years. Disruptive software, such as malware, ransomware, and disruptive services, provided by those botnets has many specific effects and properties. Therefore, it is paramount to improve the defences against them. To tackle botnets more or less successfully, one should analyse their code, communication, kill chain, and similar technical properties. However, according to the Business Model for Information Security, besides technological attributes, there is also a human and organisational aspect to their capabilities and behaviour. This paper aims to identify the aspects of different attacks and present an analysis framework to identify botnets' technological and human attributes. After researching the literature and evaluating our previous findings in this research project, we formed a unified framework for the human-organisational classification of botnets. We tested the defined framework on five botnet attacks, presenting them as case studies. The chosen botnets were ElectrumDoSMiner, Emotet, Gamover Zeus, Mirai, and VPNFilter. The focus of the comparison was motivation, the applied business model, willingness to cooperate, capabilities, and the attack source. For defending entities, reaching the target state of defending capabilities is impossible with a one-time development due to cyberspace's dynamic behaviour and botnets. Therefore, one has to develop cyberdefence and conduct threat intelligence on botnets using such methodology as that presented in this paper. This framework comprises people and technological attributes according to the BMIS model, providing the defender with a standard way of classification.