The Demand for Sons: Evidence from Divorce, Fertility, and Shotgun Marriage

This paper shows how parental preferences for sons versus daughters affect divorce, child custody, marriage, shotgun marriage when the sex of the child is known before birth, and fertility stopping rules. We document that parents with girls are significantly more likely to be divorced, that divorced fathers are more likely to have custody of their sons, and that women with only girls are substantially more likely to have never been married. Perhaps the most striking evidence comes from the analysis of shotgun marriages. Among those who have an ultrasound test during their pregnancy, mothers carrying a boy are more likely to be married at delivery. When we turn to fertility, we find that in families with at least two children, the probability of having another child is higher for all-girl families than all-boy families. This preference for sons seems to be largely driven by fathers, with men reporting they would rather have a boy by more than a two to one margin. In the final part of the paper, we compare the effects for the U.S. to five developing countries.

D-touch: A Consumer-Grade Tangible Interface Module and Musical Applications

We define a class of tangible media applications that can be implemented on consumer-grade personal computers. These applications interpret user manipulation of physical objects in a restricted space and produce unlocalized outputs. We propose a generic approach to the implementation of such interfaces using flexible fiducial markers, which identify objects to a robust and fast video-processing algorithm, so they can be recognized and tracked in real time. We describe an implementation of the technology, then report two new, flexible music performance applications that demonstrate and validate it

The Lived Experiences of Mentoring Nurses in Malaysia

Background: Being a nursing mentor is not an entirely new concept in nursing. However, it is a new phenomenon in the nursing profession in Malaysia. The nursing administration and the senior nurses in Malaysia have claimed that they have started a mentorship program by having senior nurses shadow new graduate nurses for the past two to three years ago. With no study found in Malaysia investigating the lived experiences of mentors mentoring new registered nurses, it led the researcher to develop this research that explores the real life experiences of these senior Malaysian nurses who mentor neophyte nurses.Objectives: This research explores and describes the lived experiences of nurses mentoring neophyte or new registered nurses at one of the major hospital in the Malaysia Borneo and how such experiences influence their daily routine as a nurse and also as a mentor. The research will also attaches meaning to these experiences and identifies both positive and negative experiences as a mentor to neophyte.Methods: The experiences of nurses mentoring the neophyte in the clinical area were captured using a qualitative approach to research and further viewed through methods informed by phenomenology, which used interpretive and descriptive semi-structured interviews. Hermeneutic interpretive phenomenology was used in the focus to analyze interview transcript into textual expression of the mentors. Three main themes emerge from this study are being unprepared and challenged, perceptions of mentees, mentor hope and desire

The Complex Way to Laser Diode Spectra: Example of an External Cavity Laser With Strong Optical Feedback

An external cavity laser with strong grating-filtered feedback to an antireflection-coated facet is studied with a time-domain integral equation for the electric field, which reproduces the modes of the oscillation condition as steady-state solutions. For each mode, the stability and spectral behavior is determined by analysis of the location of side modes in the complex frequency plane. The complex frequency diagrams are shown to be a useful tool to determine the self-stabilization effect of mode coupling and its dependence on laser parameters and external cavity design. The model is used to simulate the large signal time evolution after start from unstable mode

Dual representation of choice and aspirational preferences

We consider choice over a set of monetary acts (random variables) and study a general class of preferences. These preferences favor diversification, except perhaps on a subset of sufficiently disliked acts, over which concentration is instead preferred. This structure encompasses a number of known models in this setting. We show that such preferences can be expressed in dual form in terms of a family of measures of risk and a target function. Specifically, the choice function is equivalent to selection of a maximum index level such that the risk of beating the target function at that level is acceptable. This dual representation may help to uncover new models of choice. One that we explore in detail is the special case of a bounded target function. This case corresponds to a type of satisficing and has descriptive relevance. Moreover, the model results in optimization problems that may be efficiently solved in large-scale.

New insights from inside-out Doppler tomography

We present preliminary results from our investigation into using an 'inside-out' velocity space for creating a Doppler tomogram. The aim is to transpose the inverted appearance of the Cartesian velocity space used in normal Doppler tomography. In a comparison between normal and inside-out Doppler tomograms of cataclysmic variables, we show that the inside-out velocity space has the potential to produce new insights into the accretion dynamics in these systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, conference: The Golden Age of Cataclysmic Variables and Related Objects II, Palermo 201