Revisiting Happiness and Well-Being in Later Life from Interdisciplinary Age-Studies Perspectives

Important demographic shifts and the so-called ‘longevity revolution’ have generated profound transformations in social interpretations of old age, an increased interest in age studies and new ideas on how to age well. The majority of current successful ageing models, however, represent rather a prevailing construct in Western societies. Physical and psychosocial well-being and the ability to adjust to the ideals of successful ageing are often seen as an integral part of a good quality in life. Those who do not or cannot follow these lines are often regarded as morally irresponsible and seem to be doomed to have a lonely, unhealthy and unhappy later life. This paper questions the current discourses of successful ageing in terms of healthy and happy living and calls for a reconsideration of more global, integrated and holistic understandings of the process of growing old

Prediction of future hospital admissions - what is the tradeoff between specificity and accuracy?

Large amounts of electronic medical records collected by hospitals across the developed world offer unprecedented possibilities for knowledge discovery using computer based data mining and machine learning. Notwithstanding significant research efforts, the use of this data in the prediction of disease development has largely been disappointing. In this paper we examine in detail a recently proposed method which has in preliminary experiments demonstrated highly promising results on real-world data. We scrutinize the authors' claims that the proposed model is scalable and investigate whether the tradeoff between prediction specificity (i.e. the ability of the model to predict a wide number of different ailments) and accuracy (i.e. the ability of the model to make the correct prediction) is practically viable. Our experiments conducted on a data corpus of nearly 3,000,000 admissions support the authors' expectations and demonstrate that the high prediction accuracy is maintained well even when the number of admission types explicitly included in the model is increased to account for 98% of all admissions in the corpus. Thus several promising directions for future work are highlighted.Comment: In Proc. International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, April 201

Critical Approaches to Ageing Body Politics in the Works of Erica Jong

The ways we read our bodies and bodily transformations are deeply inscribed in cultural meanings that vary across different historical times and societies. Even if the desire to achieve culturally imposed beauty standards and ideals is relevant to all age groups, anxieties about bodily decline become more pronounced as we approach the final stages of our lives. Physical changes are never just manifestations of cellular and organic loss, but can also be a source of troubled identifies and fragmented personalities caused by the mismatch between our external appearance and the inner perception of the self. This paper offers the longitudinal analysis of female processes of ageing from age-studies and feminist perspectives, as depicted in the works of Erica Jong, a contemporary American writer. It uncovers significant aspects of the pressures older women are subjected to in order to look more appealing in youth-oriented cultures, and demonstrates that the human body is often regarded as a conflicting site of perpetual ambiguities and troubled feelings caused by physical decay

Randomly stopped maximum and maximum of sums with consistently varying distributions

Let $\{\xi_1,\xi_2,\ldots\}$ be a sequence of independent random variables, and $\eta$ be a counting random variable independent of this sequence. In addition, let $S_0:=0$ and $S_n:=\xi_1+\xi_2+\cdots+\xi_n$ for $n\geqslant1$. We consider conditions for random variables $\{\xi_1,\xi_2,\ldots\}$ and $\eta$ under which the distribution functions of the random maximum $\xi_{(\eta)}:=\max\{0,\xi_1,\xi_2,\ldots,\xi_{\eta}\}$ and of the random maximum of sums $S_{(\eta)}:=\max\{S_0,S_1,S_2,\ldots,S_{\eta}\}$ belong to the class of consistently varying distributions. In our consideration the random variables $\{\xi_1,\xi_2,\ldots\}$ are not necessarily identically distributed.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.15559/17-VMSTA74 in the Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications (https://www.i-journals.org/vtxpp/VMSTA) by VTeX (http://www.vtex.lt/

Projective stochastic equations and nonlinear long memory

A projective moving average $\{X_t, t \in \mathbb{Z}\}$ is a Bernoulli shift written as a backward martingale transform of the innovation sequence. We introduce a new class of nonlinear stochastic equations for projective moving averages, termed projective equations, involving a (nonlinear) kernel $Q$ and a linear combination of projections of $X_t$ on "intermediate" lagged innovation subspaces with given coefficients $\alpha_i, \beta_{i,j}$. The class of such equations include usual moving-average processes and the Volterra series of the LARCH model. Solvability of projective equations is studied, including a nested Volterra series representation of the solution $X_t$. We show that under natural conditions on $Q, \alpha_i, \beta_{i,j}$, this solution exhibits covariance and distributional long memory, with fractional Brownian motion as the limit of the corresponding partial sums process

On linear regression models in infinite dimensional spaces with scalar response

In functional linear regression, the parameters estimation involves solving a non necessarily well-posed problem and it has points of contact with a range of methodologies, including statistical smoothing, deconvolution and projection on finite-dimensional subspaces. We discuss the standard approach based explicitly on functional principal components analysis, nevertheless the choice of the number of basis components remains something subjective and not always properly discussed and justified. In this work we discuss inferential properties of least square estimation in this context with different choices of projection subspaces, as well as we study asymptotic behaviour increasing the dimension of subspaces

A Lundberg-type inequality for an inhomogeneous renewal risk model

We obtain a Lundberg-type inequality in the case of an inhomogeneous renewal risk model. We consider the model with independent, but not necessarily identically distributed, claim sizes and the interoccurrence times. In order to prove the main theorem, we first formulate and prove an auxiliary lemma on large values of a sum of random variables asymptotically drifted in the negative direction.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.15559/15-VMSTA30 in the Modern Stochastics: Theory and Applications (https://www.i-journals.org/vtxpp/VMSTA) by VTeX (http://www.vtex.lt/

Foreign Direct Investment and Productivity Spillovers: Updated Evidence from Central and Eastern Europe

The paper discusses the inflows of foreign direct investment into the CEE countries and focuses on analysis of productivity spillovers. An overview of the relevance of foreign firms in the CEE economies is presented. Using firm-level data on manufacturing industries for the period 2000–-2005, the total factor productivity of domestic firms is estimated using the Petrin and Levinsohn (2003) method and subsequently related within a panel data model to foreign presence in the same industry and in industries linked via the production chain. The presence of productivity spillovers is tested for across several sub-samples to detect possible conditionalities.Foreign direct investment, productivity, spillovers.