Socio-economic and demographic variations in school lunch participation of French children aged 3-17 years

Objective: To assess school canteen attendance in a French nationally representative sample of children and to analyse its association with the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the children and their families.
Design: Data from the second French national cross-sectional food consumption survey (INCA2), performed in 2006–2007, were used. Information on usual weekly school canteen attendance was collected through a self-reported questionnaire, and demographic and socio-economic variables through a face-to-face questionnaire. The associations between school canteen attendance and the socio-economic and demographic variables were investigated by multivariate logistic regression analyses.
Setting: The INCA2 sample was representative of the children aged 3–17 years in France.
Subject: Analysis was performed on 1413 schoolchildren who completed the school canteen attendance questions.
Results: Some 65?6% of schoolchildren aged 3–17 years had school lunch at least once weekly. This rate of attendance was positively correlated with age. Whatever the school level, school canteen attendance was positively associated with the educational level of the caregiver/parent. In pre- and elementary-school children, enrolment at the school canteen was also higher when the caregiver/parent worked, or in single-parent families. In secondary-school children, school lunch participation decreased with children living in more densely populated areas and increased with the level of the household’s living standards.
Conclusions: School canteen attendance was positively associated with children’s socio-economic background. This could reduce the effectiveness of the forthcoming school meal composition regulations designed to improve the diet of children from deprived backgrounds, who are more likely to have unhealthy food habits.

The decomposition of housing market variations : a panel data approach

Purpose – This paper develops a new decomposition method of the housing market variations to analyse the housing dynamics of the Australian eight capital cities.
Design/methodology/approach – This study reviews the prior research on analysing the housing market variations and classifies the previous methods into four main models. Based on this, the study develops a new decomposition of the variations, which is made up of regional information, homemarket information and time information. The panel data regression method, unit root test and F test are adopted to construct the model and interpret the housing market variations of the Australian capital cities.
Findings – This paper suggests that the Australian home-market information has the same elasticity to the housing market variations across cities and time. In contrast, the elasticities of the regional information are distinguished. However, similarities exit in the west and north of Australia or the south and east of Australia. The time information contributes differently along the observing period, although the similarities are found in certain periods.
Originality/value – This paper introduces the housing market variation decomposition into the research of housing market variations and develops a model based on the new method of the housing market variation decomposition.

Traceback of DDoS attacks using entropy variations

Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks are a critical threat to the Internet. However, the memoryless feature of the Internet routing mechanisms makes it extremely hard to trace back to the source of these attacks. As a result, there is no effective and efficient method to deal with this issue so far. In this paper, we propose a novel traceback method for DDoS attacks that is based on entropy variations between normal and DDoS attack traffic, which is fundamentally different from commonly used packet marking techniques. In comparison to the existing DDoS traceback methods, the proposed strategy possesses a number of advantagesit is memory nonintensive, efficiently scalable, robust against packet pollution, and independent of attack traffic patterns. The results of extensive experimental and simulation studies are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Our experiments show that accurate traceback is possible within 20 seconds (approximately) in a large-scale attack network with thousands of zombies.

Oxidative stress : emerging mitochondrial and cellular themes and variations in neuronal injury

Oxidative stress plays a central role in neuronal injury and cell death in acute and chronic pathological conditions. The cellular responses to oxidative stress embrace changes in mitochondria and other organelles, notably endoplasmic reticulum, and can lead to a number of cell death paradigms, which cover a spectrum from apoptosis to necrosis and include autophagy. In Alzheimer's disease, and other pathologies including Parkinson's disease, protein aggregation provides further cellular stresses that can initiate or feed into the pathways to cell death engendered by oxidative stress. Specific attention is paid here to mitochondrial dysfunction and programmed cell death, and the diverse modes of cell death mediated by mitochondria under oxidative stress. Novel insights into cellular responses to neuronal oxidative stress from a range of different stressors can be gained by detailed transcriptomics analyses. Such studies at the cellular level provide the key for understanding the molecular and cellular pathways whereby neurons respond to oxidative stress and undergo injury and death. These considerations underpin the development of detailed knowledge in more complex integrated systems, up to the intact human bearing the neuropathology, facilitating therapeutic advances.

Economic network structures, growth and poverty

While investors are advised to diversify in order to manage risk, developing countries are advised instead to liberalise their trade regimes and specialise according to their current comparative advantage. This study uses 67 regions of the GTAP database to investigate the effects of unilateral liberalisation and its impacts on countries’ economic structures and the extent to which this affects countries’ vulnerability to an economic shock. While liberalisation resulted in improvements in GDP and welfare on average, there were significant variations. A number of countries experienced contractions in their GPDs and declines in welfare. While there was no evidence of a relationship between the percentage change in GDP and the initial export or output concentration, there was a positive relationship between the percentage change in GDP and the percentage change in export and output concentrations. On average, increases in GDP following liberalisation were associated with increases in concentration in both the export sector and in overall industrial output and also reductions in the fraction of unskilled labour employed by the main export sector. Initial GDP per capita has no significant effect, implying that once concentration measures and the fraction of costs in the main export are accounted for, the per capita income levels of a country show no systematic effects on the percentage change in GDP induced by the liberalisation. For developing countries undergoing unilateral liberalisation, the results imply that they are likely to experience an increase in GDP, but an increase accompanied by more highly concentrated industrial output and exports, and also a lower fraction of main export costs due to unskilled labour. Following liberalisation, the responses of liberalised and non-liberalised versions of the region’s economies to a shock were compared. The rest of the world’s productivity in the country’s main export was increased by 10%, with the liberalised economies faring marginally worse on average in welfare and terms of trade effects, but slightly better on GDP effects. When the net effects of the initial liberalisation and subsequent technology shock were compared, countries were better off on average if they had liberalised. But this average masked important sectoral differences. Countries specialising in sectors with high proportions of own-commodity inputs in their main export’s total cost, such as manufacturing, did best, while those specialising in food tended to suffer welfare declines. Higher levels of export and output concentration also tended to reduce welfare. This suggests that increased concentration does indeed make countries more vulnerable to certain economic shocks. Finally, the economic network structures of the two extreme cases, Tanzania and Vietnam are compared visually as an aid to interpretation.

A factor-augmented VAR approach : the effect of a rise in the US personal income tax rate on the US and Canada

In this paper a factor-augmented vector autoregressive (FAVAR) model is estimated to characterize the dynamic effects of shocks in the personal income tax rate in the United States on United States and Canadian economies. The representation and the estimate of the FAVAR model is based on Stock and Watson (2005) and the shocks are recovered applying the identification scheme proposed by Bernanke et al. (2005); this method allows impulse response functions to be generated for all the variables in the dataset and provides a description of the domestic and international transmission mechanisms of United States movements in the personal income tax rate. A distinguishing feature of our model is the disaggregation of traded goods sector where imports and exports are disaggregated into 12 and 13 industries, respectively. This provides extra information on the domestic and international transmission mechanism across the two countries. The results show that the FAVAR approach generates a reasonable characterisation of the effects of United States movements in the US personal income tax rate on the United States economy and its transmission to the Canadian economy.

Vitamin D, obesity, and obesity-related chronic disease among ethnic minorities : a systematic review

Objective : To assess the association between 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25[OH]D) status and obesity, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), the metabolic syndrome, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) in ethnic minorities.

Methods : Databases searched were CINHAL with full text, Global Health, MEDLINE with full text, and PsycINFO from 1980 through 2010 (February). Studies were included if they 1) targeted immigrants from low- to high-income countries or ethnic minorities, 2) focused primarily on 25(OH)D and its relation to obesity, T2DM, and/or CVDs, and 3) were published in peer-reviewed journals. The influences of key confounders such as age, gender, and ethnicity on any observed relations were also assessed. Due to the heterogeneity of study characteristics, only a narrative synthesis was undertaken.

Results : Ethnic minorities had significantly higher rates of vitamin D insufficiency (25[OH]D <50 nmol/L; children 43.6–48.7% versus 10%; adults 30.3–53% versus 13.7–26%) than their white counterparts. None of the studies reported a prevalence of obesity stratified by ethnicity. There was evidence supporting links between vitamin D deficiency and obesity-related chronic diseases, with 14 of 14 studies reporting a statistically significant result with a measurement of obesity, four of five for T2DM, four of five for CVDs, and one of one for the metabolic syndrome. However, the strength of the association varied across ethnic groups depending on the index used to measure adiposity, T2DM, and CVDs. Because most of the included studies were cross-sectional and there were variations in outcome measurements, it was not possible to determine the relative contributions of obesity or vitamin D insufficiency to CVD risk and risk of T2DM or which is the initial driver It is possible both have a role to play.

Conclusion : Further research specific to migrant populations using randomized controlled trials are required to establish whether causal links between 25(OH)D and obesity-related chronic disease exist, and whether vitamin D supplementation could be valuable in the prevention or treatment of obesity-related diseases.

Environmental and senescent related variations in Weddell seal body mass : implications for age-specific reproductive performance

Recent studies have found age-specific variations in reproductive performance amongst Weddell seals, Leptonychotes weddellii, and we hypothesized age-related variations in maternal body mass as a mechanism linking maternal age and the observed patterns of reproductive performance. We evaluated the effects of maternal traits such as age and reproductive experience and the effects of environmental variations on maternal body mass at parturition. Maternal body mass at parturition showed substantial age- and environmental-related variations. Maternal body mass increased with age through the young and middle ages, and evidence of senescent declines in body mass was found amongst the oldest ages. Additionally, body mass at parturition was strongly influenced by environmental variations during the pregnancy period, specifically sea-ice extent and the state of the El-Niño Southern Oscillation. Patterns of age-specific variations in body mass were consistent with age-specific patterns of offspring survival probability, which supported our hypothesis that changes in body mass link maternal age and reproductive performance in the Weddell seal. Further, environmental conditions during pregnancy may be an important component of Weddell seal reproductive performance.

Are shocks to national income persistent? New global evidence

Purpose – This paper aims to investigate the integrational properties of real GDP for 125 countries
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Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies the Kwiatkowski et al. univariate test and a KPSS-type univariate test that accounts for multiple structural breaks – a test procedure proposed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. The panel versions of the KPSS-type test, proposed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. with and without structural breaks, are also applied.

Findings – The paper finds that, while univariate tests with and without structural breaks provide mixed results on persistence, the panel test suggests that shocks to national output are persistent.

Originality/value – This is a multi-country study that focuses on both developed and developing countries and uses more recent data to provide new and comparable evidence on the persistence of output.

Forecasting construction demand : a vector error correction model with dummy variables

Modelling the level of demand for construction is vital in policy formulation and implementation as the construction industry plays an important role in a country’s economic development process. In construction economics, research efforts on construction demand modelling and forecasting are various, but few researchers have considered the impact of global economy events in construction demand modelling. An advanced multivariate modelling technique, namely the vector error correction (VEC) model with dummy variables, was adopted to predict demand in the Australian construction market. The results of prediction accuracy tests suggest that the general VEC model and the VEC model with dummy variables are both acceptable for forecasting construction economic indicators. However, the VEC model that considers external impacts achieves higher prediction accuracy than the general VEC model. The model estimates indicate that the growth in population, changes in national income, fluctuations in interest rates and changes in householder expenditure all play significant roles when explaining variations in construction demand. The VEC model with disturbances developed can serve as an experimentation using an advanced econometrical method which can be used to analyse the effect of specific events or factors on the construction market growth.

Influencing health equity : role of the effective consumer scale in measuring skills and abilities in a middle income country

The 2008 World Health Report emphasizes the need for patient-centered primary care service delivery models in which patients are equal partners in the planning and management of their health. It is argued that this involvement will lead to improved management of disease, improved health outcomes and patient satisfaction, better informed decision-making, increased compliance with healthcare decisions, and better resource utilization. This article investigates the domains captured by the Effective Consumer Scale (EC-17) in relation to vulnerable population groups that experience health inequity. Particular focus is paid to the domain of health literacy as an area fundamental to patients’ involvement in managing their condition and negotiating the healthcare system. In examining the possible influence of Outcome Measures in Rheumatology Clinical Trials (OMERACT) on health equity, we used the recent translation and validation of the EC-17 scale into Spanish and tested Argentina as an example. Future plans to use the EC-17 with vulnerable groups include formal collaboration and needs assessment with the community to tailor an intervention to meet its needs in a culturally relevant manner. Some systematic reviews have questioned whether interventions to improve effective consumer skills are appropriate in vulnerable populations. We propose that these populations may have the most to gain from such interventions since they might be expected to have relatively lower skills and health literacy than other groups.

Income support best way of fixing equity : Go8

The Go8 has broken ranks with other university groups in suggesting that base funding shouldn’t have an equity component.