Animated films present a unique set of challenges and questions to scholars examining films from a cognitive perspective. When the confines of the real world don’t exist as they do in live action films, the filmmaker is confronted with creating the entire narrative space from scratch (Buchan, 2011; Buchan, 2006). How do animators manage this seemingly enormous task? This question certainly pred...

Spermatic cord torsion happens rather frequently in young men. It must be discovered early on, to allow for the possibility of removal by surgery. It appears from recently written medical articles that the endocrine function of the testis is protected following several hours of torsion and the risk of immunological damage to the contralateral testis is subsequently reduced.

This paper introduces the class of seasonal specific structural time series models, according to which each season follows specific dynamics, but is also tied to the others by a common random effects. This results in a dynamic variance components model that can account for some kind of periodic behaviour, such as periodic heteroscedasticity, and is tailored to deal with situations when one or a...

Receipt of unemployment insurance by immigrant men and social assistance by immigrant families are analysed using thirteen surveys from Canada. Estimates from a cohort fixed effects model are found to be sensitive to the choice of survey years. This is due to the mis-specification of the fixed effects model which is rejected when tested against a model allowing for separate year-since-migration...

A common finding in the empirical civil war literature is that population size and per capita income are highly significant predictors of civil war incidence and onset. This paper shows that the common finding of population size and per capita income having a significant average effect on civil war risk in a world sample breaks down once countryand year-specific unobservables are accounted for....

The method of maximum likelihood (ML), introduced by Fisher (1921), is widely used in human and quantitative genetics and we draw upon this approach throughout the book, especially in Chapters 13–16 (mixture distributions) and 26–27 (variance component estimation). Weir (1996) gives a useful introduction with genetic applications, while Kendall and Stuart (1979) and Edwards (1992) provide more ...

I report estimates for a fixed-effects model of country-level Gini coefficients as a function of economic freedom along with relevant control variables. Gini coefficients are drawn from the UNU/WIDER World Income Inequality Database Version 2.0a, while economic freedom is measured by the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index. Controls are included for per capita income, politic...

The prevalence of shirking within a large Italian bank appears to be characterized by significant regional differentials. In particular, absenteeism and misconduct episodes are substantially more prevalent in the south. We consider a number of potential explanations for this fact: different individual backgrounds; group-interaction effects; sorting of workers across regions; differences in loca...

We propose Möbius transformations as the natural rotation and scaling tools for editing spherical images. As an application we produce spherical Droste images. We obtain other self-similar visual effects using rational functions, elliptic functions, and Schwarz-Christoffel maps.