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Background: Based on single cross-sectional data, prior research finds evidence of “transportation assimilation” among U.S. immigrants: the length of stay in the U.S. is negatively correlated with public transit use. This paper revisits this question by using repeated cross-sectional data, and examines the trend of transportation assimilation over time. Methods and results: Using 1980, 1990, 2000 1% census and 2010 (1%) American Community Survey, I examine the relationship between the length of stay in the U.S. and public transit ridership among immigrants. I first run regressions separately in four data sets: I regress public transit ridership on the length of stay, controlling for other individual and geographic variables. I then compare the magnitudes of the relationship in four regressions. To study how the rate of transportation assimilation changes over time, I pool the data set and regress public transit ridership on the length of stay and its interactions with year dummies to compare the coefficients across surveys. Results confirm the conclusion of transportation assimilation: as the length of stay in the U.S. increases, an immigrant’s public transit use decreases. However, the repeated cross-section analysis suggests the assimilation rate has been decreasing in the past few decades. Conclusions: This paper finds evidence of transportation assimilation: immigrants become less likely to ride public transit as the length of stay in the U.S. increases. The assimilation rate, however, has been decreasing over time. This paper finds that the rate of public transit ridership among new immigrants upon arrival, the geographic distribution of immigrants, and the changing demographics of the U.S. immigrants play roles in affecting the trend of transportation assimilation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There have been growing recommendations to include education in multi-disciplinary interventions targeting chronic pain management. However, effects of this strategy on short- and long-term self-management of chronic pain, remain largely unexplored. Objectives: 1. To provide an updated overview of studies that report on the impact of patient education in multi-disciplinary interventions, on self-management of chronic pain; 2. To explore associations between education and chronic pain self-management techniques; and 3. To identify the format and duration of suitable chronic pain interventions targeted at patient self-management. Methods: Design: Narrative systematic literature review of randomised or controlled study designs. Data Sources: PubMed, CINAHL, EMBASE, PsycINFO. Participants: Adult patients with chronic pain of any aetiology participating in multi-disciplinary programs that included education. Main outcome measures: Assessments of level of pain, function, quality of life, self-efficacy, self-management, and any other relevant assessments. Study Appraisal and Synthesis Methods: PRISMA guidelines, Cochrane Risk of Bias tool, and TIDieR model. Results: Database searching identified 485 potential papers. After removal of duplicates, and irrelevant articles by title and abstract, 120 full-text articles were reviewed and 27 studies were included in this systematic review. Studies were predominantly from the United States (n = 8; 29.6%). Over one hundred outcome measures were identified across all studies, with significant variation also observed in terms of how chronic pain duration was defined, and how education was delivered to participants. Overall, positive benefits of education were reported. Conclusions: Education, as part of multi-disciplinary programs, is likely to improve self-management and self-efficacy in people with chronic pain of any aetiology. Heterogeneity in terms of: chronic pain duration; educational resources; healthcare professionals; and outcome measures, were identified as limitations. Further research, in the form of Randomised Controlled Trials addressing these limitations, is recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many US biomedical PhD programs receive more applications for admissions than they can accept each year, necessitating a selective admissions process. Typical selection criteria include standardized test scores, undergraduate grade point average, letters of recommendation, a resume and/or personal statement highlighting relevant research or professional experience, and feedback from interviews with training faculty. Admissions decisions are often founded on assumptions that these application components correlate with research success in graduate school, but these assumptions have not been rigorously tested. We sought to determine if any application components were predictive of student productivity measured by first-author student publications and time to degree completion. We collected productivity metrics for graduate students who entered the umbrella first-year biomedical PhD program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 2008–2010 and analyzed components of their admissions applications. We found no correlations of test scores, grades, amount of previous research experience, or faculty interview ratings with high or low productivity among those applicants who were admitted and chose to matriculate at UNC. In contrast, ratings from recommendation letter writers were significantly stronger for students who published multiple first-author papers in graduate school than for those who published no first-author papers during the same timeframe. We conclude that the most commonly used standardized test (the general GRE) is a particularly ineffective predictive tool, but that qualitative assessments by previous mentors are more likely to identify students who will succeed in biomedical graduate research. Based on these results, we conclude that admissions committees should avoid over-reliance on any single component of the application and de-emphasize metrics that are minimally predictive of student productivity. We recommend continual tracking of desired training outcomes combined with retrospective analysis of admissions practices to guide both application requirements and holistic application review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordability in the developed world, as compared to the developing world, more work is needed in developed countries to understand the extent of this issue in terms of the number of households and persons impacted. To address this need, this paper assesses potential affordability issues for households in the United States using the U.S. EPA’s 4.5% affordability criteria for combined water and wastewater services. Analytical results from this paper highlight high-risk and at-risk households for water poverty or unaffordable water services. Many of these households are clustered in pockets of water poverty within counties, which is a concern for individual utility providers servicing a large proportion of customers with a financial inability to pay for water services. Results also highlight that while water rates remain comparatively affordable for many U.S. households, this trend will not continue in the future. If water rates rise at projected amounts over the next five years, conservative projections estimate that the percentage of U.S. households who will find water bills unaffordable could triple from 11.9% to 35.6%. This is a concern due to the cascading economic impacts associated with widespread affordability issues; these issues mean that utility providers could have fewer customers over which to spread the large fixed costs of water service. Unaffordable water bills also impact customers for whom water services are affordable via higher water rates to recover the costs of services that go unpaid by lower income households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual design, learning sciences, and nanotechnology may be strange bedfellows; yet, as this paper highlights, peer interaction between a designer and a scientist is an effective method for helping scientists acquire visual design skills. We describe our findings from observing twelve sessions at the Design Help Desk, a tutoring center at the University of Washington. At each session, a scientist (who is expert in his own domain but a novice in design) consulted a designer (who is expert in design but a novice in science) in order to receive advice and guidance on how to improve a scientific visualization. At the Design Help Desk, this pairing consistently produced a momentary disequilibrium in the scientist’s thought process: a disequilibrium that led to agency (where the scientist gained ownership of his/her own learning) and conceptual change in the scientist’s understanding of visual design. Scientists who visited the Design Help Desk were satisfied with their experience, and their published work demonstrated an improved ability to visually communicate research findings—a skill critical to the advancement of science. To our knowledge, the Design Help Desk is a unique effort to educate scientists in visual design; we are not aware of any other design-advice/tutoring centers at public or private universities in the United States or abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper calculates the distribution of an adjusted measure of income that deducts damages due to exposure to air pollution from reported market income in the United States from 2011 to 2014. The Gini coefficient for this measure of adjusted income is 0.682 in 2011, as compared to 0.482 for market income. By 2014, we estimate that the Gini for adjusted income fell to 0.646, while the market income Gini did not appreciably change. The inclusion of air pollution damage acts like a regressive tax: with air pollution, the bottom 20% of households lose roughly 10% of the share of income, while the top 20% of households gain 10%. We find that, unlike the case for market income, New England is not the most unequal division with respect to adjusted income. Further, the difference between adjusted income for white and Hispanics is smaller than expected. However, the gap in augmented income between whites and African-Americans is widening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: As gentrification continues in New York City as well as other urban areas, residents of lower socioeconomic status maybe at higher risk for residential displacement. Yet, there have been few quantitative assessments of the health impacts of displacement. The objective of this paper is to assess the association between displacement and healthcare access and mental health among the original residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City. Methods: We used 2 data sources: 1) 2005–2014 American Community Surveys to identify gentrifying neighborhoods in New York City, and 2) 2006–2014 Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System. Our cohort included 12,882 residents of gentrifying neighborhoods in 2006 who had records of emergency department visits or hospitalization at least once every 2 years in 2006–2014. Rates of emergency department visits and hospitalizations post-baseline were compared between residents who were displaced and those who remained. Results: During 2006–2014, 23% were displaced. Compared with those who remained, displaced residents were more likely to make emergency department visits and experience hospitalizations, mainly due to mental health (Rate Ratio = 1.8, 95% confidence interval = 1.5, 2.2), after controlling for baseline demographics, health status, healthcare utilization, residential movement, and the neighborhood of residence in 2006. Conclusions: These findings suggest negative impacts of displacement on healthcare access and mental health, particularly among adults living in urban areas and with a history of frequent emergency department visits or hospitalizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to estimate peer influence in video gaming time among adolescents. Using a nationally representative sample of the U.S. school-aged adolescents in 2009–2010, we estimate a structural model that accounts for the potential biases in the estimate of the peer effect. Our peer group is exogenously assigned and includes one year older adolescents in the same school grade as the respondent. The peer measure is based on peers’ own reports of video gaming time. We find that an additional one hour of playing video games per week by older grade-mates results in .47 hours increase in video gaming time by male responders. We do not find significant peer effect among female responders. Effective policies aimed at influencing the time that adolescents spend video gaming should take these findings into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common policy approach to reducing childhood obesity aims to shape the environment in which children spend most of their time: neighborhoods and schools. This paper uses richly detailed data on the body mass index (BMI) of all New York City public school students in grades K-8 to assess the potential for place-based approaches to reduce child obesity. We document variation in the prevalence of obesity across NYC public schools and census tracts, and then estimate the extent to which this variation can be explained by differences in individual-level predictors (such as race and household income). Both unadjusted and adjusted variability across neighborhoods and schools suggest place-based policies have the potential to meaningfully reduce child obesity, but under most realistic scenarios the improvement would be modest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “fetal origins” hypothesis suggests that fetal conditions not only affect birth characteristics such as birth weight and gestational age, but also have lifelong health implications. Despite widespread interest in this hypothesis, few methodological advances have been proposed to improve the measurement and modeling of fetal conditions. A Statistics in Medicine paper by Bollen, Noble, and Adair examined favorable fetal growth conditions (FFGC) as a latent variable. Their study of Filipino children from Cebu provided evidence consistent with treating FFGC as a latent variable that largely mediates the effects of mother’s characteristics on birth weight, birth length, and gestational age. This innovative method may have widespread utility, but only if the model applies equally well across diverse settings. Our study assesses whether the FFGC model of Cebu replicates and generalizes to a very different population of children from North Carolina (N = 705) and Pennsylvania (N = 494). Using a series of structural equation models, we find that key features of the Cebu analysis replicate and generalize while we also highlight differences between these studies. Our results support treating fetal conditions as a latent variable when researchers test the fetal origins hypothesis. In addition to contributing to the substantive literature on measuring fetal conditions, we also discuss the meaning and challenges involved in replicating prior research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]