This paper develops and estimates a Multiple Discrete Continuous Extreme Value (MDCEV) model of household activity generation that jointly predicts the activity participation decisions of all individuals in a household by activity purpose and the precise combination of individuals participating. The model is estimated on a sample obtained from the Post Census Regional Household Travel Survey conducted by the South California Association of Governments (SCAG) in the year 2000. A host of household, individual, and residential neighborhood accessibility measures are used as explanatory variables. The results reveal that, in addition to household and individual demographics, the built environment of the home zone also impacts the activity participation levels and durations of households. A validation exercise is undertaken to evaluate the ability of the proposed model to predict participation levels and durations. In addition to providing richness in behavioral detail, the model can be easily embedded in an activity-based microsimulation framework and is computationally efficient as it obviates the need for several hierarchical sub-models typically used in extant activity-based systems to generate activity patterns.Keywords: Intrahousehold interactions, joint activity participation, multiple-discreteness, activity-based travel demand modeling 1 INTRODUCTIONThe emphasis of the activity-based approach to travel modeling is on activity participation and scheduling over a specified time period (usually a weekday in the U.S.), with travel being viewed as a derivative of out-of-home activity participation and scheduling decisions. While the detailed structures of activity-based models (ABMs) vary substantially, it is typical for ABMs to model "mandatory" activity decisions such as out-of-home work-related decisions (employed or not, duration of work, location of work, and timing of work) and education-related decisions (student or not, duration of study, location of study, and timing of study) as precursors to the generation of out-of-home non-work activity participations and the overall activity-travel schedules of individuals (including the scheduling of work and non-work episodes). Within the context of the generation of out-of-home non-work activity participation, while early activity-based travel studies ignored the interactions between individuals within a household (see, for example, Mannering et al., 1994, Lu andPas, 1999), more recent studies and models have emphasized the need to explicitly consider such interactions and model joint activity participations within a household. This is motivated by several considerations. First, individuals within a household usually do not make their activity engagement decisions in isolation. As articulated by Gliebe and Koppelman (2002) and Kapur and Bhat (2007), an individual's activity participation decisions are likely to be dependent on other members of the household because of the possible sharing of household maintenance responsibilities, joint activity participat...

Soil erosion in many parts of the developing world poses a threat to rural livelihoods, to the sustainbility of the agricultural sector, and to the environment. Most erosion prediction models are mechanistic and unsuited to quantify the severity of soil erosion in a data-limited developing world context. The model developed in this paper for Negros Island, in the central Philippines, is based on the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation, but contains important innovations such as the movement of eroded soil over the landscape, simulating deposition on lower slopes and in waterways. It also includes a term describing farmer strategies to reduce soil erosion, which are typically ignored in erosion prediction models. A two-sample t-test found that model-predicted sediment loading values were not significantly different from field-measured sediment loading values when corrected for watershed size (P = 0.857). The model predicts an annual loss of 2.7 million cubic meters of sediment to waterways such that by 2050 more than 416,000 ha of agricultural land will be rendered unproductive due to erosion. Farmer behavior conserves soil, but on the steepest slopes soil conservation practices are not adequate to prevent erosion. Of two proposed strategies to control soil erosion in the rural Philippines, the model suggests that a complete switch to tree crops would conserve more soil than universal terrace adoption. However, even under these conservation scenarios, erosion threatens the areal extent of upland agriculture on Negros, and hence the sustainability of the island's food supply.

Although many high-risk mucosal and cutaneous human papillomaviruses (HPVs) theoretically have the potential to synthesize L1 isoforms differing in length, previous seroepidemiological studies only focused on the short L1 variants, co-assembling with L2 to infectious virions. Using the multimammate mouse Mastomys coucha as preclinical model, this is the first study demonstrating seroconversion against different L1 isoforms during the natural course of papillomavirus infection. Intriguingly, positivity with the cutaneous MnPV was accompanied by a strong seroresponse against a longer L1 isoform, but to our surprise, the raised antibodies were non-neutralizing. Only after a delay of around 4 months, protecting antibodies against the short L1 appeared, enabling the virus to successfully establish an infection. This argues for a novel humoral immune escape mechanism that may also have important implications on the interpretation of epidemiological data in terms of seropositivity and protection of PV infections in general.

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