SEASONALITY OF BIRTHS IS ASSOCIATED WITH SEASONALITY OF MARRIAGES IN MALTA
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study was carried out to quantify secular trends in seasonal variation in births in Malta, a small Mediterranean country where the vast proportion of births occur in wedlock due to a predominantly Roman Catholic population. It also related such variations to seasonal variation in marriages. Annual seasonal peaks of marriages and births were analysed over the period 1950-1996 by X11 ARIMA. A significant peak in marriages (n = 111,932) in the third quarter of the year was found for almost the entire period under study. This was paralleled by a peak in births (n = 299,558) for the period 1970-1996, which lagged after the peak in marriages by 13-14 months. For the period 1994-1996, when monthly data for monthly pregnancies were available by pregnancy order, the peak in births was caused by first pregnancies only. Seasonal patterns in births occur almost universally due to cultural and/or biometeorological factors. The best known patterns include those of the southern United States, where births decline in April and May, and in northern Europe, where births peak in March and April. In Malta, the late summer peak in births appears to be due to a practical and planned approach by Maltese couples to contraceptive planning, probably influenced by the Roman Catholic ethos and social pressures, with unprotected intercourse occurring only after marriage. In Malta, birth control, albeit by so-called natural methods, was introduced in the 1960s. Prior to this period, births peaked towards the beginning/end of the year, and this may be the more natural seasonality of births in Malta.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it