Chinese American Newspapers and Periodicals in the United States and Their Web Presence

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the Web presence of Chinese American newspapers and periodicals in the United States based on the author's last ten-year national survey of Chinese American newspapers and periodicals in the United States in 1997. The author reports on and updates the changes, development, variety, and status of Chinese American newspapers and periodicals and their Web editions. These publications and their Web presence have played a major role in maintaining the identity, cohesiveness, and structure of Chinese communities. They are the major sources for covering significant aspects of Chinese culture, including the historical, social, economic, and political development of Chinese Americans in the United States. Serials Review 2003; 29:179–198.     

Is the ref blind? Crime and punishment in English Premier League football

Justice is traditionally portrayed as being blind; so are football referees, but for different reasons. For years, football managers have been complaining that referees are inconsistent, and biased in favour of home teams. Recently, a team of university researchers has investigated whether or not there is any factual or statistical basis for such claims. John Goddard describes their findings.     

中国城镇职工健康及医疗服务需求的模型分析

健康是人生的一个重要方面 ,也是社会保障的一个重要指标。健康状况的改善对社会发展和经济增长的贡献是多方面的。在过去的几十年里 ,尽管世界人口的健康状况得到了改善 ,但是今后仍面临新的健康需求挑战 (ＴｈｅＷｏｒｌｄＢａｎｋ ,1993)。根据传统的消费需求理论 ,迈克·格罗斯曼(ＭｉｃｈａｅｌＧｒｏｓｓｍａｎ ,1972 )的理论认为 ,消费者对于健康的需求是出于以下两个原因 :其一 ,健康是一种消费商品 ,它可以使消费者感觉良好 ;其二 ,健康是一种投资商品 ,健康状况将决定消费者可利用的时间的多少。生病天数的减少将增加可用于工作和…     

Strong approximations for time-varying infinite-server queues with non-renewal arrival and service processes

In real stochastic systems, the arrival and service processes may not be renewal processes. For example, in many telecommunication systems such as internet traffic where data traffic is bursty, the sequence of inter-arrival times and service times are often correlated and dependent. One way to model this non-renewal behavior is to use Markovian Arrival Processes (MAPs) and Markovian Service Processes (MSPs). MAPs and MSPs allow for inter-arrival and service times to be dependent, while providing the analytical tractability of simple Markov processes. To this end, we prove fluid and diffusion limits for MAP_t/MSP_t/∞ queues by constructing a new Poisson process representation for the queueing dynamics and leveraging strong approximations for Poisson processes. As a result, the fluid and diffusion limit theorems illuminate how the dependence structure of the arrival or service processes can affect the sample path behavior of the queueing process. Finally, our Poisson representation for MAPs and MSPs is useful for simulation purposes and may be of independent interest.     

Model fusion and multiple testing in the likelihood paradigm: shrinkage and evidence supporting a point null hypothesis

ABSTRACT

According to the general law of likelihood, the strength of statistical evidence for a hypothesis as opposed to its alternative is the ratio of their likelihoods, each maximized over the parameter of interest. Consider the problem of assessing the weight of evidence for each of several hypotheses. Under a realistic model with a free parameter for each alternative hypothesis, this leads to weighing evidence without any shrinkage toward a presumption of the truth of each null hypothesis. That lack of shrinkage can lead to many false positives in settings with large numbers of hypotheses. A related problem is that point hypotheses cannot have more support than their alternatives. Both problems may be solved by fusing the realistic model with a model of a more restricted parameter space for use with the general law of likelihood. Applying the proposed framework of model fusion to data sets from genomics and education yields intuitively reasonable weights of evidence.     

Generalized exchange and propensity for military service: The moderating effect of prior military exposure

The propensity for military service (PMS) of young Americans is an important issue for our Armed Forces. Since the 1990s, the PMS of young Americans has steadily declined. Overtime, a declining PMS may cause military mission degradation, lowering of military recruitment standards, base closures, and reinstatement of the unpopular military draft system. This paper investigates the moderator effect of prior military service on the Generalized Exchange-PMS relationship. Generalized exchange is when indirect benefits such as preserving freedom and the American way of life accrue to the larger society because of an individual's military service. This paper uses a structural equation modelling approach to analyse the moderating effect of prior military exposure on prospective recruits regarding their PMS. Findings indicate that the group of prospective recruits with prior military exposure had higher levels of PMS than the group without such exposure, that is, the young people with prior military exposure are more likely to enlist in the military than the young Americans with no prior military exposure.     

Probability and statisitics in the service of computer science: illustrations using the assignment problem

Recent work on the assignment problem is surveyed with the aim of illustrating the contribution that stochastic thinking can make to problems of interest to computer scientists. The assignment problem is thus examined in connection with the analysis of greedy algorithms, marriage lemmas, linear programming with random costs, randomization based matching, stochastic programming, and statistical mechanics. (The survey is based on the invited presentation given during the “Statistics Days at FSU” in March 1990.)     

Performance analysis of the retrial queues with finite number of sources and service interruptions

This paper aims at presenting an analytic approach for investigating a single-server retrial queue with finite population of customers where the server is subject to interruptions. A free source may generate a primary call to request service. If the server is free upon arrival, the call starts to be served and the service times are independent, generally distributed random variables. During the service time the source cannot generate a new primary call. After service the source moves into the free state and can generate a new primary call. There is no waiting space in front of the server, and a call who finds the server unavailable upon arrival joins an orbit of unsatisfied customers. The server is subject to interruptions during the service processes. When the server is interrupted, the call being served just before server interruption goes to the retrial orbit and will retry its luck after a random amount of time until it finds the server available. The recovery times of the interrupted server are assumed to be generally distributed. Our analysis extends previous work on this topic and includes the analysis of the arriving customer’s distribution, the busy period, and the waiting time process.     

Urban public transport choice behavior analysis and service improvement policy-making: a case study from the metropolitan city,Chengdu, China

As the metropolitan city in Western China, Chengdu has been suffered from serious traffic congestion. The strategy of urban public transport priority was put into agenda to relieve traffic congestion. But the public transport sharing rate is only 27% in Chengdu which is much lower than the developed country. Consequently, it is of great importance to study the measures to improve the service, and provide technical support to the policy-makers. This paper selected the traffic corridor between Southwest Jiaotong University district and downtown as the experiment subject. The orthogonal design was used to generate stated preference questionnaires in order to achieve the reliable parameter estimates. Some variables were used to define the utility of the three alternatives and construct the Logit model. Then, the relationships between the cost, time variable and the choice probability of the public transport were analyzed. According to the results, we found that the orthogonal design does improve the goodness-of-fit. The workability of Multinomial Logit Model was better than Nest Logit model. We also put forward some effective measures to improve the service level of public transit, including reducing the access time to Metro, limiting parking supply to control the car use.     

Filtering and the EM-Algorithm for the Markovian Arrival Process

In this article, we deal with the so-called Markovian Arrival Process (MAP). An MAP is thought of as a partially observed Markov process, so that the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is a natural way to estimate its parameters. Then, nonlinear filters of basic statistics related to the MAP must be computed. The forward–backward principle is the basic way to do it. Here, bearing in mind a filter-based formulation of the EM-algorithm proposed by Elliott, these filters are shown to be the solution of nonlinear stochastic differential equations (SDEs) which allows a recursive computation. This is well suited for processing large data sets. We also derive linear SDEs or Zakai equations for the so-called unnormalized filters.     

Optimal designs for the logit and probit models for binary data

We consider optimal designs for a class of symmetric models for binary data which includes the common probit and logit models. We show that for a large group of optimality criteria which includes the main ones in the literature (e.g. A-, D-, E-, F- and G-optimality) the optimal design for our class of models is a two-point design with support points symmetrically placed about the ED50 but with possibly unequal weighting. We demonstrate how one can further reduce the problem to a one-variable optimization by characterizing various of the common criteria. We also use the results to demonstrate major qualitative differences between the F - and c-optimal designs, two design criteria which have similar motivation.     

Estimation and Simulation for the M-Wright Function

In this article, a structural form of an M-Wright distributed random variable is derived. The mixture representation then led to a random number generation algorithm. A formal parameter estimation procedure is also proposed. This procedure is needed to make the M-Wright function usable in practice. The asymptotic normality of the estimator is established as well. The estimator and the random number generation algorithm are then tested using synthetic data.     

货币电子化的风险及防范

货币电子化是电子商务的核心。电子货币作为当今最新的货币形式 ,既是最时尚的 ,也是最具风险的。文章本着新生事物的产生、变化和发展的哲学理论 ,着重从电子货币自身因素 (特点、功能和种类 )以及电子货币在应运中的若干问题进行风险分析 ,逐而提出科学的防范措施。