The 1947 Partition of India: A Paradigm for Pathological Politics in India and Pakistan

This article seeks to shed light on the role a particular historical event can play in conferring legitimacy to the politics of communal and national animosities and hostilities. The Partition of India in 1947 was, on the one hand, a gory consummation of a long process of mutual demonising and dehumanising by Hindu and Muslim extremists. On the other, in the post-independence era, it became a model of violent conflict resolution invoked and emulated by ethnic and religious extremists and the hawkish establishments of India and Pakistan. The paper argues that the Partition of India epitomises the politics of identity in its most negative form: when trust and understanding have been undermined and instead fear and insecurity reign supreme, generating angst at various levels of state and society. In the process, a pathological socio-political system comes into being. I try to show how such a system functions within the domestic sphere as well as in India-Pakistan political interaction.     

THE HETEROGENEITY OF IMMIGRANTS,HOST COUNTRIES' INCOME AND PRODUCTIVITY: A CHANNEL ACCOUNTING APPROACH

This article exploits changes in the distribution of immigrants across 20 Organization for Economic Co‐operation and Development countries from 1960 to 2005 in order to assess their contribution to income of destination countries. The non‐random sorting of immigrants across countries is addressed by using an instrumental variable strategy. The instrument is built by estimating a bilateral migration model incorporating exogenous origin country determinants of migration. Aggregate results reveal that immigrants have a positive effect on income that works primarily through total factor productivity (TFP). We further construct a novel dataset from censuses and labor force surveys to explore the information on the age of immigrants. Contrasting income effects are found across age groups: a higher share of immigrants among the youth has a negative impact on aggregate income, while a higher share of immigrants among prime‐aged workers has a positive effect. We interpret this disparity as short‐term versus medium‐term effects. Adjustments over time involve changes in TFP but also in the human capital of the native‐born. (JEL F22, J24, J31, O31)     

Improved estimation of the coefficient of variation

The problem of estimating the coefficient of variation (?) is considered when it is a priori suspected that ?=?,. Estimators based on the pre-test principle are proposed, and their large-sample properties are studied and compared. The relative dominance of the estimators is presented. Interestingly, the proposed estimators perform better than the classical estimator over a wider range. More importantly, the size for the preliminary test of the estimators is reasonable. An example is also given.     

SHRINKAGE, PRETEST AND ABSOLUTE PENALTY ESTIMATORS IN PARTIALLY LINEAR MODELS

We consider a partially linear model in which the vector of coefficients β in the linear part can be partitioned as ( β ₁, β ₂) , where β ₁ is the coefficient vector for main effects (e.g. treatment effect, genetic effects) and β ₂ is a vector for ‘nuisance’ effects (e.g. age, laboratory). In this situation, inference about β ₁ may benefit from moving the least squares estimate for the full model in the direction of the least squares estimate without the nuisance variables (Steinian shrinkage), or from dropping the nuisance variables if there is evidence that they do not provide useful information (pretesting). We investigate the asymptotic properties of Stein‐type and pretest semiparametric estimators under quadratic loss and show that, under general conditions, a Stein‐type semiparametric estimator improves on the full model conventional semiparametric least squares estimator. The relative performance of the estimators is examined using asymptotic analysis of quadratic risk functions and it is found that the Stein‐type estimator outperforms the full model estimator uniformly. By contrast, the pretest estimator dominates the least squares estimator only in a small part of the parameter space, which is consistent with the theory. We also consider an absolute penalty‐type estimator for partially linear models and give a Monte Carlo simulation comparison of shrinkage, pretest and the absolute penalty‐type estimators. The comparison shows that the shrinkage method performs better than the absolute penalty‐type estimation method when the dimension of the β ₂ parameter space is large.     

Immigration and resiliency: unpacking the experiences of high school students from Cape Verde and Ethiopia

This article explores the complex factors, both individual and social, that contribute to the resiliency and academic achievement of six adolescent African immigrant students from Cape Verde and Ethiopia who were enrolled in a small high school in the United States. The school was designed specifically for recent adolescent immigrant students. Using an in-depth qualitative case study research design, this study provides insight into the educational and social issues confronted by these students and the factors that contributed to their resiliency. The competencies and social capital that students acquired in school and at home were major contributing factors to their resilience and academic achievement. Findings show that these students had a supportive social network of family and friends who had encouraged them to succeed in school and provided mentoring, and material and social resources that helped them to succeed. In addition, teachers encouraged and engaged the students by having high expectations and connecting them to the curriculum in meaningful ways.     

Impact of demographic variables on women’s economic empowerment: An ordered probit model

The present study aimed to empirically examine the demographic variables that determine women’s economic empowerment. A sample of 500 married women between 21 and 49 years old (M_age = 35.49, SD = 7.66) was conveniently selected from district Multan (Pakistan). Control over economic resources was used as a proxy for women’s economic empowerment. Ordered probit regression was run to assess the demographic determinants (i.e., age, education, paid job, income, and property) of economic empowerment of the least empowered, moderately empowered, and highly empowered women. Paid job, age, income, and property appeared as positive and significant predictors of women’s economic empowerment. Implications of the study were also discussed.     

An Improved Method on Wilcoxon Rank Sum Test for Gene Selection from Microarray Experiments

Selecting a small subset out of the thousands of genes in microarray data is important for accurate classification of phenotypes. In this paper, we propose a flexible rank-based nonparametric procedure for gene selection from microarray data. In the method we propose a statistic for testing whether area under receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for each gene is equal to 0.5 allowing different variance for each gene. The contribution to this “single gene” statistic is the studentization of the empirical AUC, which takes into account the variances associated with each gene in the experiment. Delong et al. proposed a nonparametric procedure for calculating a consistent variance estimator of the AUC. We use their variance estimation technique to get a test statistic, and we focus on the primary step in the gene selection process, namely, the ranking of genes with respect to a statistical measure of differential expression. Two real datasets are analyzed to illustrate the methods and a simulation study is carried out to assess the relative performance of different statistical gene ranking measures. The work includes how to use the variance information to produce a list of significant targets and assess differential gene expressions under two conditions. The proposed method does not involve complicated formulas and does not require advanced programming skills. We conclude that the proposed methods offer useful analytical tools for identifying differentially expressed genes for further biological and clinical analysis.     

塔哈·侯赛因的《山鲁佐德之梦》与鲁迅的《补天》对比研究

塔哈·侯赛因的《山鲁佐德之梦》与鲁迅的《故事新编》均重视从多个层面对神话人物进行塑造,并在其中凝聚作者的哲学、政治、思想以及对社会的关注,使神话形象言其所不能。这两部作品在形式上存在诸多相似点,而在主题和内容方面却大相径庭。利用神话人物反映现实生活的手法,在鲁迅和塔哈·侯赛因的笔下得到完美的体现,这正是源于两位作家杰出的创造力和想象力。     

Predictive Influence of Unavailable Values of Future Explanatory Variables in a Linear Model

We consider an approach to prediction in linear model when values of the future explanatory variables are unavailable, we predict a future response y ^f at a future sample point x ^f when some components of x ^f are unavailable. We consider both the cases where x ^f are dependent and independent but normally distributed. A Taylor expansion is used to derive an approximation to the predictive density, and the influence of missing future explanatory variables (the loss or discrepancy) is assessed using the Kullback–Leibler measure of divergence. This discrepancy is compared in different scenarios including the situation where the missing variables are dropped entirely.