A Brief History of the Pacific Sociological Association

Founded in 1929 by Emory S. Bogardus, the PSA is the oldest regional sociological association. During its 85-year history, the association has steadily increased in membership, participation, registration and size of its annual meeting, complexity of organizational structure, and has moved from a gemeinshaft to a gesellshaft culture and to a more inclusive and democratic association. Much of this change has mirrored the growth of sociology in general and of higher educational institutions in U.S. and has been made possible essentially through the work and effort of volunteers.     

Band Spectral Regression with Trending Data

Band spectral regression with both deterministic and stochastic trends is considered. It is shown that trend removal by regression in the time domain prior to band spectral regression can lead to biased and inconsistent estimates in models with frequency dependent coefficients. Both semiparametric and nonparametric regression formulations are considered, the latter including general systems of two‐sided distributed lags such as those arising in lead and lag regressions. The bias problem arises through omitted variables and is avoided by careful specification of the regression equation. Trend removal in the frequency domain is shown to be a convenient option in practice. An asymptotic theory is developed and the two cases of stationary data and cointegrated nonstationary data are compared. In the latter case, a levels and differences regression formulation is shown to be useful in estimating the frequency response function at nonzero as well as zero frequencies.     

Religious giving in the united states

Research on religious giving in the United States contains several important lessons. Denominations differ immensely in their giving levels, with conservative Protestants giving the most, liberal Protestants giving at moderate levels, and Catholics giving the least. Personal religious commitments and the level of one's disposable income are the main determinants, but, in addition, interpersonal factors produce a strong skew in the amounts given. Annual pledging and deliberate planning of giving have clear effects.     

Warning Systems and Defense Policy: A Reliability Model for the Command and Control of U.S. Nuclear Forces

The U.S. Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence System (C³I) includes sensors (e.g., satellites and radars), communication links, and computer systems that allow gathering and processing of information that a missile attack on the continental United States may be on the way. The choice of a policy of response to such an attack depends in part on the reliability of the information coming from the C³I. We consider in this study four possible response policies: (1) launch on impact, (2) launch on attack assessment, (3) launch under attack, and (4) launch on warning. We propose a method to compute, for each policy, the probability of accidental nuclear strike and the probability of being unable to respond due to a malfunction of the C³I or to partial destruction of the response forces. We include in our system the launch authorization steps (permissive action links) and a very crude analysis of the survivability of second strike forces. We examine the variations of probabilities of Type I and Type II errors and the tradeoffs involved when shifting from a policy of launch on impact to another launch policy. We conclude that this simple but powerful method allows one to gain a good grasp on some of the complex issues involved.     

On the effect of correlation and unequal variances in detecting a spurious observation

Srivastava (1980) has shown that Grubbs's (1950) test for a univariate outlier is robust against the effect of equicorrelation. In this note we extend Srivastava's result by giving a more general covariance structure, which relaxes both the covariance structure and the assumption of equal variances. We also show that under the more general covariance structure, the power of Grubbs's test, as well as the significance level, is identical to the independently and identically distributed case.     

Book Review: Francie Ostrower,Trustees of Culture: Power,Wealth, and Status on Elite Arts Boards,The University of Chicago Press,Chicago, 2002, 130 pp., bibliography,notes, index, $35.00 (hbk)

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Further properties of mixture designs for five components in orthogonal blocks

Orthogonally blocked experimental designs for mixtures of five ingredients, formed from Latin squares, were previously discussed by Prescott et al. Here, we extend this development by studying the properties of three classes of possible designs, with recommendations on their practical application. Restrictions on the design classes are explored and D-optimal (within the classes) versions are identified. Remarks on general D-optimality conclude the paper.