G.H. Mead's Contact Theory of Reality: The Manipulatory Phase of the Act in the Constitution of Mundane,Scientific, Aesthetic,and Evaluative Objects*

Mead's identification of ultimate reality with the experience of physical contact is rooted in his studies of animal perception. Many of his writings on the nature of science, aesthetic experience, and values can be viewed profitably as an attempt to generalize his theory of the act from an analysis of action toward mundane objects to include these other classes of perceptual objects.     

Assessing Performance Budgeting at OMB: The Influence of Politics, Performance, and Program Size

This article investigates the impact of performance, as measuredby the OMB performance budgeting initiative called PerformanceAssessment Rating Tool (PART), on recommendations in the President'sbudget. In a multivariate analysis using data from the FY 2005budget, with appropriate controls for the political contentof programs, we find that the PART scores have a statisticallysignificant impact on budget decisions within OMB. We find thatPART scores have a larger impact on small and medium sized programsthan on large programs. We also find that the "results" componentof PART scores has a smaller impact on budget decisions thanthe "program purpose" component, a finding which tends to contradictthe goal of performance budgeting to redirect resources to programsthat produce results. The relative unimportance of the "results"component may be due to the lack of good outcome measures formost programs in PART.     

An improved comorbidity summary score for measuring disease burden and predicting mortality with applications to two national cohorts

Abstract

Research involving administrative healthcare data to study patient outcomes requires the investigator to account for the patient’s disease burden in order to reduce the potential for biased results. Here we develop a comorbidity summary score based on variable importance measures derived from several statistical and machine learning methods and show it has superior predictive performance to the Elixhauser and Charlson indices when used to predict 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year mortality. We used two large Veterans Administration cohorts to develop and validate the summary score and compared predictive performance using the area under ROC curve (AUC) and the Brier score.     

An extension of the median test to analysis of variance

In a k-way analysis of variance model, the major concern is testing for main effects and for the presence of interaction between the factors. When the assumptions of normality and equal variances are satisfied, the appropriate test to use is the usual F-test for ANOVA. However, when the normality assumption is not satisfied then a robust or nonparametric test is needed to conduct the analysis. In this paper a nonparametric method based on cell counts is proposed. Each cell is divided into L subcells based on predetermined outpoints and the resulting frequencies are laid out in a contingency table. Then the Pearson x² and tne likelihood ratio tests are performed. A comparison with the classical ANOVA F-test indicates that the proposed method is preferable when the data comes from a thick-tailed highly skewed distribution.