Elderly in America: A Descriptive Study of Elder Abuse Examining National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) Data, 2000–2005

Elder abuse is the newest form of intrafamilial violence to garner the attention of the public, policy makers, health officials, researchers, and the criminal justice system. Despite evidence that elder abuse is a growing problem, there is little known about the phenomenon because of persistent limitations in the extant empirical work. The present study examined a large cross-national sample of reported incidents (n = 87,422) collected as part of the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), 2000–2005. Addressing limitations in prior works, this research employed a criminal justice oriented definition of elder abuse examining victim, offender, and incident characteristics using chi-square tests and logistic regression to establish baseline findings from a more comprehensive sample of data than previously existed. Results render a baseline profile of victims and abusers and suggest that gender differences prevail throughout elder abuse. This work both corroborates and contrasts past findings of elder abuse research, providing new insights and much needed baseline data.     

Hidden Markov model for discrete circular–linear wind data time series

ABSTRACT

In this work, we deal with a bivariate time series of wind speed and direction. Our observed data have peculiar features, such as informative missing values, non-reliable measures under a specific condition and interval-censored data, that we take into account in the model specification. We analyse the time series with a non-parametric Bayesian hidden Markov model, introducing a new emission distribution, suitable to model our data, based on the invariant wrapped Poisson, the Poisson and the hurdle density. The model is estimated on simulated datasets and on the real data example that motivated this work.     

Second‐order Accurate Confidence Regions Based on Members of the Generalized Power Divergence Family

Recently, a technique based on pseudo‐observations has been proposed to tackle the so‐called convex hull problem for the empirical likelihood statistic. The resulting adjusted empirical likelihood also achieves the high‐order precision of the Bartlett correction. Nevertheless, the technique induces an upper bound on the resulting statistic that may lead, in certain circumstances, to worthless confidence regions equal to the whole parameter space. In this paper, we show that suitable pseudo‐observations can be deployed to make each element of the generalized power divergence family Bartlett‐correctable and released from the convex hull problem. Our approach is conceived to achieve this goal by means of two distinct sets of pseudo‐observations with different tasks. An important effect of our formulation is to provide a solution that permits to overcome the problem of the upper bound. The proposal, which effectiveness is confirmed by simulation results, gives back attractiveness to a broad class of statistics that potentially contains good alternatives to the empirical likelihood.     

Multivariate parabolic bioassay

A general linear model approach to quantitative parabolic bioassays with multivariate responses is proposed. The point and interval estimator of the relative potency and an associated test for validity is presented. The relationships with known univariate methods are illustrated.     

A note on the asymptotic behaviour of empirical likelihood statistics

This paper develops some theoretical results about the asymptotic behaviour of the empirical likelihood and the empirical profile likelihood statistics, which originate from fairly general estimating functions. The results accommodate, within a unified framework, various situations potentially occurring in a wide range of applications. For this reason, they are potentially useful in several contexts, such as, for example, in inference for dependent data. We provide examples showing that known findings in literature about the asymptotic behaviour of some empirical likelihood statistics in time series models can be derived as particular cases of our results.     

Chemical Scoring by a Rapid Screening of Hazard (RASH) Method

A rapid screening of hazard method (RASH) is presented for deriving relative potency estimates for hazardous substances. The method utilizes data from any available toxicological database such as the Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances (RTECS) or EPA's GENE-TOX database on genetic activity profiles. The method has been applied to derive relative potency values and permissible environmental concentrations for 278 chemicals. The derived values have been compared with recommendations of expert committees where possible, and substantial agreement is found.     

The U. S. Supreme Court and Value Legitimacy: An Experimental Approach With Older Americans

This study was designed to test the designed to test the legitimacy-conferring hypotheses as it relates to the United States Supreme Court. Conventional wisdom has long asscrted that the Court, in its role as interpreter of the Constitution, is a major force influencing the values and attitudes of Americans. However, little empirical research has been conducted on the issue, and that which has been conducted has been ambiguous. Using a split-ballot experimental technique, we found support for the legitimacy-conferring hypothesis among a sample of older Americans from twenty-two different states across the U. S. We found five of nine proposals to be more strongly endorsed when their attributed source was the Supreme Court rather than the U. S. Congress or when the source was unattributed. A factor analysis of the items was used to discover underlying value-orientations described by the nine items. An analysis to three derived factors added to our confidence in the legitimacy-conferring hypothesis.     

The flood control saga in the Passaic River Basin

Flooding is a natural phenomenon which engineers and politicians have attempted to control since the beginning of time. The Passaic River Basin in northern New Jersey has been recognized as a significant floodprone area in the United States since colonial times. Several State and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proposals have been abandoned because of both economic and environmental objections to expensive public works projects. During the early part of the Twentieth Century, houses were built in the floodway of the Passaic River, an area where lives and personal belongings were at highest risk.The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed a $1.0 billion flood control tunnel plan while a local watershed association, the Passaic River Coalition, has recommmended a buy-out of the houses at highest risk at a cost of $103 million. This paper introduces that innovative concept for flood management—relocating people out of the rivers path—in the most urban area in the United States.