Differences between sexual orientation behavior groups and social background,quality of life,and health behaviors

Within the literature, there is some question as to whether bisexual or homosexual persons practice more unhealthy lifestyles and experience a lower quality of life than heterosexual individuals. This study examined possible differences between sexual orientation behavior groups (homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual, and no sex partners) on demographic and social background variables, quality of life variables, lifestyle and health variables, and mental health or health background variables in a series of seven national probability samples between the years 1988 and 1996. Respondents were asked to report the sex of their sexual partners since they were age 18 and in the last 12 months. Data from a total of 11,543 interviews were collected by the National Opinion Research Center. Although there were some demographic and social background differences among the sexual orientation behavior (SORB) groups, there was little evidence that the behavioral dimension of sexual orientation is either strongly or directly related to quality of life, lifestyle, or health indicators. The report closes with a consideration of future research questions for this issue.     

Journalism and Globalization

Like every other social practice, journalism cannot now fully be understood apart from globalization. As part of a larger platform of communication media, journalism contributes to this experience of the world-as-a-single-place and thus represents a key component in these social transformations, both as cause and outcome. These issues at the intersection of journalism and globalization define an important and growing field of research, particularly concerning the public sphere and spaces for political discourse. In this essay, I review this intersection of journalism and globalization by considering the communication field’s approach to ‘media globalization’ within a broader interdisciplinary perspective that mixes the sociology of globalization with aspects of geography and social anthropology. By placing the emphasis on social practices, elites, and specific geographical spaces, I introduce a less media-centric approach to media globalization and how journalism fits into the process. Beyond ‘global village journalism,’ this perspective captures the changes globalization has brought to journalism.     

Examining the historical and present energy metabolism of a Rust Belt City: Syracuse,NY 1840–2005

Early cities depended on local, solar-based energy resources for their metabolism. Over time, cities have become increasingly dependent on fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly, as they facilitate exploitation of solar resources from much farther away. Alternatives to fossil fuels, typically generated locally, often provide lower surplus energy to society. As cities consider the transition back to solar-based energy resources, it becomes necessary to understand the capability of the solar-based economy to provide e.g. energy (including food) from nearby lands. To do so, we compared the energy metabolism (respiration) of a typical rust-belt city, Syracuse, NY, with the net primary production in the surrounding county (production) over its development (1840–2005). We calculated the ratio of respiration to production (R:P) and examined how this ratio changed during the periods of industrialization, shifts in major fuel types, and deindustrialization. We found that from 1840 to 1950 respiration became increasingly centralized in the urban core; since then it has become more diffused. Urban respiration exceeded production in the county by 9:1 in 1930, and it remains just under 2:1 today. Respiration reached an absolute (67 PJ) and a per capita (339 GJ) maximum in 1970, then fell by 40 % and 20 % respectively, due to deindustrialization and population losses. Conversely, production increased 480 % from its lows in 1930 because of reforestation and improved agricultural yields. What this means is that to achieve a higher P:R ratio requires either increased production of food and fuels in areas surrounding the city, or decreased per capita energy consumption.     

Invariance,Optimality, and a 1-Observation Confidence Interval for a Normal Mean

In a 1965 Decision Theory course at Stanford University, Charles Stein began a digression with “an amusing problem”: is there a proper confidence interval for the mean based on a single observation from a normal distribution with both mean and variance unknown? Stein introduced the interval with endpoints ± c|X| and showed indeed that for c large enough, the minimum coverage probability (over all values for the mean and variance) could be made arbitrarily near one. While the problem and coverage calculation were in the author’s hand-written notes from the course, there was no development of any optimality result for the interval. Here, the Hunt–Stein construction plus analysis based on special features of the problem provides a “minimax” rule in the sense that it minimizes the maximum expected length among all procedures with fixed coverage (or, equivalently, maximizes the minimal coverage among all procedures with a fixed expected length). The minimax rule is a mixture of two confidence procedures that are equivariant under scale and sign changes, and are uniformly better than the classroom example or the natural interval X ± c|X|?.     

Identifiable state‐space models: A case study of the Bay of Fundy sea scallop fishery

State‐space models (SSMs) are now popular tools in fisheries science for providing management advice when faced with noisy survey and commercial fishery data. Such models are often fitted within a Bayesian framework requiring both the specification of prior distributions for model parameters and simulation‐based approaches for inference. Here we present a frequentist framework as a viable alternative and recommend using the Laplace approximation with automatic differentiation, as implemented in the R package Template Model Builder, for fast fitting and reliable inference. Additionally we highlight some identifiability issues associated with SSMs that fisheries scientists should be aware of and demonstrate how our modelling strategy surmounts these problems. Using the Bay of Fundy sea scallop fishery we show that our implementation yields more conservative advice than that of the reference model. The Canadian Journal of Statistics 47: 27–45; 2019 © 2018 Statistical Society of Canada     

GMM Estimation with persistent panel data: an application to production functions

This paper considers the estimation of Cobb-Douglas production functions using panel data covering a large sample of companies observed for a small number of time periods. GMM estimatorshave been found to produce large finite-sample biases when using the standard first-differenced estimator. These biases can be dramatically reduced by exploiting reasonable stationarity restrictions on the initial conditions process. Using data for a panel of R&Dperforming US manufacturing companies we find that the additional instruments used in our extended GMM estimator yield much more reasonable parameter estimates.     

Daily Fantasy Football and Self-Reported Problem Behavior in the United States

Traditional, season-long fantasy sport participation has grown considerably since the late 1990s, and in an attempt to capitalize on this growing demand, daily fantasy sports (DFS) providers have created a new game where money changes hands instantly. This change has led some legal commentators and state agencies to believe the game is a form of Internet gambling similar to online poker, blackjack, and sports wagering, and thus, it requires increased regulation or even prohibition. Little is known, however, about the gambling behavior associated with DFS participation. Thus, the purpose of the current study was to examine problem gambling severity in conjunction with DFS participant motives, perceptions, and consumption behavior. Over 500 DFS participants were surveyed, and the results suggest DFS participants behave similarly with participants in other forms of gambling activities. In addition, the findings suggest additional consumer protections may be needed to prevent further problem behavior such as chasing.     

Handling missing data in numeric analyses

ABSTRACT

Social science datasets usually have missing cases, and missing values. All such missing data has the potential to bias future research findings. However, many research reports ignore the issue of missing data, only consider some aspects of it, or do not report how it is handled. This paper rehearses the damage caused by missing data. The paper then briefly considers eight different approaches to handling missing data so as to minimise that damage, their underlying assumptions and the likely costs and benefits. These approaches include complete case analysis, complete variable analysis, single imputation, multiple imputation, maximum likelihood estimation, default replacement values, weighting, and sensitivity analyses. Using only complete cases should be avoided wherever possible. The paper suggests that the more complex, modelling approaches to replacing missing data are based on questionable methodological and philosophical assumptions. And they may anyway not have clear advantages over simpler approaches like default replacements. It makes sense to report all possible forms of missing data, report everything that is known about the characteristics of cases missing values, conduct simple sensitivity analyses of the potential impact of missing data on the substantive results, and retain the knowledge of missingness when using any form of replacement value.