Psycho-social impacts of terrorism and organized crime: The counterfinality of the practico-inert

The phrase, the counterfinality of the practico-inert is from Sartre with reference to implications of modern technology as a shorthand for that enormous properly human and anti-natural power of dead human labor stored up in our machinery — an alienated power, which turns back on and against us in unrecognizable forms and can symbolize the massive dystopian horizon of organized crime as well as individual terrorist praxis (Jean-Paul Sartre (1948).Situations II. Paris: Gallimard).     

“Consumer Confidence” Indexes as social indicators

Consumer Confidence Indexes can be sensibly used in economic and social research conducted in theoretical and methodological framework of social indicators research. They are good predictors of other attitudes, such as voting preferences. Voting preferences are determined much more strongly by expectations of changes in economic conditions than by evaluations of present situation. On the other hand, Consumer Sentiment Indexes — irrespective whether they concern future or present times — are correlated more strongly with leading than with coincident indexes of economic cycles. That proves very important role of predictions, expectations and hopes in attitude formation.     

A model of numbers of births in three countries,with persistent forty-year cycles

This paper describes a model which relates fertility to partner availability, an aspect of relative cohort size. Partner availability is affected by the tendency for males to reproduce at a later age than females. For women born at a time of rising birth rates, there is a shortage of slightly older men as potential partners. Women born when birthrates are falling enjoy a surplus of older men from which to choose. This model is believed to be the first non-linear demographic feedback model involving feedbacks through marriage squeezes in which empirically estimated values of the parameters imply persistent limit cycles. The deterministic model makes births in each five-year period a function of births in previous five-year periods. The form of the function is chosen to model the effect of partner availability upon entry into reproductive relationships, and therefore on age-specific fertility. Marriage rates are not modeled directly. The model was developed from data for more than a century from England and Wales, New Zealand, and the US. The demographic transition is modeled with a logistic function and age-specific fertility rates are estimated using lognormal distributions. The stepwise inclusion of a partner availability estimate in the model showed that it accounts for 29% of otherwise unexplained variance. Projected future births stabilize in sustained or limit cycles with periods a little longer than 40 years, and amplitudes of at least 7% of the mean. The necessary conditions for cycle persistence are outlined on a graph of maximum and minimum fertility parameters.     

Measuring credibility of compensatory preference statements when trade-offs are interval determined

This paper studies how an overall fuzzy preference relation can be constructed in the compensatory context of the simple additive difference model, when imprecision on the trade-offs has to be taken into account. Three credibility indices of preferences are analysed and illustrated by a numerical example. Arguments are presented supporting the use of the third index, for which an interesting transitivity property (which was an open problem) is proved.     

Recent fertility trends in industrialized countries: Toward a fluctuating or a stable pattern?

By the mid-1980s, fertility in most of the world's developed countries had declined to unprecedentedly low levels. Since then, it has declined still further in some, increased slightly in others, and fluctuated in still others. Irrespective of cause, these changes could not have occurred in the absence of substantial control over childbearing.While future increases and decreases are both possible, it is argued that, contrary to the usual demographic expectations for populations exercising substantial control over fertility, fertility in most of these countries will increase to approximate replacement levels and then undergo only minor fluctuations around these levels thereafter.     

Coherent decision analysis with inseparable probabilities and utilities

This article explores the extent to which a decision maker's probabilities can be measured separately from his/her utilities by observing his/her acceptance of small monetary gambles. Only a partial separation is achieved: the acceptable gambles are partitioned into a set of belief gambles, which reveals probabilities distorted by marginal utilities for money, and a set of preference gambles, which reveals utilities reciprocally distorted by marginal utilities for money. However, the information in these gambles still enables us to solve the decision maker's problem: his/her utility-maximizing decision is the one that avoids arbitrage (i.e., incoherence or Dutch books).     

Drawing households and other living spaces in the process of assessment and psychotherapy

This paper introduces a drawing technique developed by the author for use in the assessment and treatment of individuals and families. The client is invited to draw a floor plan of his or her home or apartment, or an aerial view of un outdoor area. The drawing is then discussed and considered as a means of understanding critical elements of the experience of life space. The material derived is discussed from the eerspectives of family systems, psychodynamic, and abuse treatment theories, with special reference to notions of family structure, boundary, the self, and memory. Emphasis is placed on the actual physical layout of the home, as well as the subjective experience of it. Applications of the drawing technique for exploring memories are illustrated. Case examples are presented from clinical trials with children and adults in residential treatment, inpatient, and outpatient settings.The Heller Financial Corporation generously supports the development of household and spatial drawings for treatment and prevention. A version of this paper was presented at the 43rd Annual Meeting of the American Association of Psychiatric Services for Children, New Orleans, February 26, 1992. The author wishes to thank Robert B. Bloom, Ph.D., Excutive Director of JCB, for supporting the development of ideas and techniques discribed in this paper.     

Nondictatorially independent pairs

Suppose that social welfare function f satisfies the Pareto condition and has complete and transitive values. On a domain satisfying the free quadruple property, if the outcome set X has m< outcomes, then the set of pairs of distinct alternatives on which f satisfies both independence and nondictatorship contains at most the fraction 2/m of all pairs. On a domain satisfying the free six-tuple property, if X is a subset of Euclidean space then the set of pairs on which f satisfies both independence and nondictatorship has Lebesgue measure zero.Campbell's research was financed by the National Science Foundation, grant SES 9209039.     

International migration: demographic and socioeconomic consequences in the United Kingdom and Europe

"This article evaluates the consequences of international migration since World War II, with particular reference to Great Britain. It emphasizes the substantial differences between the origins and responses to immigration in the United Kingdom and that of the rest of Western Europe." It is found that "people of non-European origin from Commonwealth countries have predominated in postwar immigration to the United Kingdom. That migration neutralized the previously dominant pattern of emigration and increased U.K. population by about 3 million people through immigration and higher fertility, with only slight effects upon the age distribution."     

An analytic method for randomized trials with informative censoring: Part 1

Consider a randomized trial in which time to the occurrence of a particular disease, say pneumocystis pneumonia in an AIDS trial or breast cancer in a mammographic screening trial, is the failure time of primary interest. Suppose that time to disease is subject to informative censoring by the minimum of time to death, loss to and end of follow-up. In such a trial, the censoring time is observed for all study subjects, including failures. In the presence of informative censoring, it is not possible to consistently estimate the effect of treatment on time to disease without imposing additional non-identifiable assumptions. The goals of this paper are to specify two non-identifiable assumptions that allow one to test for and estimate an effect of treatment on time to disease in the presence of informative censoring. In a companion paper (Robins, 1995), we provide consistent and reasonably efficient semiparametric estimators for the treatment effect under these assumptions. In this paper we largely restrict attention to testing. We propose tests that, like standard weighted-log-rank tests, are asymptotically distribution-free -level tests under the null hypothesis of no causal effect of treatment on time to disease whenever the censoring and failure distributions are conditionally independent given treatment arm. However, our tests remain asymptotically distribution-free -level tests in the presence of informative censoring provided either of our assumptions are true. In contrast, a weighted log-rank test will be an -level test in the presence of informative censoring only if (1) one of our two non-identifiable assumptions hold, and (2) the distribution of time to censoring is the same in the two treatment arms. We also extend our methods to studies of the effect of a treatment on the evolution over time of the mean of a repeated measures outcome, such as CD-4 count.