Does intergenerational social mobility affect antagonistic attitudes towards ethnic minorities?

Up till now, no study satisfactorily addressed the effect of social mobility on antagonistic attitudes toward ethnic minorities. In this contribution, we investigate the effect of educational and class intergenerational mobility on ethnic stereotypes, ethnic threat, and opposition to ethnic intermarriage by using diagonal mobility models. We test several hypotheses derived from ethnic competition theory and socialization theory with data from the Social and Cultural Developments in The Netherlands surveys (SOCON, waves 1995, 2000, and 2005) and The Netherlands Kinship and Panel Study (NKPS, wave 2002). We find that the relative influence of social origin and social destination depends on the specific origin and destination combination. If one moves to a more tolerant social destination position, the influence of the social origin position is negligible. If on the other hand, one is socially mobile to a less tolerant social position, the impact of the origin on antagonistic attitudes is substantial and may even exceed the impact of the destination category. This confirms our hypothesis that adaptation to more tolerant norms is easier than adaptation to less tolerant norms. We find only meagre evidence for the hypothesis that downward mobility leads to frustration and consequently to more antagonistic attitudes.     

Advances in structural equation modeling—the 2009 meeting of the working group SEM

This editorial introduces the Special Issue “Advances in Structural Equation Modeling” which provides a snapshot of the different research activities performed by members of the working group “Structural Equation Modeling”. More specifically, this issue contains a selection of papers presented at the 2009 annual meeting in Berlin at Humboldt University.     

Cross-docking: State of the art

Cross-docking is a logistics strategy in which freight is unloaded from inbound vehicles and (almost) directly loaded into outbound vehicles, with little or no storage in between. This paper presents an overview of the cross-docking concept. Guidelines for the successful use and implementation of cross-docking are discussed and several characteristics are described that can be used to distinguish between different cross-dock types. In addition, this paper presents an extensive review of the existing literature about cross-docking. The discussed papers are classified based on the problem type that is tackled (ranging from more strategic or tactical to more operational problems). Based on this review, several opportunities to improve and extend the current research are indicated.     

Solving for an optimal airline yield management policy via statistical learning

Summary. The yield management (YM) problem considers the task of maximizing a company's revenue. For the competitive airline industry, profit margins depend on a good YM policy. Research on airline YM is abundant but still limited to heuristics and small cases. We address the YM problem for a major domestic airline carrier's hub-and-spoke network, involving 20 cities and 31 flight legs. This is a problem of realistic size since airline networks are usually separated by hub cities. Our method is a variant of the orthogonal array experimental designs and multivariate adaptive regression splines stochastic dynamic programming method. Our method is demonstrated to outperform state of the art YM methods.     

Gewaltkriminalität Junger Deutscher und Ausländer

Ulrich Mueller criticizes a report on juvenile criminal violence in Germany, published by Christian Pfeiffer, Ingo Delzer, and the authors (Pfeiffer et al. 1998). We emphatically reject the accusation of unsound scientific methodology and dishonesty. The reply focuses on the issue of methodological rigor and the validity of the substantial results. First, we counter the insinuation of deliberate one-sidedness and argue that our presentation of results is not intended to serve personal preferences for a certain criminal policy, as Mueller assumes. Second, we refute the assumption that appropriate tests of significance have not been applied. Third, we treat the phenomenon of ethnic selective reporting to the police. In the fourth section we discuss and present in detail empirical evidence concerning the issue of higher rates of violent offenders among foreign juveniles. Finally, the necessity of giving scientific results away to the practice and the requirements of a comprehensible form of presentation for the general public is discussed.     

Adaptive independence samplers

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is an important computational technique for generating samples from non-standard probability distributions. A major challenge in the design of practical MCMC samplers is to achieve efficient convergence and mixing properties. One way to accelerate convergence and mixing is to adapt the proposal distribution in light of previously sampled points, thus increasing the probability of acceptance. In this paper, we propose two new adaptive MCMC algorithms based on the Independent Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. In the first, we adjust the proposal to minimize an estimate of the cross-entropy between the target and proposal distributions, using the experience of pre-runs. This approach provides a general technique for deriving natural adaptive formulae. The second approach uses multiple parallel chains, and involves updating chains individually, then updating a proposal density by fitting a Bayesian model to the population. An important feature of this approach is that adapting the proposal does not change the limiting distributions of the chains. Consequently, the adaptive phase of the sampler can be continued indefinitely. We include results of numerical experiments indicating that the new algorithms compete well with traditional Metropolis–Hastings algorithms. We also demonstrate the method for a realistic problem arising in Comparative Genomics.     

Regulations, policies and practices concerning work stress in five European countries

A comparative inventory of regulations, policies and practices in The Netherlands, Sweden, UK, Germany and France with regard to the prevention of work stress was carried out. In each country data were collected by means of interviews with key informants and through exploring relevant documents and literature. It was found that Sweden, The Netherlands and the UK—those countries with framework legislation in the field of health and safety—recognize stress as an important health and safety topic, whereas Germany and France do not yet recognize stress as an important policy issue. However, even in the first group of countries less attention is being paid towards psychosocial work characteristics when compared with traditional health and safety issues, such as noise, machine safety and toxic agents. There is a clear lack of well-documented (national) 'examples of good preventive practice', even in Sweden and The Netherlands. Recommendations are being formulated concerning type of legislation, guidance and information, monitoring and risk assessment, costs and benefits, examples of good practice and European networking.