A research into homosexuality in The Netherlands

This article presents varying ideologies regarding homosexuality. The history of homosexual research is reviewed from a clinical and sociological perspective. Centers for research in the area of homosexuality in The Netherlands are described in terms of their area of study as well as their differing ideological views. In conclusion, the increased awareness of the Dutch Government and the governance of the Dutch universities of the importance of research into homosexuality is described.     

Diffusion Effects in the European Fertility Transition: Historical Evidence from Within a Belgian Town (1846–1910)

This article investigates empirically diffusion effects on married couples' fertility behaviour during the historical European demographic transition. To this end, a blended logistic model of parity-dependent stopping behaviour is developed, including indicators for both natural and structural determinants and diffusion effects. The model is applied to the birth intervals of three 19th century generations of urban working class couples living in the Belgian town of Leuven. The results indicate that occupational status cannot explain the adoption of stopping behaviour. The evidence suggests that diffusion mechanisms were at work on a neighbourhood level: the proportion of Francophone couples living in the Leuven streets had a significant positive impact on the probability that the Flemish couples were applying stopping behaviour. Also, working class couples who were living in a town quarter that was hosting many upper class people were significantly more likely to stop. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A polemic on education reform in the American states

Building upon previous research on educational reforms in the states after A Nation at Risk, we attempt to evaluate the effect of reforms on the improvement of both schooling and learning in secondary schools. Only meager data are available to evaluate the question and they yield ambiguous results. Our argument is that the absence of good measures of educational outcomes prevent intelligent reform constituting a cause for alarm in the education community as well as the society at large.     

Bayesian Estimation for Linear Functions of Poisson Rates

The probability matching prior for linear functions of Poisson parameters is derived. A comparison is made between the confidence intervals obtained by Stamey and Hamilton (2006 Stamey, J., Hamilton, C. (2006). A note on confidence intervals for a linear function of Poisson rates. Commun. Statist. Simul. &; Computat. 35(4):849–856.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), and the intervals derived by us when using the Jeffreys’ and probability matching priors. The intervals obtained from the Jeffreys’ prior are in some cases fiducial intervals (Krishnamoorthy and Lee, 2010 Krishnamoorthy, K., Lee, M. (2010). Inference for functions of parameters in discrete distributions based on fiducial approach: Binomial and Poisson cases. J. Statist. Plann. Infere. 140(5):1182–1192.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). A weighted Monte Carlo method is used for the probability matching prior. The power and size of the test, using Bayesian methods, is compared to tests used by Krishnamoorthy and Thomson (2004 Krishnamoorthy, K., Thomson, J. (2004). A more powerful test for comparing two Poisson means. J. Statist. Plann. Infere. 119(1):23–35.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The Jeffreys’, probability matching and two other priors are used.     

The ideological roots of the support for welfare state reform: Support for distributive and commodifying reform in The Netherlands

This article examines the extent to which four major trends in welfare state reform – privatisation, increasing selectivity, increasing activation and increasing discipline – are supported and how this support can be explained. Using recent public opinion data of the Dutch population, it is found that there are two ideological dimensions underlying welfare reform support, the first tapping distributive reform, the latter tapping commodifying reform. While support for distributive reform in the direction of decreasing redistribution can solely be explained by economic interests and economic values, support for commodifying reform can also be explained culturally. It appears that one's cultural position and cultural ideological values are important for support for commodifying reform.     

Measuring changes in consumer confidence

Consumer confidence indicators are surveyed monthly and each month concern different individuals. This complicates a straightforward interpretation of shifts in confidence. First, it is not clear how many respondents switch from and to negative, neutral and positive opinions in consecutive months. Second, reported net changes in confidence may be largely driven by the different respondent samples used over time. The proposed methodology addresses both issues. It involves estimating unobserved switching between negative, neutral and positive opinions for what can be thought of as being the same set of individuals. Next, a new change-in-confidence measure is developed from these switching proportions and the associated confidence bounds are computed for testing purposes. Applications to US and Dutch confidence data show that US respondents tend to switch attitudes more often than their Dutch counterparts do. Furthermore, the illustrations show that monthly changes in consumer confidence are not often significantly different from zero. Hence, claims about increased or decreased confidence should be made with care.     

Characteristic properties of FPTP systems

In this article, we model FPTP systems as social preference rules and give two characterizations. We show that a social preference rule is an FPTP system if, and only if, it satisfies the axioms of subset consistency, district consistency, subset cancellation, and district cancellation. The second characterization consists of the axioms of subset consistency, subset anonymity, neutrality, topsonlyness, Pareto optimality, district consistency and district cancellation. The characterizations give us an opportunity to compare the characteristic properties of FPTP systems to the characteristic properties that we found for list systems of proportional representation (list PR systems) in Hout et al. (Social Choice and Welfare, 27:459–475, 2006), where we modelled those systems also as social preference rules. We find that consistency and anonymity distinguish list PR systems from FPTP systems. On the other hand, it is district cancellation that distinguishes FPTP systems from list PR systems.     

Exploring the Uncertainties in Cancer Risk Assessment Using the Integrated Probabilistic Risk Assessment (IPRA) Approach

Current methods for cancer risk assessment result in single values, without any quantitative information on the uncertainties in these values. Therefore, single risk values could easily be overinterpreted. In this study, we discuss a full probabilistic cancer risk assessment approach in which all the generally recognized uncertainties in both exposure and hazard assessment are quantitatively characterized and probabilistically evaluated, resulting in a confidence interval for the final risk estimate. The methodology is applied to three example chemicals (aflatoxin, N‐nitrosodimethylamine, and methyleugenol). These examples illustrate that the uncertainty in a cancer risk estimate may be huge, making single value estimates of cancer risk meaningless. Further, a risk based on linear extrapolation tends to be lower than the upper 95% confidence limit of a probabilistic risk estimate, and in that sense it is not conservative. Our conceptual analysis showed that there are two possible basic approaches for cancer risk assessment, depending on the interpretation of the dose‐incidence data measured in animals. However, it remains unclear which of the two interpretations is the more adequate one, adding an additional uncertainty to the already huge confidence intervals for cancer risk estimates.     

Embodying who we are: Leader group prototypicality and leadership effectiveness

Leadership is a process enacted in the context of a shared group membership, and leadership effectiveness is contingent on followers' perceptions of the leader as a group member. Addressing this role of group membership, the social identity theory of leadership puts leader group prototypicality, the extent to which the leader is perceived to embody group identity, center-stage in leadership effectiveness. I review empirical research in leader group prototypicality, concluding there is a robust empirical basis for the key propositions of the social identity theory of leadership. I also identify newer developments that extend and enrich the social identity analysis of leadership, including attention to the roles of uncertainty, leader fairness, leader–follower relationship, leader self-perceived prototypicality, and leadership of creativity and innovation.