Southern culture and patterns of victim‐offender relationships in homicide: A study of primary and nonprimary homicide in Louisiana

This paper examines the relative influence of Southern culture versus social structural features on primary (dispute motivated) and nonprimary (crime motivated) homicide rates in Louisiana. Multiple regression analysis is used to compare the determinants of homicide in parishes ("counties") with typical Southern cultural heritage with those of parishes with French‐Catholic heritage. It was found that Southern culture exerted a greater positive influence on primary homicide rates than most structural variables, but was negative with respect to nonprimary rates. Implications for clarifying the debate concerning the existence of a Southern subculture of violence are discussed.     

Support and Profiles of Nonoffending Mothers of Sexually Abused Children

Maternal support offered to sexually abused children following disclosure may be a crucial factor in children's recovery. A person-centered approach was used to examine how profiles of nonoffending mothers could better describe their ability to support their children after disclosure. Cluster analyses based on a total of 226 nonoffending mothers recruited from child protective services yielded four distinctive groups of mothers: resilient, avoidant-coping, traumatized, and anger-oriented reaction. These profiles differed on measures of support, parenting, and variables related to attitude following disclosure. The discussion underscores the relevance of adopting a tailored approach to intervention with mothers of sexually abused children.     

Black Immigrants in the United States and the "Cultural Narratives" of Ethnicity

This article argues that social science representations of post-1965 Black immigrants in the United States employ the concept of "ethnicity" in ways that reinforce the racialist myth of Black (American) cultural inferiority. Specifically, the discursive use of Black immigrant "ethnic" and "cultural distinctiveness," while admittedly reflecting an important recognition of the heterogeneity of the United States Black populations, is in fact predicated upon a repackaged "culture of poverty" discourse that serves to reaffirm the overarching racial order. In a discussion of the theoretical and historical development of the concept, I show how the current discourse of "ethnic distinctiveness" perpetuates a form of racism under a theory that denies the relevance of race while it continuously recodes the biological notions of race as "culture." Thus, Black immigrant distinctiveness, when presented through the prism of the cultural narratives of ethnicity, allows for the perpetuation of a "cultural racism" that adversely affects all Blacks in this country. I therefore call for a rejection of ethnicity theory as it is currently conceptualized and suggest the need to ground theories of Black distinctiveness within analyses of power relations and ongoing practices of racial subjugation.     

The theatre of war: art,organization and the aesthetics of strategy

Recent Anglo-Saxon writings on management regard “vision” as being of strategic importance to leadership. Whilst such an approach has led to socio-psychological inquiries into “visionary leadership” the equally relevant phenomenological “philosophy of the eye” has remained unexplored by organizational scholars. This European philosophical tradition is closely connected to theories of art. In three cases, it will be shown how continental reflection on the strategic management of warfare has taken the eye seriously and thereby gained insights from aesthetics. It will be argued that the understanding of civilian strategic management also might benefit from such s connection between Strategy and Art.     

Extreme Values and Haar Series Estimates of Point Process Boundaries

ABSTRACT.  We present a new method for estimating the edge of a two-dimensional bounded set, given a finite random set of points drawn from the interior. The estimator is based both on Haar series and extreme values of the point process. We give conditions for various kind of convergence and we obtain remarkably different possible limit distributions. We propose a method of reducing the negative bias, illustrated by a simulation.     

Olfactory Familiarization and Discrimination in Preterm and Full‐Term Newborns

The purpose of this study was to observe olfactory detection and discrimination in preterm and full‐term newborns. Infants were familiarized for 10 trials with either vanillin or anethole. On each trial, a cotton swab perfumed with one of the odors was slowly moved in front of the baby's nose for 10 sec. For half of the preterm and full‐term infants, a new odor was presented after the last familiarization trial (experimental groups). For the other half, the same odor as during familiarization was presented (control groups). Facial and head movements for both populations and heart rates for preterm infants were recorded before, during, and after odor presentation. Preterm infants reacted to the scents by increasing facial actions and heart rate but not head movements. Full‐term infants increased facial and head movements. Neither population showed a clear behavioral habituation pattern, but full‐term newborns had a significantly reduced facial reactivity on the last familiarization trial compared to preterm infants. Preterm newborns did, however, show cardiac habituation on the last familiarization trial. Preterm and full‐term infants presented with a new odor after familiarization increased responding compared to infants presented with the same odor, indicating their ability to discriminate between 2 odors. Infants' reactivity and discrimination to odors indicate preterm and full‐term newborns' ability to be attuned to their olfactory environment.     

Modelling forces of infection by using monotone local polynomials

Summary. On the basis of serological data from prevalence studies of rubella, mumps and hepatitis A, the paper describes a flexible local maximum likelihood method for the estimation of the rate at which susceptible individuals acquire infection at different ages. In contrast with parametric models that have been used before in the literature, the local polynomial likelihood method allows this age-dependent force of infection to be modelled without making any assumptions about the parametric structure. Moreover, this method allows for simultaneous nonparametric estimation of age-specific incidence and prevalence. Unconstrained models may lead to negative estimates for the force of infection at certain ages. To overcome this problem and to guarantee maximal flexibility, the local smoother can be constrained to be monotone. It turns out that different parametric and nonparametric estimates of the force of infection can exhibit considerably different qualitative features like location and the number of maxima, emphasizing the importance of a well-chosen flexible statistical model.     

Efficient volatility estimation in a two-factor model

We statistically analyze a multivariate Heath-Jarrow-Morton diffusion model with stochastic volatility. The volatility process of the first factor is left totally unspecified while the volatility of the second factor is the product of an unknown process and an exponential function of time to maturity. This exponential term includes some real parameter measuring the rate of increase of the second factor as time goes to maturity. From historical data, we efficiently estimate the time to maturity parameter in the sense of constructing an estimator that achieves an optimal information bound in a semiparametric setting. We also nonparametrically identify the paths of the volatility processes and achieve minimax bounds. We address the problem of degeneracy that occurs when the dimension of the process is greater than two, and give in particular optimal limit theorems under suitable regularity assumptions on the drift process. We consistently analyze the numerical behavior of our estimators on simulated and real datasets of prices of forward contracts on electricity markets.