Applying Decision Analysis to Determine the Effect of Smoke Detector Laws on Fire Loss in the United States

Decision analysis is used to examine whether residential smoke detectors should be required by law. Statistics pertaining to fire incidence, fire death, smoke detector efficacy, and the consequences of fire are examined for accuracy and availability and combined in a decision model. A sensitivity analysis is performed on the model inputs. Included in the analysis is the idea that homes with detectors may have lower death rates due to the characteristics of those who purchase detectors rather than the detectors themselves. Results from the base case estimate show an expected cost of $65,000 per life saved when a law is enacted. This value lies well below the value implied by spending on other public safety programs.     

On mitigating collinearity through mixtures

In linear models having near collinear columns of X, ridge and surrogate estimators often are used to mitigate collinearity. A new class of estimators is based on mixtures, either of X and a design minimal in an ordered class or of the Fisher information and a scalar matrix. Comparisons are drawn among choices for the mixing parameter, and the estimators are found to be admissible relative to ordinary least squares. Case studies demonstrate that selected mixture designs are perturbed from the original design to a lesser extent than are those of the surrogate method, while retaining reasonable efficiency characteristics.     

Stable local computation with conditional Gaussian distributions

This article describes a propagation scheme for Bayesian networks with conditional Gaussian distributions that does not have the numerical weaknesses of the scheme derived in Lauritzen (Journal of the American Statistical Association 87: 1098–1108, 1992).The propagation architecture is that of Lauritzen and Spiegelhalter (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series B 50: 157– 224, 1988).In addition to the means and variances provided by the previous algorithm, the new propagation scheme yields full local marginal distributions. The new scheme also handles linear deterministic relationships between continuous variables in the network specification.The computations involved in the new propagation scheme are simpler than those in the previous scheme and the method has been implemented in the most recent version of the HUGIN software.     

Contexts of Reception Seen and Constituted from Below: The Production of Refugee Status Apathy

Qualitative Sociology - Refugee status is often imagined as a holy grail. Yet it can have radically different meanings for refugees, even under inclusive policy regimes replete with legal and...     

Military technology and socio-cultural change in the ancient Greek city1

The political culture of classical Greek civilization, with its distinctive twin ideals of citizenship and mass participatory democracy, represents a revolutionary development in the history of human society. The social origins of that momentous cultural breakthrough are examined in this essay, with specific attention being given to those forces – destructive as well as reorganizing – which undermined the bases of traditional aristocratic domination and which prepared the ground for the emergence of new institutional patterns. Pressures for structural and normative ‘democratization are shown to have been exerted primarily by changes in the military domain, the central axis of political and economic power within the ancient city.     

The Quintessential Rural Sociologist*

Alvin L. Bertrand's career and research have made him an exemplar of humane social scientist, scholar, and academician. For many of his peers, Bertrand is the quintessential rural sociologist. Spending almost all of his career at Louisiana State University, Dr. Bertrand has addressed an extraordinarily broad array of social phenomena, often of a community problem variety, in his research. His research employed a social systems analysis frequently focused on the rural context and had a strong applied orientation with the result that his findings have been widely used as the basis for the formulation of important national and international program and policy decisions. Bertrand's work has attracted wide attention abroad as well as in the United States. Because of his many contributions to the discipline of sociology, he has received numerous awards and recognitions and has also been elected to various offices in professional societies and associations, including the presidency of five such groups.     

User Involvement in Therapy: Couples' and Family Therapists’ Lived Experiences with the Inclusion of a Feedback Procedure in Clinical Practice

User involvement in therapy includes some form of feedback from the clients. The feedback guides the therapist and the clients toward a best possible result through a best possible therapy process. In recent years many different procedures for collecting feedback have been developed. In a previous study presented in this journal we explored the expectations therapists had before including the comprehensive clinical feedback procedure, Systemic Therapy Inventory of Change (STIC), in their clinical practices. Our aim with this present study is to explore couples' and family therapists’ experiences with STIC from the perspective of user involvement. We found that the term ‘using STIC’ represented many different variations both between therapists and between the families each therapist worked with. Likewise user involvement, combined with a feedback procedure like STIC, was also a many faceted area. We discuss how therapists’ experiences may relate to the different aspects of user involvement in therapy.