Gender identity,nationalism, and social action among Jewish and Arab women in Israel: redefining the social order?

In the study this article explores, the meaning of gender identity for religious and seclar Jewish and Arab women in Israeli society is examined. The study focuses on how Israeli women rank gender identity relative to other identities like being Jewish/Arab, being Israeli/Palestinian, religious or secular, of a certain ethnic group, and political identity. It examines the characteristics of gender identity and the attitudes that are associated with it. The analysis shows that the hierarchies of identities are different for religious and secular Jewish and Arab women, and that this is related to having different sociopolitical attitudes (e.g., Women’s social and political involvement, social obedience, social influence). Thus, the hierarchy of identities and the sociopolitical attitudes of religious women indicate a more consensual acceptance of the social order than the hierarchy of identities and the sociopolitical attitudes of secular women, especially among Arab women. Her main fields of interest are sociopolitical attitudes, perceptions of justice and gender issues. She is currently conducting a comparative research on the attitudes, beliefs and stereotypes of Jewish, Arabs, and Palestinian high school students. Dr. Moore is also an advisor to the Israeli Parliament (the Knesset) Committee for Women's Status. The research was financed by the Eshkol Institute for Social, Political, and Economic Research. We are grateful to Hanna Levinson and Majid al-Haj who managed data collection at the Guttman Institute of Applied Research.     

毛细管通道聚合纤维:液相分离新平台

以微米级内径的纤维作为色谱填料的研究已经活跃了很多年,但是由于重现性较差和填充过程难以控制等问题,使其商品化过程大大延缓。近来发展起来的一种新型聚合纤维材料可以克服已有的许多缺陷,有望作为新一代的色谱固定相。     

Pair Chart Test for an Early Survival Difference

The log-rank test is commonly used in comparing survival distributions between treatment and control groups in clinical trials. However, in many studies, the treatment is only effective at the early stage of the trial. Especially when the two survival curves cross, the log-rank test has a low statistical power to show the survival difference. We propose a test statistic for detecting such an early difference between the two treatment arms. The new test has an intuitive geometric interpretation based on a pair chart and is shown to have more power than the log-rank test when the treatment effect only appears in the early phase of the study. This advantage is evaluated for finite sample sizes in simulation studies. Finally, the proposed method is illustrated with a real data example of patients with gastric cancer.     

Flexible Cure Rate Modeling Under Latent Activation Schemes

With rapid improvements in medical treatment and health care, many datasets dealing with time to relapse or death now reveal a substantial portion of patients who are cured (i.e., who never experience the event). Extended survival models called cure rate models account for the probability of a subject being cured and can be broadly classified into the classical mixture models of Berkson and Gage (BG type) or the stochastic tumor models pioneered by Yakovlev and extended to a hierarchical framework by Chen, Ibrahim, and Sinha (YCIS type). Recent developments in Bayesian hierarchical cure models have evoked significant interest regarding relationships and preferences between these two classes of models. Our present work proposes a unifying class of cure rate models that facilitates flexible hierarchical model-building while including both existing cure model classes as special cases. This unifying class enables robust modeling by accounting for uncertainty in underlying mechanisms leading to cure. Issues such as regressing on the cure fraction and propriety of the associated posterior distributions under different modeling assumptions are also discussed. Finally, we offer a simulation study and also illustrate with two datasets (on melanoma and breast cancer) that reveal our framework's ability to distinguish among underlying mechanisms that lead to relapse and cure.     

Adversarial risk analysis for counterterrorism modeling

Recent large-scale terrorist attacks have raised interest in models for resource allocation against terrorist threats. The unifying theme in this area is the need to develop methods for the analysis of allocation decisions when risks stem from the intentional actions of intelligent adversaries. Most approaches to these problems have a game-theoretic flavor although there are also several interesting decision-analytic-based proposals. One of them is the recently introduced framework for adversarial risk analysis, which deals with decision-making problems that involve intelligent opponents and uncertain outcomes. We explore how adversarial risk analysis addresses some standard counterterrorism models: simultaneous defend-attack models, sequential defend-attack-defend models, and sequential defend-attack models with private information. For each model, we first assess critically what would be a typical game-theoretic approach and then provide the corresponding solution proposed by the adversarial risk analysis framework, emphasizing how to coherently assess a predictive probability model of the adversary's actions, in a context in which we aim at supporting decisions of a defender versus an attacker. This illustrates the application of adversarial risk analysis to basic counterterrorism models that may be used as basic building blocks for more complex risk analysis of counterterrorism problems.     

Near Wins Prolong Gambling on a Video Lottery Terminal

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate whether near wins can prolong gambling activity on a video lottery terminal. In a three-reel game, near wins were operationally defined as two identical symbols followed by a third different symbol. Players in an experimental condition were exposed to 27% near wins in a series of continuous losses, whereas players in a control group were exposed to none. Participants played as long as they wished, and received real money for their wins. The results showed that players in the near win condition played 33% more games than did the control group. The results of this study suggest that near wins can be added to the list of factors that may motivate people to gamble despite the probability of monetary loss.     

The variance of population characteristics in stable populations, with applications to the distribution of income

Summary Stable population theory has recently been used to analyse the effects of changes in fertility and mortality on economic variables such as income per head. In this paper more general results are derived to describe the effects of changing vital rates on the variance and higher moments of the distribution of some age-dependent variable. Simple analytical expressions are derived which decompose the effects of changes in age structure into the effects on inter-cohort and intra-cohort variance. The results are easily applied to standard measures of the distribution of income. By combining the analytical results with actual age profiles of income and income variance from the United States and Brazil it is observed that both the magnitude and direction of the effects of population growth on measured inequality are sensitive to the specific age profiles used. The most surprising result is that the Brazilian age profiles suggest that higher growth rates may actually reduce measured inequality, although the effect is relatively small.     

Educational stratification among Arabs and Jews in Israel: historical disadvantage, discrimination, and opportunity

Arabs in Israel are a heterogeneous but largely underprivileged minority with a history of disadvantage in several domains, including education and employment. In this paper, we document changes in their attainment of various educational levels across cohorts born from the mid-1920s to the 1970s. We make comparisons among different Arab religious groups, between men and women, and between Arabs and the majority Jewish populations in Israel. We find that over consecutive birth cohorts, substantial ethnic differences in educational attainment have narrowed at the lower levels of schooling, but have increased at higher levels. Moreover, the results indicate that the disadvantage of Muslim Arabs in terms of entry into and completion of high school can be accounted for only partially by differences in the social status of their parents and characteristics of their neighbourhoods. The findings suggest that long-term historical differences among groups and discriminatory practices towards Arabs are important factors in explanations of disparities in educational attainment.     

Inequality in life expectancy, functional status, and active life expectancy across selected black and white populations in the United States

We calculated population-level estimates of mortality, functional health, and active life expectancy for black and white adults living in a diverse set of 23 local areas in 1990, and nationwide. At age 16, life expectancy and active life expectancy vary across the local populations by as much as 28 and 25 years respectively. The relationship between population infirmity and longevity also varies. Rural residents outlive urban residents, but their additional years are primarily inactive. Among urban residents, those in more affluent areas outlive those in high-poverty areas. For both whites and blacks, these gains represent increases in active years. For whites alone they also reflect reductions in years spent in poor health.