The struggle for hegemony: the emergence of a counter-public sphere in post-1997 Hong Kong

The present study examines the struggle for hegemony in the public sphere by two different systems, following Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997. It has been postulated that the new media, particularly social media, has become an important public sphere for the citizens of Hong Kong to engage in an anti-hegemonic struggle against China’s discursive encroachment into Hong Kong since 1997. Given that the public platform provided by legacy media has been bought out or coopted by China, new media has begun to serve as a subaltern public sphere to enable resisting the hegemony imposed by China. This was analyzed through a survey conducted as part of this study, which showed that people who are young, read the Apple Daily, have high expectations of local autonomy, and a high regard for press freedom are prone to using social media to obtain their social and political information. This article analyzes the implications of the emergence of a counter-China hegemonic public sphere.     

Two-agent scheduling of time-dependent jobs

We consider the problem of scheduling deteriorating jobs or shortening jobs with two agents A and B. We are interested in generating all Pareto-optimal schedules for the two criteria: (1) the total completion time of the jobs in A and the maximum cost of the jobs in B, and (2) the maximum cost of the jobs in A and the maximum cost of the jobs in B. We show that all Pareto-optimal schedules for both problems can be generated in polynomial time, whether the jobs are deteriorating or shortening.     

Separating Type-I Odd-Cycle Inequalities for a Binary-Encoded Edge-Coloring Formulation

In this note, we describe an efficient algorithm for separating a class of inequalities that includes the type-I odd-cycle inequalities for a binary-encoded edge-coloring formulation.     

Quality of Life in Older Adults: Benefits from Caring Services in Hong Kong

Many older adults are in need of care. Therefore, older people would generally benefit from the use of caring services, notably including home care, residential care, nursing, and medical services. The contributory factors underlying caring services tend to be a caring perspective that aspires to sustain older peoples social relationships and real-life involvement. To gauge the benefits from various social and health services, the present study relies on a large-scale survey of 3000 older adults in Hong Kong, using quality of life as a criterion. Results showed that an older adult who had used (ordinary or enhanced) home care services for a longer time turned out to have appreciably more improvement in quality of life. Besides, those who joined an interest group more frequently were higher in quality of life, including the health domain. On the other hand, frequent use of medical and meal-to-home services were signals that reflected problems detrimental to the older users quality of life. Despite this, the quality of clinics or hospitals, as perceived by the older adult, was the most beneficial. As such, caring services that foster older adults interests, cater to their health care needs, and embody quality can have principal contribution to their users quality of life.     

On tests for sex preferences

This paper presents a critical evaluation of three widely used tests for sex preferences: sex ratio, parity progression ratio and ordinary least squares regression of birth interval. We show that under some appropriate conditions, the sex ratio is a valid test for sex preferences. The methods of parity progression ratio and OLS regression of birth interval fail to deal with right censoring and time varying covariates, which reduce the power of the tests. We suggest the use of hazard estimation to test for sex preferences. We demonstrate the differences among the tests by analyzing the retrospective fertility histories of the Chinese and the Malays in Malaysia. We find that unlike the two conventional methods, the hazard estimation gives clear and strong evidence of sex preferences among the Chinese in Malaysia.I am indebted to Gary Becker, James Heckman and Thomas Mroz for their many valuable comments and encouragement. I have also benefited from the discussions with V. Joseph Hotz, Mark Rosenzweig, Lester Telser and Robert Willis. Research support from the Bradley Foundation and the Hewlett Foundation is gratefully acknowledged. Computational facilities are supported by NICHD Grant HD-19226 and NSF Grant SES-84-11242 to the Economics Research Center/NORC.     

Subjective Residential Environment and its Implications for Quality of Life Among University Students in Hong Kong

This paper reports the results of a convenient sample survey of 500 Hong Kong university students conducted in May 2003. The main aim of the survey was to investigate the respondents’ perception of the residential environment and its implications for the quality of life (QOL). Results indicated that the respondents were generally satisfied with the residential environment, scoring a mean satisfaction rating of 3.32, on a 5-point Likert scale. The type, size and age of a respondent’s home, years of occupancy and attending university were found to be significantly related to the overall satisfaction. Transport (4.37), environmental quality (4.30), and public utilities (4.25) were reported to be the most important infrastructures for the QOL, but environmental quality (3.21), education (3.11) and greening (2.98) were considered to be the least satisfactory ones. The desirable distribution of facilities and services was defined by their functions and the new urban designs were appreciated by the respondents. Although available space was less than the ideal and public transport was a serious concern, the respondents had adapted well to the high-density environment and enjoyed the urban life in Hong Kong. It is hoped that the results and findings of this study can provide a reference for the formulation of future development strategy in Hong Kong.     

A three-state disease model with interval-censored data: Estimation and applications to AIDS and cancer

In presence of interval-censored data, we propose a general three-state disease model with covariates. Such data can arise, for example, in epidemiologic studies of infectious disease where both the times of infection and disease onset are not directly observed, or in cancer studies where the time of disease metastasis is known up to a specified interval. The proposed model allows the distributions of the transition times between states to depend on covariates and the time in the previous state. An estimation procedure for the underlying distributions and the model coefficients is suggested with the EM algorithm. The EMS algorithm (Smoothed EM algorithm) is also considered to obtain smooth estimates of the distributions. The proposed method is illustrated with data from an AIDS study and a study of patients with malignant melanoma.     

Social security reforms in China: issues and prospects

The phenomenal success of China's market-oriented economic reforms since the 1980s has rendered the traditional employment-based social security system increasingly inadequate and inefficient. For decades, the Chinese government has been trying to develop a more pluralistic, effective and affordable social security system which will be compatible with both a thriving market economy and a flagging socialist political structure. While the emerging system is still struggling with a variety of operational problems, the entry of China into the WTO is looming as a formidable challenge to this social security system. This presentation outlines the recent reforms of the social security system undertaken by the Chinese government, and assesses the effectiveness of the results in meeting the challenge. Here, social security reforms focus on the retirement and unemployment insurance schemes and the social assistance program.     

Early stopping by using stochastic curtailment in a three-arm sequential trial

Summary. Interim analysis is important in a large clinical trial for ethical and cost considerations. Sometimes, an interim analysis needs to be performed at an earlier than planned time point. In that case, methods using stochastic curtailment are useful in examining the data for early stopping while controlling the inflation of type I and type II errors. We consider a three-arm randomized study of treatments to reduce perioperative blood loss following major surgery. Owing to slow accrual, an unplanned interim analysis was required by the study team to determine whether the study should be continued. We distinguish two different cases: when all treatments are under direct comparison and when one of the treatments is a control. We used simulations to study the operating characteristics of five different stochastic curtailment methods. We also considered the influence of timing of the interim analyses on the type I error and power of the test. We found that the type I error and power between the different methods can be quite different. The analysis for the perioperative blood loss trial was carried out at approximately a quarter of the planned sample size. We found that there is little evidence that the active treatments are better than a placebo and recommended closure of the trial.