The residents’ ‘images of the past’ in the architecture of Salt City, Jordan

In the preservation movement, the perception of older buildings by the residents of a city has received limited consideration. This paper reports on empirical research conducted in a small traditional city, Salt, Jordan. It examines ‘images of the past’ within a model of nonverbal communication of the meaning in the built environment. The objective of this study is to identify similarities among residents’ images of the past. A survey research design using multiple sorting techniques with open-ended questions was used to identify residents’ images of the past. These images were elicited through the observation of coloured photographs of a sample of older buildings from the city centre. Images of the past were examined within three content areas: knowledge of the past, date of construction of the building, and character of the past of Salt City. Findings suggest that older buildings in the centre of the city do evoke similar images of the past for residents, regardless of their length of residential tenure. From these similar images, a common image of the past focus on public or social use buildings along with residential buildings of the settlement era. Residents has associated these buildings with the past functions and development of the city. This study presents an approach for operationalizing the image of the past as a research variable (in terms of the scale of a city and of different cultures).     

Doppelganger: Twins' Disruption of the Assumptions of Constancy and Uniqueness of Self in Everyday Life

The ubiquitous presence of the assumptions of constancy and uniqueness of self in everyday life renders them virtually undetectable. A radical disruption of these assumptions through an experiment involving identical twins lays bare the varieties of “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” rationalizations and convictions concerning the performer and the audience that protect the above dual assumptions of social cognition and communication.     

End of double taxation: Is the policy better when announced?

This paper examines the effectiveness of the “end of double taxation” (on dividends) policy in stabilizing an economy. Both announced and unannounced policies are considered. A reduction in double taxation stimulates investment and improves welfare, but its impact on output is moderate and it has a negative effect on work hours. A temporary cut creates an investment boom but also generates an investment slump when the tax cut expires. Announcements of future tax cuts are found to have important effect on output dynamics. Agents respond to the tax policy even before it is implemented. If the tax cut is announced to be temporary, its impact on output is greatly reduced. Our study suggests that a temporary dividend tax cut is most effective in stabilizing a recession stricken economy when the policy change comes as “news” to the economy.     

Bayesian prediction based on type-I censored data from a mixture of Burr type XII distribution and its reciprocal

This paper is concerned with the problem of obtaining Bayesian prediction bounds of future observables from a finite mixture of Burr type XII distribution with its reciprocal based on type-I censored data. We consider the one-sample and two-sample prediction schemes using the Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Numerical examples are given to illustrate the procedures and the accuracy of prediction intervals is investigated via extensive Monte Carlo simulation.     

Moments of order statistics from doubly truncated continuous distributions and characterizations

In this paper, recurrence relations from a general class of doubly truncated continuous distributions which are satisfied by single as well as product moments of order statistics are obtained. Recurrence relations from doubly truncated generalized Weibull, exponential, Raleigh and logistic distributions have been derived as special cases of our result, Some previous results for doubly truncated Weibull, standard exponential, power function and Burr type XII distributions are obtained as special cases. The general recurrence relation of single moments has been used in the case of the left and right truncation to characterize the Weibull, Burr type XII and Pareto distributions.     

Variance components estimation for the balanced random effects model under mixed prior distributions

For the balanced random effects models, when the variance components are correlated either naturally or through common prior structures, by assuming a mixed prior distribution for the variance components, we propose some new Bayesian estimators. To contrast and compare the new estimators with the minimum variance unbiased (MVUE) and restricted maximum likelihood estimators (RMLE), some simulation studies are also carried out. It turns out that the proposed estimators have smaller mean squared errors than the MVUE and RMLE.     

Tests of Covariance Matrices for High Dimensional Multivariate Data Under Non Normality

Ahmad and von Rosen (2014 Ahmad, M. R. (2014). A U-statistic approach for a high-dimensional two-sample mean testing problem under non-normality and Behrens-Fisher setting. Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics 66:33–61.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) presented test statistics for sphericity and identity of the covariance matrix of a multivariate normal distribution when the dimension, p, exceeds the sample size, n. In this note, we show that their statistics are robust to normality assumption, when normality is replaced with certain mild assumptions on the traces of the covariance matrix. Under such assumptions, the test statistics are shown to follow the same asymptotic normal distribution as under normality for large p, also when p > >n. The asymptotic normality is proved using the theory of U-statistics, and is based on very general conditions, particularly avoiding any relationship between n and p.     

Goodness-of-fit testing of a weak memoryless property of life distributions

A life distribution is said to have a weak memoryless property if its conditional probability of survival beyond a fixed time point is equal to its (unconditional) survival probability at that point. Goodness‐of‐fit testing of this notion is proposed in the current investigation, both when the fixed time point is known and when it is unknown but estimable from the data. The limiting behaviour of the proposed test statistic is obtained and the null variance is explicitly given. The empirical power of the test is evaluated for a commonly known alternative using Monte Carlo methods, showing that the test performs well. The case when the fixed time point t₀ equals a quantile of the distribution F gives a distribution‐free test procedure. The procedure works even if t₀ is unknown but is estimable.     

The plight of rural women: alternatives for action

Women in rural areas perform many of the agricultural tasks as well as the household care tasks. In addition to food production, looking after children, and cultivating cash crops, women also process food, carry water, make cloth, and work 15-16 hours, often much longer than the men. Too often development programs disregard the needs of women altogether. Modernization has often had a negative effect on women. They have no access to modern tools or credit. Land reform, land settlement programs, and cooperatives have neglected to consider women's interests, roles, and position. Technogical progress has resulted in creating new inequalities between rural men and women. Development has increased the workload of women who are unpaid family helpers, and time-saving mechanised device have replaced women's jobs. In most developing countries women are active in home-based industrial production. The contractor who provides the material and collects the finished product is often a wealthy landowner who also get the profits. Technical cooperation projects should be geared more directly to food processing and traditional sectors where women predominate with the goal of reducing work loads. Organization or group action is necessary to achieve economies of scale; to eliminate middle men, money-lenders and traders profiting from women's work; and, to provide solidarity and support to women otherwise isolated in their homes and on their farms.