Estimation of cyclic long-memory parameters

This paper studies cyclic long-memory processes with Gegenbauer-type spectral densities. For a semiparametric statistical model, new simultaneous estimates for singularity location and long-memory parameters are proposed. This generalized filtered method-of-moments approach is based on general filter transforms that include wavelet transformations as a particular case. It is proved that the estimates are almost surely convergent to the true values of parameters. Solutions of the estimation equations are studied, and adjusted statistics are proposed. Monte-Carlo study results are presented to confirm the theoretical findings.     

Feeling Attached and Feeling Accepted: Implications for Political Inclusion among Visible Minority Immigrants in Canada

Immigrants’ sense of belonging to their host communities is viewed as a core condition for their successful inclusion, but there is no consensus on which attributes of belonging are most relevant to understanding inclusion, nor is there agreement on how the sense of belonging ought to be measured empirically. This study examines how two related but independent dimensions of belonging help to better understand the political inclusion of visible minority immigrants in Canada. More specifically, it examines the role of feeling attached (immigrants’ feeling toward the host community) and the role of feeling accepted (immigrants’ sense of how their host communities feel about them). We assess the relationship between attachment, acceptance and political inclusion for both first- and second-generation visible minority Canadians; the results suggest there is analytical value in utilising separate measures of attachment and acceptance: political inclusion is more likely when both are stronger.     

An Inductive Analysis of Young Adults’ Conceptions of Femininity and Masculinity and Comparison to Established Gender Inventories

This study provides an analysis of the content of feminine and masculine characteristics/behaviors described in writing by 366 young women and 289 young men from the U.S. Emergent characteristics/behaviors were placed into domains. For both femininity and masculinity, the domains of “physical differences related to sex” and “emphasized physical differences” emerged. For masculinity, additional domains were: “activities and interests focused on the body,” “powerful or oriented toward power,” and “emotion-control or emotionally-limited.” For femininity, additional domains were “lacking power,” “orientation to other people,” and “emotional.” We then compared the characteristics/behaviors and domains we discovered to gender inventories that are commonly used in the contemporary period. The masculine domains focused on physical differences, activities, and interests that emerged from the present study are mostly absent from these masculinity inventories. The domains focused on power and restricted emotion are evident in these inventories, but these inventories do not cover all of the characteristics within our domains. The feminine domains that emerged from the present study are more often covered in these inventories, but some of the specific feminine characteristics we found are not evident in these inventories. Results are discussed in terms of gender role theory, gender inequality, and potential application for qualitative and quantitative inquiries into the construction of gender.     

Disclosure of sexual abuse in sport organizations: a case study

The disclosure of sexual abuse in the world of sports is a process that has not been widely documented. This article presents the results of a document analysis of sport organization policies and interviews conducted with 27 sport stakeholders. The interviews focus on these stakeholders' perceptions of how the disclosure process would unfold if a case of sexual abuse were to arise in their organization and their perceptions of the actual cases experienced in the sport organizations participating in this study. The results reveal several problems affecting the disclosure of sexual abuse in sport organizations.     

Sexual abuse in sport: a model to prevent and protect athletes

Several studies clearly show that sexual abuse exists in sport. Currently, very few studies have examined the prevention and management of this problem in sports organisations. This article explores the measures used to prevent sexual abuse in sports organisations as well as the perceptions of the sports actors affected by these measures (parents, athletes, administrators and coaches). The results demonstrate that several factors affect the implementation of measures and the management of this problem in sports organisations. Moreover, few measures exist to prevent and manage cases of sexual abuse in these organisations, thus jeopardising the protection of athletes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Use and Misuse of Indicators in Spatial Planning: The Example of Land Take

The use of indicators to assess the impacts of spatial planning policies has experienced a strong increase in the last decades, despite the difficulties to identify clear causality links in this discipline. The aim of this article is to critically reflect on the impacts of such a phenomenon on spatial planning policies and practices. In order to do so, it explores the issue of land take and how the European Community has set up a policy objective, based on an indicator, to try to tackle the phenomenon.     

Global Development Goals: The Folly of Technocratic Pretensions

This article argues that, although effective strategic choices for achieving global development goals need to be based on assessments of the costs and benefits of alternative approaches, existing methods of arriving at such assessments are highly unreliable, in particular deriving from implausible and restrictive assumptions and often depending on data of poor quality, and on the pretence that the future can be adequately known. Such weaknesses can be mitigated, but not easily overcome, without abandoning deeply held technocratic presumptions.     

Cognitive rationality and alternative belief measures

In this article, we first examine the various criticisms of the probabilistic model. Then we introduce capacities in order to show that if a probability measure corresponds to anesthetizing the belief of the agent's knowledge, it is then possible to suggest another type of rationality—namely, being able to describe a wise and a rash behavior when facing risk—and therefore another model of belief under uncertainty. While trying to specify various alternative measures, possibility, necessity, and measures resulting from a triangular norm or from a triangular conorm, we finally try to define the field of application of the probabilistic model as well as a sign of the rationality choice: constraint of mass-unity for traditional rationality, and constraint of duality for the one we present.This article is a revised version of a paper presented during the FUR V Congress, Duke University, North Carolina, USA, June 10–13, 1990. I am indebted to Bertrand Munier, Alain Chateauneuf, Olivier Favereau, Jacques-François Thisse, Bernard Walliser, and Kip Viscusi for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.     

The Deep Side of Preference Theory

An individual is said to have a taste for a particular menu, i.e. a subset of available commodities, if he is indifferent between all commodity bundles that contain the same quantity for each commodity which actually is in the menu, whatever the rest of the bundle. Then, a taste is directly defined as a deep property of preferences. As a first result, it is shown that a complete and transitive preference relation over the commodity bundles is equivalent to regular tastes where regularity means that tastes can be derived from a pure qualitative relation between the different commodities. Besides, a preference family based on preference relations corresponding to each particular commodity is said to be rationalizable if there exists a metapreference over commodity bundles which consistently summarizes the preference family and then allows to decide. As a second result, it is shown that if a preference family is rationalizable, then the tastes are organized thanks to a reflexive and transitive qualitative relation between the different commodities.     

Optimizing trial design in pharmacogenetics research: comparing a fixed parallel group,group sequential,and adaptive selection design on sample size requirements

Two‐stage clinical trial designs may be efficient in pharmacogenetics research when there is some but inconclusive evidence of effect modification by a genomic marker. Two‐stage designs allow to stop early for efficacy or futility and can offer the additional opportunity to enrich the study population to a specific patient subgroup after an interim analysis. This study compared sample size requirements for fixed parallel group, group sequential, and adaptive selection designs with equal overall power and control of the family‐wise type I error rate. The designs were evaluated across scenarios that defined the effect sizes in the marker positive and marker negative subgroups and the prevalence of marker positive patients in the overall study population. Effect sizes were chosen to reflect realistic planning scenarios, where at least some effect is present in the marker negative subgroup. In addition, scenarios were considered in which the assumed ‘true’ subgroup effects (i.e., the postulated effects) differed from those hypothesized at the planning stage. As expected, both two‐stage designs generally required fewer patients than a fixed parallel group design, and the advantage increased as the difference between subgroups increased. The adaptive selection design added little further reduction in sample size, as compared with the group sequential design, when the postulated effect sizes were equal to those hypothesized at the planning stage. However, when the postulated effects deviated strongly in favor of enrichment, the comparative advantage of the adaptive selection design increased, which precisely reflects the adaptive nature of the design. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.