The Native in the Garden: Floral Politics and Cultural Entrepreneurs

Although sociological research has examined how state symbolism binds citizens together and creates allegiance, little attention has been paid to how such symbols are selected. We investigate the adoption of state flowers in the United States. Seemingly unproblematic processes surrounding the selection of floral emblems can, under certain circumstances, involve heated symbolic politics. The default option of selecting a native flower, naturalizing the state, can be overcome by materialist or cultural interests that invest cultivated flowers with symbolic potency. In-depth case studies of three states where battles were waged over the state flower reveal that the battle lines were material and symbolic, demonstrating that apparently “authentic” representations of nature can be trumped by factional and subcultural interests.

Multivariate tests comparing binomial probabilities, with application to safety studies for drugs

Summary.  In magazine advertisements for new drugs, it is common to see summary tables that compare the relative frequency of several side-effects for the drug and for a placebo, based on results from placebo-controlled clinical trials. The paper summarizes ways to conduct a global test of equality of the population proportions for the drug and the vector of population proportions for the placebo. For multivariate normal responses, the Hotelling T ²-test is a well-known method for testing equality of a vector of means for two independent samples. The tests in the paper are analogues of this test for vectors of binary responses. The likelihood ratio tests can be computationally intensive or have poor asymptotic performance. Simple quadratic forms comparing the two vectors provide alternative tests. Much better performance results from using a score-type version with a null-estimated covariance matrix than from the sample covariance matrix that applies with an ordinary Wald test. For either type of statistic, asymptotic inference is often inadequate, so we also present alternative, exact permutation tests. Follow-up inferences are also discussed, and our methods are applied to safety data from a phase II clinical trial.     

Involving communities in the evaluation of programmes with ‘at risk’ children and young people

This article explores the relationships between evaluators and those who take part in community‐based programmes. It draws specifically on experience gained from the continuing evaluation of the Communities that Care (CTC) programme in Britain. Different community perspectives towards evaluation are discussed, highlighting the challenges these create for evaluators. In the final sections examples are used to identify different strategies used on the CTC evaluation, showing how ‘trust’, ‘boundary setting’, ‘independence’ and ‘identification of benefits’ are central to including community participants in evaluation. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A permutation test approach to phase II historical control trials

In this note we outline 15 years of Gynecologic Oncology Group (GOG) experience conducting a series of phase II second-line intraperitoneal trials in the treatment of ovarian cancer. Using this information, the goal is to define a new permutation approach to historical control phase II trials in ovarian cancer. We utilize seven previous phase II GOG trials in our database to illustrate our methodology.     

Pragmatism, Bourdieu, and collective emotions in contentious politics

We aim to show how collective emotions can be incorporated into the study of episodes of political contention. In a critical vein, we systematically explore the weaknesses in extant models of collective action, showing what has been lost through a neglect or faulty conceptualization of collective emotional configurations. We structure this discussion in terms of a review of several “pernicious postulates” in the literature, assumptions that have been held, we argue, by classical social-movement theorists and by social-structural and cultural critics alike. In a reconstructive vein, however, we also lay out the foundations of a more satisfactory theoretical framework. We take each succeeding critique of a pernicious postulate as the occasion for more positive theory-building. Drawing upon the work of the classical American pragmatists–especially Peirce, Dewey, and Mead–as well as aspects of Bourdieu's sociology, we construct, step by step, the foundations of a more adequate theorization of social movements and collective action. Accordingly, the negative and positive threads of our discussion are woven closely together: the dismantling of pernicious postulates and the development of a more useful analytical strategy.     

中国式秀恩爱

正当你坐上缆车,爬上黄山,你会看到山上的铁丝网上挂满了成千上万个小锁。每个锁上都刻上了一对夫妻的名字;他们或是情侣,或是夫妻,或是即将走入婚姻殿堂。支付30元(4.89美元),卖锁的人就会将你们的名字刻在小挂锁上,然后给你们两把小钥匙。你在篱笆上找一个看似     

A bivariate space-time downscaler under space and time misalignment

Ozone and particulate matter PM(2.5) are co-pollutants that have long been associated with increased public health risks. Information on concentration levels for both pollutants come from two sources: monitoring sites and output from complex numerical models that produce concentration surfaces over large spatial regions. In this paper, we offer a fully-model based approach for fusing these two sources of information for the pair of co-pollutants which is computationally feasible over large spatial regions and long periods of time. Due to the association between concentration levels of the two environmental contaminants, it is expected that information regarding one will help to improve prediction of the other. Misalignment is an obvious issue since the monitoring networks for the two contaminants only partly intersect and because the collection rate for PM(2.5) is typically less frequent than that for ozone.Extending previous work in Berrocal et al. (2009), we introduce a bivariate downscaler that provides a flexible class of bivariate space-time assimilation models. We discuss computational issues for model fitting and analyze a dataset for ozone and PM(2.5) for the ozone season during year 2002. We show a modest improvement in predictive performance, not surprising in a setting where we can anticipate only a small gain.