Queer (in)frequencies: SiriusXM’s OutQ and the limits of queer listening publics

On February 23, 2016, OutQ, the nation’s only LGBT-focused satellite radio station, ceased broadcasting. This essay theorizes a queer listening public as intentionally imagined as such and concomitantly taken up as a queer listening public by queers. It utilizes in-depth interviews with OutQ founder John McMullen, and OutQ show hosts Frank DeCaro, Romaine Patterson, and Michelangelo Signorile, as well as posts from Facebook Fan Pages, to explore the ways OutQ was both imagined and functioned as a queer listening public. Using the interview data, the essay argues that a queer listening public functions in three ways. First, it creates a specifically queer space for queer listeners, almost at the exclusion of heterosexual listeners. Second, it creates a queer affective community where events important to LGBT citizens can be “felt” in a communal, mediated space. Third, a queer listening public seeks to create a national/transnational queer listening public for geographically isolated queers. Additionally, this essay argues that in the cessation of OutQ, SiriusXM practiced what I call queer dispersal, a term deployed to describe the ways marketable aspects of queer life, like entertainment and music, are dispersed and hegemonically incorporated into mainstream media properties.     

How might sovereign bond yields in Asia Pacific react to US monetary normalisation under turbulent market conditions?*

This paper examines the potential impact of US monetary normalisation on sovereign bond yields in Asia Pacific. We apply the quantile vector autoregressive model with principal component analysis to the assessment of tail risk of sovereign debt, which may not be detectable using traditional OLS-based analysis. Our empirical evidence suggests that US Treasury bond yields can have a significant impact on sovereign bond yields in the region, an important channel through which monetary normalisation by the Fed can affect Asia-Pacific economies. Increases in sovereign bond yields will not only compromise the ability of the sovereigns in the region to service their debt but also translate into higher costs of borrowing for the rest of economy. The results show how much the outsized impact could potentially be if US monetary normalisation somehow turns out to be much more disorderly than expected.     

Public relations channel “repertoires”: Exploring patterns of channel use in practice

While public relations practitioners may use any number of channels to accomplish organizational objectives, research has focused on the use of single communication channels in isolation from other available channels. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify the common combinations of channels or “channel repertoires” that practitioners use to reach their publics. Analyses of survey data (N = 504) of practitioners from five countries revealed four distinct patterns or repertoires of channels. The results also indicated that many public relations functions predict the use of certain repertoires, and explained which functions of public relations use more channels than others. The findings have implications for theory building, practice, and pedagogy on planning and engagement with publics.     

Settler colonialism and sociological knowledge: insights and directions forward

Theory and Society - What can the analytical framework of settler colonialism contribute to sociological theorizing, research, and overall understanding of the social world? This essay argues that...     

Modeling Lung Carcinogenesis in Radon‐Exposed Miner Cohorts: Accounting for Missing Information on Smoking

Epidemiological miner cohort data used to estimate lung cancer risks related to occupational radon exposure often lack cohort‐wide information on exposure to tobacco smoke, a potential confounder and important effect modifier. We have developed a method to project data on smoking habits from a case‐control study onto an entire cohort by means of a Monte Carlo resampling technique. As a proof of principle, this method is tested on a subcohort of 35,084 former uranium miners employed at the WISMUT company (Germany), with 461 lung cancer deaths in the follow‐up period 1955–1998. After applying the proposed imputation technique, a biologically‐based carcinogenesis model is employed to analyze the cohort's lung cancer mortality data. A sensitivity analysis based on a set of 200 independent projections with subsequent model analyses yields narrow distributions of the free model parameters, indicating that parameter values are relatively stable and independent of individual projections. This technique thus offers a possibility to account for unknown smoking habits, enabling us to unravel risks related to radon, to smoking, and to the combination of both.     

Authorship of drug industry trials

Viewpoint welcomes short papers expressing a personal opinion on matters of general interest to statisticians in the pharmaceutical industry. In this first issue Professor Stephen Senn shares his views on the authorship of drug industry trials. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Even Risk-Averters may Love Risk

A decision maker bets on the outcomes of a sequence of coin-tossings. At the beginning of the game the decision maker can choose one of two coins to play the game. This initial choice is irreversible. The coins can be biased and the player is uncertain about the nature of one (or possibly both) coin(s). If the player is an expected-utility maximizer, her choice of the coin will depend on different elements: the nature of the game (namely, whether she can observe the outcomes of the previous tosses before making her next decision), her utility function, the prior distribution on the bias of the coin. We will show that even a risk averter might optimally choose a riskier coin when learning is allowed. We will express most of our results in the language of stochastic orderings, allowing comparisons that are valid for large classes of utility functions.