Outliers and order statistics

Outliers are to be found among the extremes of a data set. Extremes are examples of order statistics. It is thus relevant to ask to what extent the statistical methods (and probabilistic properties) of outliers and of order statistics coincide and depend on each other. Whilst clear overlap is identifiable, aims and procedures are often quite distinct and each topic plays its own important role in the panoply of statistical principles and methodology.     

Toward Authenticity

Scholars suggest we construct stories or narratives to help us create order and rationalize events that are difficult to explain. In contemporary society, journalists serve as mediated storytellers, and one story journalists have told from the perspective of sense-making is that of mothers who kill their children, a crime that can defy understanding. This qualitative textual analysis examines ten cases of maternal infanticide to determine the collective narrative told by journalists, exploring the dialectical and rhetorical functions of narrative. The analysis reveals that the news narrative offers moral lessons about the consequences of maternal incompetence and “inappropriate” feminine sexual behavior. The author questions whether the journalistic paradigm of detachment—traditionally associated with a masculine narrative style—is the best way to tell stories of women's lives and suggests feminist research practices can be used to capture the complexities of mothering work, as well as other complicated situations in women's and men's lives.     

Pathways of Adult Children Providing Care to Older Parents

Guided by life course and stress process theory, this study investigated pathways of adult child caregivers' family (caregiving, marital, parenting) and nonfamily (employment) roles. Eight waves of data from the Health and Retirement Study were analyzed for 1,300 adult child caregivers. Latent class analysis provided strong evidence for a 4‐class model of caregivers' role pathways. The four pathways were (a) Not‐Married, Early‐Transition to Not‐Working Caregivers (34%), (b) Married, Not‐Working Caregivers (26%), (c) Married, Late‐Transition to Not‐Working Caregivers (23%), and (d) Married, Not‐Working Caregivers with Coresiding Child (17%). Caregivers' background characteristics and contexts predicted pathway membership. Adult child caregivers have structurally diverse life pathways that have implications for theory, research, and practice.     

London murders: a predictable pattern?

Four stabbings to death in a single day. Ninety murders in 7 months. Shocking figures—or are they? Knife crime makes the headlines almost daily but are Londoners really at increased risk of being murdered? David Spiegelhalter and Arthur Barnett investigate—and find a predictable pattern of murder.     

Individual and Crossover Effects of Work Schedule Fit: A Within‐Couple Analysis

A couple‐level analysis with a sample of 105 female reduced‐hours physicians and their full‐time–employed husbands found individual and spouse crossover effects: Each spouse's ratings of own schedule fit predict own job‐role quality; wives' ratings of partner/family schedule fit predict their marital‐role quality, with a similar trend for husbands; husbands' ratings of own schedule fit predict wives' marital‐role quality; and husbands' ratings of partner/family schedule fit and wives' ratings of own schedule fit predict husbands' psychological distress. These findings highlight the interdependence of couple members' experiences and illustrate potential costs of wives' trading off time at work for time at home.     

Parental After‐School Stress and Psychological Well‐Being

The mismatch between employed parents’ work schedules and their children's school schedules creates the structural underpinning for an as‐yet‐unstudied stressor, namely, parental after‐school stress, or the degree of parents’ concern about their children's welfare after school. We estimate the relationship between parental after‐school stress and psychological well‐being in a sample of 243 employed parents of children in grades K–12. Parental after‐school stress is related to psychological well‐being. This relationship did not differ by parent gender or child age but was significantly stronger for parents of girls versus boys. Our results suggest that parental after‐school stress is an important stressor that affects the well‐being of a large segment of the work force and warrants further research.     

Public space as 'context' in assistive information and communication technologies for people with cognitive impairment

This paper examines emergent issues of 'context' raised by the application of information and communication technologies for people with cognitive impairment. The issue of the development and application of cognitive prostheses for this group provides an opportunity to examine assumptions and issues emerging from this area pertaining to understandings of the term 'context' in these applications. In this sense the paper takes these assumptions and issues as a point of departure for the development of a 'problematic' that can contribute to the study of the experience of cognitive impairment. The paper specifically addresses recent concerns about the lack of knowledge of these experiences in public spaces such as shopping centres, given that this is a critical site for the civic participation of this group. We argue that this participation should be understood in terms of the 'meeting of two histories': the history of contemporary requirements governing participation in public space and the habitus of people with cognitive impairment with regard to this participation. The paper proposes that the salience of cognitive impairment in these spaces turns on what it means for individuals to inhabit them as complex 'Container Technologies' (Sofia) and underlines the importance of understanding their efforts to attain a sense of normality (Goffman) in these contexts. We propose that this approach can inform research contributing to the development of a 'pattern language', informing applications that make cognition a system property in networks that operate between humans, machines and their contexts.     

Identifying managerial potential for manpower planning

This article describes the approach of a South African retail store organization to the problems of Manpower Planning, The emphasis is upon the assessment of potential using the Assessment Centre technique.     

Antisocial and Prosocial Teasing Among Children: Perceptions and Individual Differences

Two studies examined fifth‐ and sixth‐grade students’ perceptions of antisocial and prosocial teasing among peers and potential correlates of individual differences in their tendencies to engage in both forms of teasing. The children were rated as showing a greater tendency to be prosocial teasers than antisocial teasers by both teachers and peers. In addition, the children indicated that they generally experienced and observed prosocial teasing more frequently than antisocial teasing at home and in school. Although boys were perceived to tease in a hostile, antisocial manner to a greater extent than were girls, the evidence for a gender difference in affiliative, prosocial teasing among these children was relatively weak. Additionally, systematic relations were found among ratings of the children's tendencies to engage in antisocial and prosocial teasing with peers, teachers’ ratings of their general level of antisocial and prosocial behavior with peers, ratings of the frequency with which they experienced antisocial and prosocial teasing at home and at school, and their attitudes toward antisocial and prosocial teasing.     

Discussion: The Recent Reappearance of the Homotheticity Restriction on Preferences

A model linking final demand (sales) with intermediate manufactures is estimated and simulated over the course of a business cycle. The results show that prices fluctuate more for early-stage manufactures than for later-stage products at the manufacturing and retail level. This is found to be largely due to inventory and unfilled orders fluctuations, particularly those of inventories of primary manufactured products held by finished goods manufacturers. Since these inventory fluctuations lead the cycle in final demand, prices of primary manufactures lead business activity. Another result is that inventories of materials and supplies, including those of retailers for resale, exhibit more instability than producers' inventories of finished goods.