Constructing Clean Dreams: Accounts,Future Selves,and Social and Structural Support as Desistance Work

This article investigates the discourse individuals use when talking about desisting from criminal offending. I analyze the links between offenders’ accounts of past negative behavior, their construction of their possible “clean” future selves, and the social and structural conditions in which they were raised and continue to be embedded. Applying Scott and Lyman's (1968) framework on accounts and Markus and Nurius's (1986) framework of possible selves to interview data with twenty‐eight criminal offenders, I illustrate how excuses for past behavior provide a way for people to distance themselves from their past selves in attempts to preserve or re‐create a possible self that is still worthy to be redeemed in the future. This discourse becomes one mechanism that motivates individuals to change their lives—but it can be short‐lived. The analysis highlights how limited structural opportunities influence individuals’ lifestyles and behaviors, how individuals approach the desistance process even in the face of structural deprivation, and how they attempt to sustain this desistance process.     

Locally quadratic log likelihood and data-based transformations

The investigation of multi-parameter likelihood functions is simplified if the log likelihood is quadratic near the maximum, as then normal approximations to the likelihood can be accurately used to obtain quantities such as likelihood regions. This paper proposes that data-based transformations of the parameters can be employed to make the log likelihood more quadratic, and illustrates the method with one of the simplest bivariate likelihoods, the normal two-parameter likelihood.     

Planning in a state of turbulence

This paper is concerned with an exploration of the role of the long range planner, whether in the private or public sector of the economy, and the impact made upon the processes of his work by government's increasing propensity to manipulate the economy. The authors' researches over the last 2 years into the comparative nature of planning processes in the U.K. economy have made it abundantly clear to them that planners are increasingly concerned at the dangerous potential of such impact upon their forecasting procedures. The emphasis here will rest upon the planner in private enterprises, although the authors' work in both local government and the nationalized enterprises suggest that the problem is of equal importance in these sectors.The authors consider first the past nature of the search processes in long range planning and the context of such attempts to narrow down the range of variables that form the enterprise's perception of its future. Secondly, they examine the emerging discontinuity and the changing role of government, with particular reference to indicative planning concepts. Then they introduce some of the findings of a recent survey of attitudes towards long range planning in the construction industry of the U.K., a sector vitally influenced by turbulence in the economy and with particular interest in government's ideas of macro-planning. Finally Edwards and Harris examine the implications to government and to planners of their findings.     

Estimating the Concentration of Propagules of a Plant Pathogen from Soil Dilution Plate Counts when the Response is Non-linear

The estimation of micro-organism concentrations from dilution plate data is discussed for situations where expected counts are not proportional to the amount of sample per plate. Aspects of design and analysis are investigated in relation to an alternative non-linear model in which the concentration is given by the slope at the origin. This exponential model generally provides a good fit to available experimental data. Simulations show that estimators based on the model perform well when the response is non-linear and remain reasonably efficient when the response is linear.     

Using tri-reference point theory to evaluate risk attitude and the effects of financial incentives in a gamified crowdsourcing task

Crowdsourcing has rapidly developed as a mechanism to accomplish tasks that are easy for humans to accomplish but are challenging for machines. However, unlike machines, humans need to be cajoled to perform tasks, usually through some type of incentive. Since participants from the crowd are typically anonymous and have no expectation of an ongoing work relationship with a task requester, the types of incentives offered to workers are usually short-term monetary bonuses, which have had an inconclusive impact on crowdsourcing worker quality. In this paper, we explore the notion that the risk attitude of crowdsourcing workers may play an important role in the effectiveness of incentives on task accuracy. Traditional utility theories, such as prospect theory, depend on decisions made relative to a singular reference point, whereas the tri-reference point (TRP) theory (Wang and Johnson, J Exp Psychol Gen 141:743–756, 2012) holds that three reference points impact decision making. Using the TRP theory as a guide, we develop a game that provides workers with three reference points and subsequently explores the role of multiple reference points on worker risk aversion and task accuracy.     

Perceptions of Effectiveness of Responses to Sexual Harassment in the US Military, 1988 and 1995

This analysis compares patterns of response to the harassment experiences that had the greatest effect on the respondents to the ‘1988 Department of Defense (DoD) Survey of Sex Roles in the Active‐Duty Military’ and Form A of the ‘1995 Armed Forces Sexual Harassment Survey’. We analyse the respondents’ perceptions about effectiveness of their responses, and respondents’ opinions about the efforts of senior military leadership, and their own immediate supervisors’ efforts to ‘make honest and reasonable efforts to stop sexual harassment in the active‐duty military’ ( DoD, 1988 ; Bastian et al., 1996 ). Results indicate that while the military has been somewhat successful in attempts to lower actual incidence of sexual harassment, the percentage of those experiencing such uninvited and unwanted behaviours remains high. Similar patterns of responses in both years, with most employing personal solutions and few filing complaints with officials, may reflect the fact that official DoD policy focuses on individual behaviour and does not address the masculine environmental context that promotes such behaviours (see also Harrell and Miller, 1997 ). Findings also suggest that the ‘no tolerance’ policies adopted by the military may concentrate on the military image but ignore the wishes of the complainants who fear reprisals. If the rights and wishes of all parties involved are not taken into account, policies are unlikely to be successful (see, for example, Rowe, 1996 ).     

The fiducial argument and hacking's principle of irrelevance

In a searching analysis of the fiducial argument Hacking (1965) proposed the Principle of Irrelevance as a condition under which the argument is valid. His statement of the Principle was essentially non-mathematical and this paper presents a mathematical development of the Principle. The relationship with likelihood inference is explored and some of the proposed counter-examples to fiducial theory are considered. It is shown that even with the Principle of Irrelevance examples of non-uniqueness of fiducial distributions exist.