Implementation of a demographic and contraceptive surveillance system in four counties in north China

This paper details efforts to implement a demographic and contraceptive surveillance system in four counties in North China. These counties are taking part in a large-scale field experiment involving the introduction of new contraceptives, greater choice in the use of contraceptives, and better training of family planning personnel. To evaluate the impact of these changes, a system of detailed, individual-level records are being kept in the 24 townships taking part in the project. We discuss the interaction between data collection and policy implementation - its general forms, its manifestations in modern China, and its relevance for the current project. We describe the system that we are implementing - what the old system looked like, and how we have tried to improve it. We evaluate the system's functioning over three years, based on field observations and preliminary data from one of the project's four counties. We conclude that there has been progress in the timely accumulation of standardized data; but there remains an antinomy whereby, past a point, an emphasis on data quality has the effect of sensitizing those responsible for recording data to the problematic nature of such data, thereby weakening accuracy. Many of the issues encountered in implementing the new system are relevant to the larger issues of (a) correct interpretation of data from China, and (b) creating a reasonable climate for change in the family planning system.     

"Anything Can Happen With Police Around": Urban Youth Evaluate Strategies of Surveillance in Public Places

In order to document urban youth experiences of adults in positions of public authority, including police, educators, social workers and guards, a broad based street survey of 911 New York City-based urban youth was conducted in which youth, stratified by race, ethnicity, gender and borough, were asked about their experiences with, attitudes toward, and trust of adult surveillance in communities and in schools. In-depth telephone interviews were conducted with 36 youth who have experienced serious, adverse interactions with police, guards, or educators. Findings suggest that urban youth, overall, express a strong sense of betrayal by adults and report feeling mistrusted by adults, with young men of color most likely to report these perceptions.     

Migrant Membership as an Instituted Process: Transnationalization,the State and The Extra‐Territorial Conduct of Mexican Politics1

How should we conceptualize membership, citizenship and political community in a world where migrants and their home states increasingly maintain and cultivate their formal and informal ties? This study analyzes the extra‐territorial conduct of Mexican. politics and the emergence of new migrant membership practices and relations between migrants and home states. Standard globalist, transnationalist or citizenship theories cannot properly contextualize and analyze such practices. I propose that we rethink the concept of membership in a political community not only as a Marshallian status granted by states, but also as an instituted process embedded within four other institutions and processes: home state domestic politics; the home state's relationship to the world system; a semi‐autonomous transnational civil society created in part by migration; and the context of reception of migrants in the United States. A main conclusion is that the state itself plays a key role in creating transnational political action by migrants and new migrant membership practices. The article draws on printed sources and interviews and ethnography done since 1990.     

The effect of OSHA records-check inspections on reported occupational injuries in manufacturing establishments

In late 1981 Federal workplace safety officers, and those of several states, began on-site checks of plants' injury records to determine which establishments to inspect. Critics claim incentives for underreporting were thus created, and that published injury rates could be biased downward. Because the records-check procedure is not applied in all states or industries, this research (using four different statistical models) compares pre- to post-1981 changes in reported injury rates across states and industries. Data on 3059 uninspected plants suggests a 5–14% decline (cet. par.) in reported rates among plants potentially subject to the records-check procedure.     

Charpy Impact Energy Data: a Markov Chain Monte Carlo Analysis

To assess radiation damage in steel for reactor pressure vessels in the nuclear industry, specimens are subjected to the Charpy test, which measures how much energy a specimen can absorb at a given test temperature before cracking. The resulting Charpy impact energy data are well represented by a three-parameter Burr curve as a function of test temperature, in which the parameters of the Burr curve are themselves dependent on irradiation dose. The resulting non-linear model function, combined with heteroscedastic random errors, gives rise to complicated likelihood surfaces that make conventional statistical techniques difficult to implement. To compute estimates of parameters of practical interest, Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling-based techniques are implemented. The approach is applied to 40 data sets from specimens subjected to no irradiation or one or two doses of irradiation. The influence of irradiation dose on the amount of energy absorbed is investigated.     

Renovating inverval-censored responses

In this note we provide a general framework for describing interval-censored samples including estimation of the magnitude and rank positions of data that have been interval-censored so as to counteract the effect of censoring. This process of sample adjustment, or renovation, allows samples to be compared graphically, using diagrams (such as boxplots) which are based on ranks. The renovation process is based on Buckley-James regression estimators for linear regression with censored data.     

Claire Philip's poems and the “art of dying”

Through a study of the poems Claire Philip wrote while dying of cancer, the author develops the hypothesis that in writing poems, a patient reveals thoughts and feelings that might not be evident in a clinical situation. The thoughts and feelings disclosed in Philip's poems are less about pain and more about grief over separation from loved ones, dread of loss of identity, and doubts about death's meaning. In these disclosures and in the selection of images and stanza forms used to convey the disclosures, Philip is in the tradition of ars moriendi poets, more concerned about how to live and write about living while dying than in what happens to the body in the last moments.