Defacing Levinas: vision,veiling and the ethics of republican citizenship in France

In 2010, the French parliament passed legislation banning the concealment of the face in public in response to a highly publicised debate over the place of the full-face Islamic veil in French society. This essay explores the thus far unexamined relationship between Jewish-French philosopher Emmanual Levinas' ethics of the face-to-face encounter and France's so-called burqa ban. It draws particular attention to the role vision plays in the articulations of ethical comportment between French citizens that were used to justify the burqa ban. In his writing on the face, Levinas remarked more than once that ethics for him is an optics. I seek to demonstrate that his understanding of vision in relation to the face of the Other is a very different optics from that advanced in French anti-burqa discourse.     

Resident interaction and social well-being in an oil boomtown in western North Dakota

Previous studies on the social well-being of residents living in energy boomtowns focus primarily on demographic characteristics of residents. These studies do not consider that there could be a relationship between residents’ social well-being and whether they interact with new residents moving into their community. The current study includes a measure of interaction with new residents as it examines five dimensions of the social well-being of residents living in an oil boomtown in western North Dakota. Surveys were distributed door-to-door to residents living in Williston North Dakota during the fall of 2015. Research findings show that people who reported that they interact with new residents moving into their community felt safe from crime and violence in their community; felt more socially integrated in their community; had high levels of community trust and community satisfaction, and believed that they could count on their neighbors. These findings are important because they highlight the significance of social interaction in communities that experience rapid population growth resulting from increased energy production.     

CHARLES HENRY WICKENS: 1872–1939

An account of the life of the second Commonwealth Statistician, Charles Henry Wickens (1872–1939), has been given. After a primary school education in a Victorian country centre, Wickens became Associate of the Institute of Actuaries. Having joined the public service of Western Australia in 1897, he was appointed Compiler in the Commonwealth Bureau of Census and Statistics in 1906; he served as Commonwealth Statistician and Actuary, 1922 to 1932, giving outstanding service as government adviser and head of an important government department. He was a leader among theoretical and practical economists. His contributions to the study of Australian demography, especially life tables and vital statistics, were of the highest quality and permanent value. He made also scholarly contributions to actuarial theory and to the popularization of the work of the Bureau.     

Latent variable techniques for categorical data

Two useful statistical methods for generating a latent variable are described and extended to incorporate polytomous data and additional covariates. Item response analysis is not well-known outside its area of application, mainly because the procedures to fit the models are computer intensive and not routinely available within general statistical software packages. The linear score technique is less computer intensive, straightforward to implement and has been proposed as a good approximation to item response analysis. Both methods have been implemented in the standard statistical software package GLIM 4.0, and are compared to determine their effectiveness.