SYSTEMIC AND NONSYSTEMIC DIAGNOSTIC PROCESSES: AN EMPIRICAL COMPARISON

This study concerned the extent to which systemic and nonsystemic clinicians differ in their diagnostic processes. Experienced therapists, identified either with a family systems or a psychodynamic orientation, viewed a stimulus film of a family session and individual interviews with each parent and identified patient. Subjects listed "clinically relevant factors" and formulated hypotheses. Content analyses showed that the systemic clinicians, in contrast to the nonsystemic ones, identified as relevant a greater number of different subsystems, more triads, and fewer monads. Whereas they formulated more functional and fewer temporal hypotheses, almost no explicitly circular hypotheses were developed by either group of therapists.     

Symmetry extensions of “neutrality” I: Advantage to the condorcet loser

This is the first of three papers introducing a theory for positional voting methods that determines all possible election rankings and relationships that ever could occur with a profile over all possible subsets of candidates for any specified choices of positional voting methods. As such, these results extend to all positional voting systems what was previously possible only for the Borda Count and the plurality voting systems. In this first part certain mathematical symmetries based on neutrality are used 1) to generalize the basic properties that cause the desired features of the Borda Count and 2) to describe classes of positional voting methods with new types of election relationships among the election outcomes. Some of these relationships generalize the well-known results about the positioning of a Condorcet winner/loser within a Borda ranking, but now it is possible for the Condorcet loser, rather than the winner, to have the advantage to win certain positional elections. Included among the results are axiomatic characterizations of many positional voting methods.This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IRI-9103180.     

Understanding the September 11 Terrorist Attack on America: The Role of Intergroup Theories of Normative Influence

The present article analyzes the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in terms of current theories of normative influence in intergroup conflict. The (conflicting) implications of various social psychological models of decision making for Western and American attempts to reduce the likelihood of further attacks are delineated. We examine the implications of social identity models and models of outgroup normative influence, as well as dynamic models of intergroup behavior that focus on the polarizing effects of outgroup hostility. The influence of Western responses is distinguished for various target audiences, including not only the terrorists, but also pro-Western Muslims in North America and Europe, unaligned Muslims, and Muslims with anti-American feelings who do not endorse terrorism.     

Beacon Art Center and Institute

The Beacon Art Center and Institute, located in an area of Florida experiencing rapid population growth, has enjoyed increases in membership,revenue and services. The Board of the Corporation and the Director must develop a long range strategic plan for the future of the organization. Ability to function is currently restricted by limited space, limited size of staff, and limited endowment. The center also faces potentially troublesome governance issues. The long run future of the art center must be addressed by the Board and the Director of the organization.     

Regression-based estimation of the false negative fraction when multiple negatives are unverified

Summary.  The paper describes a method of estimating the false negative fraction of a multiple-screening test when individuals who test negatively on all K tests do not have their true disease status verified. The method proposed makes no explicit assumptions about the underlying heterogeneity of the population or about serial correlation of test results within an individual. Rather, it is based on estimating false negative fractions conditionally on observed diagnostic histories and extrapolating the observed patterns in these empirical frequencies by using logistic regression. The method is illustrated on, and motivated by, data on a multiple-screening test for bowel cancer.     

An adjusted likelihood-ratio algorithm for the Behrens-Fisher problem

We present an algorithm which will incorporate an adjusted likelihood and a scaled likelihood procedure for the Behrens-Fisher problem. Nonuniqueness of the maximum likelihood estimates for the common mean are demonstrated on a simple example showing how ill-conditioned the maximum likelihood equations can be. Our results, however, show that the significance levels are stable even when the means are sensitive to perturbations.