Backtracking and the Ethics of Framing: Lessons from Voles and Vasopressin

When communicating scientific information, experts often face difficult choices about how to promote public understanding while also maintaining an appropriate level of objectivity. We argue that one way for scientists and others involved in communicating scientific information to alleviate these tensions is to pay closer attention to the major frames employed in the contexts in which they work. By doing so, they can ideally employ useful frames while also enabling the recipients of information to “backtrack” to relatively uncontroversial facts and recognize how these frames relate to their own values and perspectives. Important strategies for promoting this sort of backtracking include identifying the weaknesses of particular frames, preventing misunderstanding of them, differentiating well-supported findings from more speculative claims, and acknowledging major alternative frames.     

The Effects of Race and Family Structure on Women's Spatial Relationship to the Labor Market

This study examines the intersection of race, family structure, and economic inequality through women's spatial relationships to the labor market. Using survey data from three major metro labor markets, we operationalize spatial relationships in two ways: first, using a conventional measure of commute time, and second, using an indicator of neighborhood job contacts to obtain employment. Results indicate that family structure exerts no direct effect on women's spatial relationship to the labor market. Race, by contrast, plays a strong role, mediating women's reliance on mass transit, their response to teenage kids in the household, and their likelihood of using neighbors to find employment. The result is a situation in which black and Latina women are more likely than white women to rely on localized job networks to obtain employment that requires longer commutes from home.     

Confidence regions for two proportions from independent negative binomial distributions

The negative binomial distribution offers an alternative view to the binomial distribution for modeling count data. This alternative view is particularly useful when the probability of success is very small, because, unlike the fixed sampling scheme of the binomial distribution, the inverse sampling approach allows one to collect enough data in order to adequately estimate the proportion of success. However, despite work that has been done on the joint estimation of two binomial proportions from independent samples, there is little, if any, similar work for negative binomial proportions. In this paper, we construct and investigate three confidence regions for two negative binomial proportions based on three statistics: the Wald (W), score (S) and likelihood ratio (LR) statistics. For large-to-moderate sample sizes, this paper finds that all three regions have good coverage properties, with comparable average areas for large sample sizes but with the S method producing the smaller regions for moderate sample sizes. In the small sample case, the LR method has good coverage properties, but often at the expense of comparatively larger areas. Finally, we apply these three regions to some real data for the joint estimation of liver damage rates in patients taking one of two drugs.     

A method of spare parts inventory planning

A mathematical and simulation technique is discussed to obtain integer (s1, S) solutions for a group of part numbers at spares stocking locations. The technique utilizes cost function based on stochastic integer (s, S) inventory model formulation. The results are successfully implemented to plan several million dollars of spares inventory and to plan multi-echelon initial spares provisioning in the field.