Social Acceleration Theory and the Self

In recent years, there has been a rapidly growing body of work in the social sciences that underscores the prevalence of the phenomenon of ‘social acceleration'—the speeding up of social life— in many parts of the Western world. Although research on social acceleration has tended to analyze the phenomenon on a social‐structural level, there is also a need to investigate how social acceleration has ‘ramifications for the socially dominant forms of self‐relation’. One way to gain a more in‐depth understanding of this facet of social acceleration is to investigate the speeding up of social life through the prism of the self. The central argument of this article is that there are at least five images of the self which can be associated with the social acceleration phenomenon: (1) the ‘detached’ self, (2) the ‘reflexive’ self, (3) the ‘reinventive’ self, (4) the ‘stationary’ self and (5) the ‘decelerating’ self. By explaining how these kinds of self relate to the speeding up process, we seek to advance a more nuanced and sophisticated theory of social acceleration, which captures some of the complexities and paradoxes that the phenomenon involves.     

Parametric survival densities from phase-type models

After a brief historical survey of parametric survival models, from actuarial, biomedical, demographical and engineering sources, this paper discusses the persistent reasons why parametric models still play an important role in exploratory statistical research. The phase-type models are advanced as a flexible family of latent-class models with interpretable components. These models are now supported by computational statistical methods that make numerical calculation of likelihoods and statistical estimation of parameters feasible in theory for quite complicated settings. However, consideration of Fisher Information and likelihood-ratio type tests to discriminate between model families indicates that only the simplest phase-type model topologies can be stably estimated in practice, even on rather large datasets. An example of a parametric model with features of mixtures, multiple stages or ‘hits’, and a trapping-state is given to illustrate simple computational tools in R, both on simulated data and on a large SEER 1992–2002 breast-cancer dataset.     

Cumulative Correspondence Analysis of Two-Way Ordinal Contingency Tables

A suitable measure of association for two ordered variables is the doubly cumulative chi-squared statistic (Hirotsu, 1994 Hirotsu , C. ( 1994 ). Modelling and analysing the generalized interaction . Proc. Third IEEE Conf. Control Applic. 2 : 1283 – 1288 .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). This statistic is obtained by considering the cumulative sum of cell frequencies across the variables. In this article, we explore the development of correspondence analysis which takes into account the presence of two ordered variables by partitioning the doubly cumulative chi-squared statistic.     

An exponential (matching based) neighborhood for the vehicle routing problem

We introduce an exponential neighborhood for the Vehicle Routing Problem (vrp) with unit customers’ demands, and we show that it can be explored efficiently in polynomial time by reducing its exploration to a particular case of the Restricted Complete Matching (rcm) problem that we prove to be polynomial time solvable using flow techniques. Furthermore, we show that in the general case with non-unit customers’ demands the exploration of the neighborhood becomes an -hard problem.     

The analysis of dependence for three ways contingency tables with ordinal variables: A case study of patient satisfaction data

For many questionnaires and surveys in the marketing, business, and health disciplines, items often involve ordinal scales (such as the Likert scale and rating scale) that are associated in sometimes complex ways. Techniques such as classical correspondence analysis provide a simple graphical means of describing the nature of the association. However, the procedure does not allow the researcher to specify how one item may be associated with another, nor does the analysis allow for the ordinal structure of the scales to be reflected. This article presents a graphical approach that can help the researcher to study in depth the complex association of the items and reflect the structure of the items. We will demonstrate the applicability of this approach using data collected from a study that involves identifying major factors that influence the level of patient satisfaction in a Neapolitan hospital.     

Disaggregated spatial modelling for areal unit categorical data

Summary.  We consider joint spatial modelling of areal multivariate categorical data assuming a multiway contingency table for the variables, modelled by using a log-linear model, and connected across units by using spatial random effects. With no distinction regarding whether variables are response or explanatory, we do not limit inference to conditional probabilities, as in customary spatial logistic regression. With joint probabilities we can calculate arbitrary marginal and conditional probabilities without having to refit models to investigate different hypotheses. Flexible aggregation allows us to investigate subgroups of interest; flexible conditioning enables not only the study of outcomes given risk factors but also retrospective study of risk factors given outcomes. A benefit of joint spatial modelling is the opportunity to reveal disparities in health in a richer fashion, e.g. across space for any particular group of cells, across groups of cells at a particular location, and, hence, potential space–group interaction. We illustrate with an analysis of birth records for the state of North Carolina and compare with spatial logistic regression.     

行政国家的危机治理——9·11恐怖袭击和2008年金融危机

9·11恐怖袭击和2008年金融危机中,美国政府的危机治理和危机立法有相似的表现:宽泛的政治过程而非宪法上的限制等因素在两次事件中都发挥着作用,产生了相似的危机治理模式;在这一模式中,国会向行政部门赋予强大的新的权力。这一模式通过卡尔·施密特关于立法的理论得到更好的解释,更优于麦迪逊理论。但在危机政治的广泛制约因素中,布什政府在9·11之后比在金融危机中对其权力的攫取更加激进。这一方面是因为布什政府在2001—2008年间逐步丧失了其公信力和群众的拥护,另一方面也是由于金融监管体制的分裂局面。