All Ages and None: Commentary on Helene Moglen's Ageing and Transageing

Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associatively “recovered” in the work of mourning that might be better seen as the more illusive “production” of presumptively anterior contexts and states of mind in the present. I also question how successfully Moglen's positioning of her notion of “transaging” somewhere between “transgender” and “transsexuality” serves to loosen up the vicious binary between “young” and “old. I would appreciate closer attention to the dreaded “feminization” of old age, noting the toxic sexism permeating cultures of ageing. Nevertheless, Moglen offers an excellent opening into this troubling topic.     

Kernel Density Estimator From Ranked Set Samples

We study kernel density estimator from the ranked set samples (RSS). In the kernel density estimator, the selection of the bandwidth gives strong influence on the resulting estimate. In this article, we consider several different choices of the bandwidth and compare their asymptotic mean integrated square errors (MISE). We also propose a plug-in estimator of the bandwidth to minimize the asymptotic MISE. We numerically compare the MISE of the proposed kernel estimator (having the plug-in bandwidth estimator) to its simple random sampling counterpart. We further propose two estimators for a symmetric distribution, and show that they outperform in MISE all other estimators not considering symmetry. We finally apply the methods in this article to analyzing the tree height data from Platt et al. (1988 Platt, W.J., Evans, G.M., Rathbun, S.L. (1988). The population dynamics of long-lived conifer (Pinus plaustris) (1988). Amer. Natrualist 131:491–525.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Chen et al. (2003 Chen, Z., Bai, Z., Sinha, B.K. (2003). Ranked Set Sampling: Theory and Applications. New York: Springer. [Google Scholar]).     

中国劳动力流动的形势及其变化--从历时最久的流动中得到的启示

文章的目的是探索中国劳动力流动的潜在动态变化,并以墨西哥劳动力迁移到美国的案例为类比对象.墨西哥-美国迁移从开始到现在已经40多年了,文章考察了这一时期墨西哥-美国迁移形势的主要变化,显示其如何随着来源地、目标地和迁移过程的因素变化而变化,并将这些因素与可能影响中国人口流动的类似因素进行了比较.     

Models of the future

Existing world models are criticized for the omission of feedback effects. Modifications to existing models are considered implausible, and a very simple structure representing the system by stocks and flows of energy is proposed. The planning implications of such simple models are explored in terms of risk evaluation. The analysis of a possible risk situation yields a dimensionless quantity relating capital investment, depletion rate, investment fraction and efficiency. This quantity is shown to be critical in determining the existence of discontinuities in the growth curve, independent of the desired level of growth.     

Fortune,Risk, and Remittances: An Application of Option Theory to Participation in Village‐Based Migration Networks1

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Is the Person-Affecting Intuition Paradoxical?

This article critically examines some of the inconsistency objections that have been put forward by John Broome, Larry Temkin and others against the so-called "person-affecting," or "person-based," restriction in normative ethics, including "extra people" problems and a version of the nonidentity problem from Kavka and Parfit. Certain Pareto principles and a version of the "mere addition paradox" are discussed along the way. The inconsistencies at issue can be avoided, it is argued, by situating the person-affecting intuition within a non-additive form of maximizing consequentialism – a theory which then competes with such additive, or aggregative, forms of maximizing consequentialism as "totalism" and "averagism."     

Critical realism and the dialectic

A prominent strand within both sociological and social theory has been concerned to develop a 'systems approach' with which to explore social life. One of the most original contributions to a systems approach has arisen within critical realism. In particular critical realism demonstrates that it is possible to abstract the causal powers of different objects of analysis to examine their interaction within concrete and contingent 'open systems'. The recent dialectical turn of critical realism develops this systems approach in a much more rigorous manner. However, in this paper I argue that the (dialectical) critical realist mode of abstraction ultimately fails to embed concepts and categories internally within the specific ideological and historical forms of social relations. Or rather, critical realists do not seek to develop concepts that reflect the self-movement of a historical and contradictory essence. This self-movement is what I prefer to call a 'system'. Consequently critical realists are led to separate method from system in theory construction and such a separation leads to a problematic dualist mode of theorizing. I make these observations from a Hegelian-Marxist position.