Surname analysis for estimating local concentration of Hispanics and Asians

Surname analysis is a potentially useful technique for identifying members of particular racial, ethnic, or language communities within a population. We review the existing state of the art for identifying persons of Hispanic or Asian origin, based on surnames distinctive of each group. We describe the logic of surname analysis, profile several available surname dictionaries, and illustrate their applications in local redistricting. Results of our ongoing validation studies suggest promising future directions for improving accuracy and broadening applications.This article is based on a paper presented at the annual Population Association of America meetings at Cincinnati, 1 April 1993.     

Local polynomial estimation of Poisson intensities in the presence of reporting delays

Summary.  The system for monitoring suicides in Hong Kong has considerable delays in reporting as the cause of death needs to be determined by a coroner's investigation. However, timely estimates of suicide rates are desirable to assist in the formulation of public health policies. This motivated us to develop a non-parametric procedure to estimate the intensity function of a Poisson process in the presence of reporting delays. We give closed form estimators of the Poisson intensity and the delay distribution, conduct simulation studies to evaluate the method proposed and derive their asymptotic properties. The method proposed is applied to estimate the intensity of suicide in Hong Kong.     

BATHTUB-TYPE CURVES IN RELIABILITY AND BEYOND

Finding optimal, or at least good, maintenance and repair policies is crucial in reliability engineering. Likewise, describing life phases of human mortality is important when determining social policy or insurance premiums. In these tasks, one searches for distributions to fit data and then makes inferences about the population(s). In the present paper, we focus on bathtub‐type distributions and provide a view of certain problems, methods and solutions, and a few challenges, that can be encountered in reliability engineering, survival analysis, demography and actuarial science.     

Stochastic Modelling of Times to Temperature for Furnaces Supplying Titanium Blooms to a Rolling Mill at TIMET

In conjunction with TIMET at Waunarlwydd (Swansea, UK) a model has been developed that will optimise the scheduling of various blooms to their eight furnaces so as to minimise the time taken to roll these blooms into the finished mill products. This production scheduling model requires reliable data on times taken for the various furnaces that heat the slabs and blooms to reach the temperatures required for rolling. These times to temperature are stochastic in nature and this paper identifies the distributional form for these times using the generalised F distribution as a modelling framework. The times to temperature were found to be similarly distributed over all furnaces. The identified distributional forms were incorporated into the scheduling model to optimise a particular campaign that was run at TIMET Swansea. Amongst other conclusion it was found that, compared to the actual campaign, the model produced a schedule that reduced the makespan by some 35%.     

Imagined Memories

Most discussions of popular music on the Internet focus on the utopian potential of new file-sharing technologies, yet applications that reproduce existing inequalities also deserve attention. Webcasting is the streaming (transmission) of digital video to multiple recipients in cyberspace. Paul McCartney's Webcast from the Cavern was a landmark case. It was a digital package staged for reproduction, and yet it felt live; in this article I explore why and offer a two-part explanation. The first part is that "live'-ness is based on an increasingly false opposition to recording, but, because that opposition still remains, Little Big Gig could seem live by adopting some trappings associated with it. The second part is that Internet use is mediated by daily life and computer users brought their own desire to the Webcast, in particular desires to see a Beatle play in the Cavern. Webcasting is an unanticipated use of the Internet that is being used to support corporate interests. With its widespread publicity, Little Big Gig helped naturalize that process.