Innovation: The way out of the recession?

A nation may easily have more than enough of any one commodity though she can never have more than enough of commodities in general: Faced with the possibility of a prolonged recession the introduction of innovations into manufacturing industry is essential. With the likelihood of a declining role for the already industrialized countries—while that of the developing countries will continue to grow as current technologies are still expanding there—an equilibrium will eventually be reached. New technologies must be found to provide the basis for a new growth in the economic cycle.     

Thomas Szasz' “critical reflections on child psychiatry”: An alternative view through a systemic lens

In “Critical Reflections on Child Psychiatry,” Thomas Szasz (1979) argues that children are without the rights afforded adults, that children are often coerced into therapy, and that most children do not appear to benefit from psychotherapy. Szasz raises many pertinent questions for mental health professionals working with children. However, his arguments appear to be based on literature limited to traditional psychodynamic approaches. His position also neglects to consider literature in the developmental psychology and legal fields. This paper, written from the cognitive developmental and the family systems perspective, provides another examination of the important issues raised by Thomas Szasz.     

Severity-of-illness systems. An overview for medical directors--Part two

In Part One of this article in the March-April 1990 issue of Physician Executive, the authors explored severity-of-illness systems that relied on administrative data for their formulation. In the second part of the article, the authors deal with systems that use clinical and/or physiologic data as their basis.     

Monte Carlo exact methods used for analysing interethnic unions in Great Britain

The value of using exact rather than asymptotic tests to measure intermarriage in the United Kingdom is examined. "We develop Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for estimating the exact conditional p-value and the exact distribution of the residuals, for quasi-independence and quasi-symmetry. These methods are used to analyse a sparse 10 x 10 symmetric table of interethnic unions, extracted from the 1% household sample of anonymized records from the 1991 U.K. census. With the exception of Pakistani/White and Other Asian/White unions, there is no evidence against quasi-symmetry. We conclude that, with these exceptions, there are no gender differences in the affinities between ethnic groups."     

Age-based transition periods and the outcome of mental health treatment

Do people ever get too old to change? Studies of the influence of the age of adult patients on the outcome of mental health treatment have led to inconsistent results. Design characteristics of such studies have limited our understanding of the relationship between age and outcome. Over 300 male veterans undergoing brief inpatient psychiatric treatment were categorized according to their age-based, adult developmental period (Levinson, Darrow, Klein, Levinson, &; McKee, 1978). Improvement during treatment was found to be significantly related to the patient's developmental stage (r = .25, p < .01). These results were cross-validated and replicated using three different techniques for measuring improvement. Patients treated during transition periods, whether young or old, improved most. These results were not limited to wartime veterans. Apparently, adult males are more responsive to mental health treatment during transition periods than at other times.     

A comparison of population estimation methods: housing unit versus component II,ratio correlation,and administrative records

The authors present the case for the housing unit (HU) method as a technique for estimating the population of states and local areas in the United States. They "evaluate population estimates produced by the housing unit method and by three other commonly used methods: component II, ratio correlation, and administrative records. Basing [the] analysis on 1980 census data from 67 counties in Florida and testing for precision, bias, and the distribution of errors, [they find that] application of the HU method performs at least as well as the more highly acclaimed methods of local population estimation."     

“Just a hunch”: Accuracy and awareness in person perception

Person perception tasks involving nonverbal communication have a mystified reputation. It is frequently argued that nonverbal cues are accurately, but only unconsciously, perceived. This may explain the frequent response of judges who, when asked to decode a sample of nonverbal behavior, reply that it was just a hunch—i.e., show little or no awareness of how they arrived at a judgment, even a correct one. Two alternative models, the Unconsciousness hypothesis and the Inarticulation hypothesis are posited to describe the possible relationship between accuracy and awareness. Two studies are reported on the relationship between accuracy and awareness, both using the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT). In the first study, the IPT was given to a sample of 476 undergraduates. Accuracy was measured by how many of the 30 IPT questions these judges answered correctly. Global awareness was indexed by having each judge guess how many of the 30 scenes they had answered correctly. In this coarse analysis, the accuracy-awareness relationship was positive but weak. A second experiment was conducted to produce more fine-grained tests of the accuracy-awareness relationship. Different versions of the IPT were presented to 134 undergraduates. Judges given each version of the IPT were asked to indicate their degree of confidence in each one of their answers. This second experiment found a positive, substantial relationship between accuracy and awareness, and this relationship was particularly strong when analyzed across experimental conditions as a whole. These findings support the Inarticulation hypothesis, and cast doubt on the Unconsciousness hypothesis. Implications for an emerging understanding of how nonverbal communication is processed are discussed.We wish to thank Robin Akert and Bob Rosenthal for helpful advice and inspiration.     

Dynamic image analysis using Bayesian shape and texture models

In this paper, we discuss the implementation of fully Bayesian analysis of dynamic image sequences in the context of stochastic deformable templates for shape modelling, Markov/Gibbs random fields for modelling textures, and dynomation.

Throughout, Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms are used to perform the Bayesian calculations.     

General liberalism and social change in post World War II America: A summary of trends

There has been a general shift towards liberalism during the post World War II period. A plurality of attitude trends have moved in the liberalism direction. There is, however, some evidence that this liberal shift has weakened, but not reversed during the last decade. Topical disaggregation show that the liberal movement has not been uniform across subjects. Attitudes towards abortions, civil liberties, race relations, and religion have moved most consistently in the liberal direction while crime/violence and spending/taxation items have showed more conservative trends. The main causes of the general liberalism trend were modernization and liberal idealism assisted by the New Deal Realignment and institutional leadership. The main countervailing forces to liberalism were found to be stagflation, taxation level, and crime. Despite the waning of liberalism in recent years there is no evidence to support the idea that most liberal advances over the past four decades will be reversed in the immediate future.