Asperger’s Syndrome and the Decoding of Boredom,Interest, and Disagreement from Body Posture

Twenty Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) participants were compared with 20 matched neurotypical controls in their decoding of postural cues of boredom, interest, and disagreement. On a nonverbal matching task, the AS group performed as accurately as the controls, whereas on a verbal labeling task, AS participants made significantly more mistakes in labeling bored postures. Response times of the AS group were significantly slower than controls in their judgments of all three attitudes on both tasks, with the exception only of disagreeing postures on the verbal labeling task. It was hypothesized that these slower response times may reflect a feature-based cognitive processing style by AS participants. Proposed practical recommendations are to train AS individuals in the recognition of boredom, and to improve the speed with which they can recognize different attitudes.     

The mean of linear signed rank statistics under alternatives

An expression is presented for the mean of a linear signed rank statistic for the one sample location model. Several examples are given to illustrate its application.     

Theorizing the lesbian hashtag: Identity,community, and the technological imperative to name the sexual self

This analysis integrates poststructuralist and symbolic interactionist approaches to the self by incorporating the insights of science and technology studies regarding categorization processes. While the advent of the Internet has freed many individuals from geographical constraints on community formation, the architectures of online platforms produce a technological imperative to name aspects of the self with words. Using sexual identity hashtags on Instagram (e.g., #lesbian) thus performs paradoxical functions: the hashtag both enables the construction of a sexual identity within an affirming community and also reinforces the power relations that compel individuals to name and account for their sexual selves. By illustrating one way sexual identities function in the online lives of young women, this research complicates other scholars' findings that the salience of sexual identity categories is decreasing.     

The Probability of Teenage Parenthood: Parental Predictions and Their Accuracy

Teenage parenthood is an often-discussed topic in family economics since it has been shown to affect many outcomes for the teen, child, and household. Using a nationally representative longitudinal panel of American teenagers and their parents, two questions related to the probability of teenage parenthood are examined. First, how do predictions of this occurrence made by the teenager’s parents vary across the population? Second, how does the accuracy of these predictions vary? The actual prevalence and variance of teenage parenthood are also examined, and the determinants of its occurrence are estimated. Among other results, expectations and their accuracy are found to differ substantially across socioeconomic status and some demographics such as race and religion. The average American parent underestimates the probability their child will become a teen parent by only a small amount, but within certain demographic groups this outcome is considerably underestimated, and in others it is overestimated. These differences help explain the variability in teen parenthood effects, and more broadly, the analysis serves as a test of parents’ ability to judge their childrens’ future outcomes.     

Diffusive nested sampling

We introduce a general Monte Carlo method based on Nested Sampling (NS), for sampling complex probability distributions and estimating the normalising constant. The method uses one or more particles, which explore a mixture of nested probability distributions, each successive distribution occupying ∼e ⁻¹ times the enclosed prior mass of the previous distribution. While NS technically requires independent generation of particles, Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) exploration fits naturally into this technique. We illustrate the new method on a test problem and find that it can achieve four times the accuracy of classic MCMC-based Nested Sampling, for the same computational effort; equivalent to a factor of 16 speedup. An additional benefit is that more samples and a more accurate evidence value can be obtained simply by continuing the run for longer, as in standard MCMC.     

Mean square error comparison among variance estimators with known coefficient of variation

The improved estimators for the population parameters were considered by several statisticians under various conditions. Recently Laheetharan and Wijekoon (Improved estimation of the population parameters when some additional information is available. Stat Papers doi:, 2008) demonstrated a generalized procedure for obtaining optimal shrunken estimators, and derived such estimators for both population mean and variance when coefficient of variation is known. In this article the mean square errors of those estimators were compared, and a numerical illustration was done using the scaled mean square error loss as used by Kanefuji and Iwase (Stat Papers 39:377–388, 1998) to understand the efficiency of the estimators with increasing sample size.     

Marital splits and income changes: Evidence from the British Household Panel Survey

We provide new evidence about what happens to people's incomes when their or their parents' marital union dissolves using longitudinal data from waves 1--4 of the British Household Panel Survey. Marital splits are accompanied by substantial declines in real income for separating wives and children on average, whereas separating husbands' real income on average changes much less. Results are shown to be robust to the choice of income de®nition and degree of economies of scale built into the household equivalence scale, and are validated with information about respondents' assessments of how their personal ®nancial circumstances changed. In addition we analyse the extent to which the welfare state mitigates the size of the income loss for women and children relative to men, and document the accompanying changes in social assistance bene®t receipt and paid work, and maintenance income receipt and payment.     

An examination of sexual strategies used by urban southern and rural Midwestern university women

The purposes of this study were (a) to determine whether women's use of persuasion, non‐physical coercion, and physical force strategies to obtain sex from a man varied between U.S. women from an urban Southern and rural Midwestern university and (b) to determine if sexual behavior history and early courtship behavior affected the use of these strategies (or not using any strategy). Women from the Midwest and the South did not differ in their use of sexual strategies. There were, however, other variables that accounted for differences in women's use of sexual strategies. Women who used persuasion strategies had fewer lifetime sexual partners than women who used any other strategy. Women who used physical force strategies reported a lower age at first intercourse and more early courtship behaviors than all others. Overall, the results indicated that sexual strategies are related to sexual behavior history and early courtship behaviors rather than cultural setting or demographics.