The Forgotten Million Unemployed

In July 1985 the National Council for Voluntary Organisations launched a campaign for "action for the forgotten million"— the four out of every five long-term unemployed people who receive no practical support from the public services, apart from their benefits. The author of the National Council discussion document outlines some of the major issues which will need to be faced. In particular, he argues that public debate tends to concentrate too narrowly on specific initiatives and individual programmes. Instead, there is a need to consider the rights of all long-term unemployed people, and the needs of the group as a whole.     

小额信贷之违约概率模型:特别考虑异质性

在新巴塞尔资本协议(New Basel Capital Accord)对金融全球化的冲击及金融机构改善资产质量及合并政策的影响下,我国台湾地区金融业进入激烈合并竞争的时代.许多银行颇受降低逾放比率及增加净值报酬率与资产报酬率两难之困扰.消费性信用贷款产品利差大、风险分散,是金融机构授信经营极重要的产品.实证结果显示,采用世代研究(cohort study)建立之模型对样本数据之拟合程度较个案对照研究法(case-control study)的解释变异量为佳,且较符合新巴塞尔资本协议规定及科学程序.虽然Logistic 回归模型在建立逾期概率模型上广泛地被使用,但要求存在于同构型的变异数Var=np(1-p)假设上,且在数据分析上常因为出现变异数之异质性问题,故可采用调整变异数异质性之方法.     

From critical sociology to public intellectual: Pierre Bourdieu and politics

By the late 1990s, Pierre Bourdieu had become the primary public intellectual of major social scientific status at the head of the anti-globalization movement that emerged in France and in other Western European countries. This article discusses how Bourdieu became a leading public intellectual, a role that seems to contrast with his early years as a professional sociologist. It explores what seemed to change in Bourdieu’s activities and outlook as sociologist and what seems to have remained constant. It identifies several institutional conditions that seemed necessary for Bourdieu to be able to play the kind of public intellectual role he did in his later years. Bourdieu’s movement from a peripheral position to a central location in the French intellectual field, the changing character of the field itself, the growing influence of the mass media in French political and cultural life, the failures of the French Socialists in power, a cultural legacy of leading critical intellectuals in France, a unifying national issue of globalization, and the political conjuncture in 1995 all intersected in ways that opened a path for Bourdieu to choose new and more frequent forms of political action. His responses to that combination of factors at different moments reveal both a striking continuity in desire to preserve the autonomy of intellectual life and a change in view and strategy on how best to do that. The article concludes with a brief evaluation of Bourdieu’s public intellectual role.     

Form Perception of Partly Occluded Shapes in 4‐Month‐Old Infants

Two habituation experiments were conducted to investigate how 4‐month‐old infants perceive partly occluded shapes. In the first experiment, we presented a simple, partly occluded shape to the infants until habituation was reached. Then we showed either a probable completion (one that would be predicted on the basis of both local and global cues) or an improbable completion. Longer looking times were found for the improbably completed shape (compared to probable and control conditions), suggesting that the probable shape was perceived during partial occlusion. In the second experiment, infants were habituated to more ambiguous partly occluded shapes, where local and global cues would result in different completions. For adults, the percept of these shapes is usually dominated by global influences. However, after habituation the infants looked longer at the globally completed shapes. These results suggest that by the age of 4 months, infants are able to infer the perceptual completion of partly occluded shapes, but for more ambiguous shapes, this completion seems to be dominated by local influences.     

Projective Identification as a Contributor to Domestic Violence

Many explanations have been given as to why men batter. Rarely are deep unconscious intrapsychic processes identified as contributing reasons. One way that violent men may use their partner to fill emotional needs is through the primitive defense of projective identification. Projective identification may be invoked by men to induce the other partner to carry split off threatening parts of the self that are too anxiety provoking to retain. The occurrence of projective identification could therefore be an important intrapsychic and interpersonal dynamic that contributes to the escalation of tension prior to the violent episode.     

Data tilting for time series

Summary. We develop a general methodology for tilting time series data. Attention is focused on a large class of regression problems, where errors are expressed through autoregressive processes. The class has a range of important applications and in the context of our work may be used to illustrate the application of tilting methods to interval estimation in regression, robust statistical inference and estimation subject to constraints. The method can be viewed as 'empirical likelihood with nuisance parameters'.     

The Gendered Face of Terrorism

What does sociology have to contribute to our understanding of terrorism? As scholars of gender and the Far Right, we believe that we have much to offer the current debates. In this article, we focus both on contemporary cases of terrorism, the attacks of September 11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, and terrorist movements as gendered: as enactments of masculinity. In particular, we focus on the contemporary white supremacist movement, the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat faced by the USA. We suggest that the ideology and organization of many terrorist groups are saturated with gendered meanings, both as the analytic prism through which they view their situation, and also as a means of political mobilization.