The relationship between the mean,median, and mode with grouped data

It is widely believed that the median is “usually” between the mean and the mode for skewed unimodal distributions. However, this inequality is not always true, especially with grouped data. Unavailability of complete raw data further necessitates the importance of evaluating this characteristic in grouped data. There is a gap in the current statistical literature on assessing mean–median–mode inequality for grouped data. The study aims to evaluate the relationship between the mean, median, and mode with unimodal grouped data; derive conditions for their inequalities; and present their application.     

The Power of Sum: An Accountability Sistah Circle

Duoethnography offers the narratives of first-generation Black women scholars who created a virtual community as a transformative safe space for peer mentorship and scholarship. Framed through a womanist epistemological lens, our narratives provide insight about challenges and triumphs of navigating the academy from female scholars of African descent. Unique to this chronicle, the development of an Accountability Sistah Circle in 2012 became an organic transformative community for personal and professional growth. Through the components of this model, which can be implemented with others living in the margins, we uncovered our authentic voices, shared resources, expanded social capital, and developed a ritual that provided a safety shield around us and ultimately helped enhance our academic fortitude.     

Labour Market Flexibility,Human Resource Management and Corporate Performance

Labour market flexibility is often portrayed as a key to the competitive success of the UK and US economies. We surveyed several hundred firms in the UK, and using the resulting data (on over 200 manufacturing firms) this paper investigates the relationships between firms’ use of flexible work practices, human resource systems and industrial relations on the one hand, and corporate performance on the other hand. The results suggest that ‘low‐road’ practices – short‐term contracts, a lack of employer commitment to job security, low levels of training and low levels of human resource sophistication – are negatively correlated with corporate performance. In contrast, it is found that ‘high‐road’ work practices –‘high commitment’ organizations or ‘transformed’ workplaces – are positively correlated with good corporate performance. It is also found that human resource management practices are more likely to contribute to competitive success where they are introduced as a comprehensive package, or ‘bundle’ of practices. Significant interaction effects between human resource systems, trade unions and flexible work practices add further support to the bundling hypothesis.     

Making methods choices

This article is a further discussion of methodological paradigms in evaluation research. More specifically, this article is a response to the attacks on paradigmatic perspectives made by Reichardt and Cook in the opening chapter of their edited book Qalitative and Quantitative Methods in Evaluation Research. They “suggest that part of this current debate over qualitative and quantitative methods is not centered on productive issues and so is not being argued in as logical a fashion as it should be.” For better or worse paradigm debates are, by their nature, only partly subject to logical analysis. Paradigms — methodological or otherwise — involve values, world view, empirical tendencies, and patterned responses. Because their central arguments rest entirely on a logical foundation, Reichardt and Cook may have done precisely what they accuse others of doing: “obscuring issues and unnecessarily creating schisms between the two methodtypes.”     

The importance of education-occupation matching in migration decisions

In this article, we present and test a model that incorporates education-occupation matching into the migration decision. The literature on education-occupation matching shows that earnings are affected by how individuals' education matches that required by their occupation. Accordingly, individuals with more schooling than required by their occupation have an additional incentive to migrate: the increase in earnings that occurs with a more beneficial education-occupation match. Using data from Mexico, we found statistical support for the importance of education-occupation matching in migration decisions. Education-occupation matching provides a plausible explanation for the mixed findings in the literature on the relationship between educational attainment and migration.     

Managing strategies incrementally

When sophisticated large organizations make significant changes in strategy, the approaches they use frequently bear little resemblance to the rational-analytical systems so often touted in the planning literature. Such systems are rarely the source of overall corporate strategies. Instead, the processes used to generate major strategies are typically fragmented and evolutionary with a high degree of intuitive content. Although one usually finds imbedded in these fragments some very refined pieces of formal analysis, overall strategies tend to emerge as a series of conscious internal decisions blend and interact with changing external events to slowly mutate key managers' broad consensus about what patterns of action make sense for the future. Based on a multi-year study of how large companies change their strategies, this article summarizes why strategic managers do proceed incrementally and how they manage the complex process of generating an overall strategy.     

An Improved Approximation to the Exact Solution of the Two-Stage Clonal Growth Model of Cancer

Multistage clonal growth models are of interest for cancer risk assessment because they can explicitly incorporate data on cell replication. Both approximate and exact formulations of the two stage growth model have been described. The exact solution considers the conditional probability of tumors arising in previously tumor-free animals; the approximate solution estimates total probability of tumor formation. The exact solution is much more computationally intensive when time-dependent cell growth parameters are included. The approximate solution deviates from the exact solution at high incidences and probabilities of tumor. This report describes a computationally tractable,'improved approximation'to the exact solution. Our improved approximation includes a correction term to adjust the unconditional expectation of intermediate cells based on the time history of formation of intermediate cells by mutation of normal cells (recruitment) or by cell division in the intermediate cell population (expansion). The improved approximation provided a much better match to the exact solution than the approximate solution for a wide range of parameter values. The correction term also appears to provide insight into the biological factors that contribute to the variance of the expectation for the number of intermediate cells over time.