Reviews

Abstract

Elizabeth Parang reviews Reengineering the Library: Issues in Electronic Resources Management. Scott Johnson reviews Academic Library Management: Case Studies.     

Cultural Anthropology and Open Access—Interview With Dominic Boyer,Cymene Howe,and Marcel LaFlamme

Abstract

In this installment of “Conversations,” Dominic Boyer, Cymene Howe, and Marcel LaFlamme, of the Cultural Anthropology editorial team, discuss the ins and outs of publishing a gold open access journal in the field of anthropology. Highlights of the discussion include Cultural Anthropology’s move to open access, the ethics of open access, the growth of international readership, ongoing publishing challenges in open access, and the role libraries can play with open access publishing.     

Double Sampling Designs in Multivariate Linear Models with Missing Variables

We provide a method for finding the optimal double sampling plan for estimating the mean value of a continuous outcome. It is assumed that the fallible and true outcome data are related by a multivariate linear regression model where only some of the explanatory variables are sampled. Conditions under which double sampling is preferred over standard sampling plans are determined. An application of the method to a well-known data set on air pollution is presented.     

Estimated Data Collection Organization Effect in the National Medical Care Expenditure Survey

The National Medical Care Expenditure Survey, which has a complex survey design, is further complicated by combining two independently drawn national samples of households from the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). It is assumed that since the structures of these national-area samples are similar, they are thereby compatible and allow for the derivation of statistically equivalent unbiased national estimates of relevant health parameters. In this paper, national parameter estimates of relevant demographic and health measures were separately produced for each of the two survey organizations and a determination was made regarding statistical equivalence across samples. In addition, the data-collection organization effect was estimated and tested within the framework of a multivariate analysis appropriate for complex survey data. The findings consistently revealed a statistically nonsignificant data-collection organization effect when testing for differences in domain estimates of the relevant health parameters under consideration.     

Response transformations in repeated measures and growth curve models

This article describes estimation and inference procedures for the parameters of the Box-Cox and foided-power transformations in repeated measures and growth curve models. Procedures for computing maximum likelihood estimates of the transformation and covariance parameters under several covanance structures (omnibus sphericity, local sphericity, and unstructured) are described. Lack of fit statistics and hypothesis tests for comparing these structures also are described. The procedures are illustrated on three data sets. Software for performing the analyses in the SAS System is described and is available from the authors.     

Environmental affects: NASCAR,place and white American cultural citizenship

Attempts to grapple with the complicated tangle of race and memory are more prominent than ever in the public discourse of the United States. In 2006, public intellectual Henry Louis Gates sought to popularize the search for roots and meaning with his project African American Lives, and in 2007 the black and white descendants of the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case met in New Orleans to discuss the past and present significance of their ancestors’ lives. As the crafting of identities around increasingly fluid notions of ‘race’ proceeds apace, the activities of family historians provide a useful entrée into struggles over race, identity, and collective memory in the United States. The research reported here illustrates how the shared history of the multi-racial descendants of eighteenth and nineteenth century St Domingue/Haiti in Louisiana is encountered in racially distinct ways. Participant observation is used to examine how race is dealt with in the activities of two groups: 1) a mainly European American genealogical society, called the St Domingue Special Interest Group; and 2) the LA Creole cultural and genealogy group, made up primarily of Louisiana creoles of color. Preliminary findings indicate that while the process of engaging in family history research provides an opening for some participants to better understand others across racial and ethnic divides, this kind of cross-racial dialogue was limited by the organization of family history activities into racially distinct social networks. As the popularity of genealogy increases, the findings here point to the need to recognize the public significance of these private histories.     

On the Breslow–Holubkov estimator

Breslow and Holubkov (J Roy Stat Soc B 59:447–461 1997a) developed semiparametric maximum likelihood estimation for two-phase studies with a case–control first phase under a logistic regression model and noted that, apart for the overall intercept term, it was the same as the semiparametric estimator for two-phase studies with a prospective first phase developed in Scott and Wild (Biometrica 84:57–71 1997). In this paper we extend the Breslow–Holubkov result to general binary regression models and show that it has a very simple relationship with its prospective first-phase counterpart. We also explore why the design of the first phase only affects the intercept of a logistic model, simplify the calculation of standard errors, establish the semiparametric efficiency of the Breslow–Holubkov estimator and derive its asymptotic distribution in the general case.     

Fostering Risk Taking in Research and Development: The Importance of a Project's Terminal Value

Large firms face a conflict in managing a portfolio of high-risk projects. When an ongoing project is thought to have a low likelihood of success, project team members take risks to improve its chances of success. However, upper-level managers who allocate resources tend to withhold resources from a project with a low likelihood of success in favor of others in the portfolio that look more promising. Because this paucity of resources influences project team members to avoid risk, the total effect of success likelihood on risk taking is conflicted. The influence on risk taking of a project's terminal value—defined as the value that remains in the firm in the event of project failure—is unequivocally positive, because both senior management resource allocation and project team risk-taking propensity are encouraged by terminal value. Thus, firms can override the ambivalent effect of likelihood of success on project decision making by focusing attention on a project's terminal value.     

Metropolitan influences on migration into poor and nonpoor neighborhoods

Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and three decennial US censuses are used to examine the influence of metropolitan-area characteristics on black and white households’ propensity to move into poor versus nonpoor neighborhoods. We find that a nontrivial portion of the variance in the odds of moving to a poor rather to a nonpoor neighborhood exists between metropolitan areas. Net of established individual-level predictors of inter-neighborhood migration, black and white households are more likely to move to a poor or extremely poor tract rather than to a nonpoor tract in metropolitan areas containing many poor neighborhoods and a paucity of recently-built housing in nonpoor areas. Blacks are especially likely to move to a poor tract in metropolitan areas characterized by high levels of racial residential segregation and in which poor tracts have a sizeable concentration of blacks. White households are more likely to move to a poor than to a nonpoor tract in metropolitan areas that have comparatively few African Americans.