Saying Meritocracy and Doing Privilege

This article describes the relationship between saying and doing. It argues that focusing on the discrepancy between participants’ accounts and their actions is one of the greatest analytical strengths of ethnography. We make this case by drawing upon an ethnography of an elite boarding school. We also reflect on the way that two ethnographers worked together to better understand the social significance of accounts that are incongruent with situated behavior. We conclude by arguing that qualitative researchers must be more sensitive to the different kinds of claims that can be made with interview versus observational data.     

Subsea Release of Oil from a Riser: An Ecological Risk Assessment

This study illustrates a newly developed methodology, as a part of the U.S. EPA ecological risk assessment (ERA) framework, to predict exposure concentrations in a marine environment due to underwater release of oil and gas. It combines the hydrodynamics of underwater blowout, weathering algorithms, and multimedia fate and transport to measure the exposure concentration. Naphthalene and methane are used as surrogate compounds for oil and gas, respectively. Uncertainties are accounted for in multimedia input parameters in the analysis. The 95th percentile of the exposure concentration (EC_95%) is taken as the representative exposure concentration for the risk estimation. A bootstrapping method is utilized to characterize EC_95% and associated uncertainty. The toxicity data of 19 species available in the literature are used to calculate the 5th percentile of the predicted no observed effect concentration (PNEC_5%) by employing the bootstrapping method. The risk is characterized by transforming the risk quotient (RQ), which is the ratio of EC_95% to PNEC_5%, into a cumulative risk distribution. This article describes a probabilistic basis for the ERA, which is essential from risk management and decision‐making viewpoints. Two case studies of underwater oil and gas mixture release, and oil release with no gaseous mixture are used to show the systematic implementation of the methodology, elements of ERA, and the probabilistic method in assessing and characterizing the risk.     

Impacts of Demographics on Citizen's Access to Information: An Empirical Study of District Dera Ismail Khan, North Western Frontier Province, Pakistan

The impact of demographic dimensions on local government behavior is well identified, analyzed and documented at the global level. Likewise, several studies are available on developing countries, but empirical evidence on the conditions of Pakistan is lacking. This study is an effort to unearth empirical evidence on access to information in the local government system exemplifying data from the district Dera Ismail Khan (DIK), North Western Frontier Province (NWFP). Most global hypotheses for developing countries are accepted in this study but the statistics on local data are far more different in terms of the value and weight of variables, relationships and impacts on the research concepts. The most dominant concept in the impact of access to information on the local government system is "education for all." Mass education is a leading concept in making or breaking the role of people participation in the success or failure of local democracies. Data show that illiteracy is causing many problems, including the mass population's unawareness of their interests and duties at the public level, thereby giving the ruling elite a free hand in exploiting public resources for self-interest, at the cost of the public good.     

entropy and internal inormation of printed urdu

This paper presents a systematic study for the entropy and coding of the printed Urdu language. Comparison with the study of printed Arabic and printed English is also given. We also find the alphabet entropy of the Urdu language using Bayesian estimator given by Gill and Joane (1979) and compare it with the entropy calculated through using the usual maximum likelihood estimator.     

Comparing Joint GQL Estimation and GMM Adaptive Estimation in COM-Poisson Longitudinal Regression Model

It is of scientific interest to study the application of COM-Poisson model to the case of longitudinal response data, the analysis of which is quite challenging due to the fact that longitudinal responses of a subject are correlated and the correlation pattern is usually unknown. In this article, we extend the COM-Poisson GLM to the generalized linear longitudinal model. We also develop a joint generalized quasi-likelihood estimating equation approach based on a stationary autocorrelation structure for the repeated count data. We further compare the performance of this estimation method with that of Generalized Method of Moments through a simulation study.     

Inference about the parameters of a bi-variate simultaneous equation model: structural approach

The paper considers a system of bi-linear responses having a regression structure with known predetermined variables. In econometric studies, the model is widely used and is known as simultaneous equation model. The probability distribution for the coefficients of the exogenous variables as well as that of the error variances along with the marginal likelihood function of the coefficients of the endogenous variables have been derived. The model in this paper has been analysed in the framework of a conditional structural model (Fraser 1968, 1979), which provides the basis of inference about all the parameters.     

The foster care system in India

The author has undertaken the difficult task of giving us an overall view of the foster care picture of all India, the first such panorama we have received.     

Competing constructions of calamity: The April 1991 Bangladesh cyclone

On April 30, 1991, a cyclone of unusual intensity hit the coastline of Bangladesh, causing over one hundred thousand deaths and widespread property damage. An international debate ensued over whether the disaster was due to natural phenomena and should be addressed by relief measures, or whether it was due to social, economic, and political factors and should be addressed by structural change in society. This study explores the dimensions of this debate by means of a content analysis of accounts of the cyclone by the Bangladesh media and government, and by the international media and scholarly community.Bangladeshi accounts of the cyclone emphasize its purported inevitability and natural origins. However, scholars maintain that while cyclones are inevitable, disasters such as occurred in April 1991 are not: they are a function of the historically increasing socioeconomic vulnerability of the Bangladesh population. According to this view, the natural disaster of April 1991 could more accurately be called a social or political disaster. The factor chiefly responsible for transforming natural disasters into sociopolitical disasters is occupation of hazardous areas.The Bangladesh media and government suggest that the cyclone's impact was worsened by the irrational behavior of individuals and the limited resources of the nation. Non-Bangladeshi accounts focus instead on the poverty of individuals and the structural inequities of society, which compel people to live in hazardous areas. Bangladeshi accounts attempted to link the cyclone to global warming and the greenhouse gas emissions of the industrialized nations, thus shifting the focus from internal problems of structure and equity to international problems of structure and equity. Debates such as this promise to become more common, as the global environment becomes increasingly post-natural and the framing of relations between population and environment is increasingly contested.     

The Correlated Bivariate Noncentral F Distribution and Its Application

This article proposes the singly and doubly correlated bivariate noncentral F (BNCF) distributions. The probability density function (pdf) and the cumulative distribution function (cdf) of the distributions are derived for arbitrary values of the parameters. The pdf and cdf of the distributions for different arbitrary values of the parameters are computed, and their graphs are plotted by writing and implementing new R codes. An application of the correlated BNCF distribution is illustrated in the computations of the power function of the pre-test test for the multivariate simple regression model (MSRM).     

Discussion of “Simple Estimators for Invertible Index Models” by H. Ahn,H. Ichimura,J. Powell,and P. Ruud

This is an interesting article that considers the question of inference on unknown linear index coefficients in a general class of models where reduced form parameters are invertible function of one or more linear index. Interpretable sufficient conditions such as monotonicity and or smoothness for the invertibility condition are provided. The results generalize some work in the previous literature by allowing the number of reduced form parameters to exceed the number of indices. The identification and estimation expand on the approach taken in previous work by the authors. Examples include Ahn, Powell, and Ichimura (2004 Ahn, H., Powell, J., and Ichimura, H. (2004), “Simple Estimators for Monotone Index Models,” UC Berkeley Working Paper. [Google Scholar]) for monotone single-index regression models to a multi-index setting and extended by Blundell and Powell (2004 Blundell, R. W., and Powell, J. L. (2004), “Endogeneity in Semiparametric Binary Response Models,” The Review of Economic Studies, 71, 655–679.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Powell and Ruud (2008 Powell, J., and Ruud, P. (2008), “Simple Estimators for Semiparametric Multinomial Choice Models,” UC Berkeley Working Paper. [Google Scholar]) to models with endogenous regressors and multinomial response, respectively. A key property of the inference approach taken is that the estimator of the unknown index coefficients (up to scale) is computationally simple to obtain (relative to other estimators in the literature) in that it is closed form. Specifically, unifying an approach for all models considered in this article, the authors propose an estimator, which is the eigenvector of a matrix (defined in terms of a preliminary estimator of the reduced form parameters) corresponding to its smallest eigenvalue. Under suitable conditions, the proposed estimator is shown to be root-n-consistent and asymptotically normal.