Beyond the Dichotomy: Six Religious Views of Homosexuality

Using published theological and scholarly evidence, this article disrupts the stereotypical “born gay”/“sinful choice” dichotomy widely assumed to characterize religious views of homosexuality in the United States. It argues that we need to keep moral questions separate from questions about the fixity or fluidity of sexual orientation. Rather than two, American Christian and Jewish views of homosexuality can been seen on a range from the “God Hates Fags” view through “Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin,” “We Don’t Talk About That,” “They Can’t Help It,” “God’s Good Gift,” and a queer-theological view of the “Godly Calling.”     

Participation in biodiversity conservation: Motivations and barriers of Australian landholders

Biodiversity conservation programs that appeal to landholders’ motivations and minimise their barriers to participation may result in both increased uptake rates and improved ecological outcomes. To understand their motivations and barriers to conserve biodiversity, qualitative interviews were conducted with 45 landholders who had participated in one of three different programs in Queensland, Australia. The results revealed that the landholders’ decisions to participate depended on the level of formal biodiversity protection offered by the program, potential changes to their property rights, personal benefits of participation, and the program objectives. Landholders’ motivations related to conservation, production, financial and experimental imperatives. Common barriers to participation were lost productivity, different interpretations of what constituted “conservation”, and limits to future development and land use options. Voluntary and economic policy instruments can be used to stimulate participation and overcome barriers, but must be applied with care to reduce the creation of perverse ecological outcomes, such as slippage and low additionality.     

Linear Regression for Panel With Unknown Number of Factors as Interactive Fixed Effects

In this paper, we study the least squares (LS) estimator in a linear panel regression model with unknown number of factors appearing as interactive fixed effects. Assuming that the number of factors used in estimation is larger than the true number of factors in the data, we establish the limiting distribution of the LS estimator for the regression coefficients as the number of time periods and the number of cross‐sectional units jointly go to infinity. The main result of the paper is that under certain assumptions, the limiting distribution of the LS estimator is independent of the number of factors used in the estimation as long as this number is not underestimated. The important practical implication of this result is that for inference on the regression coefficients, one does not necessarily need to estimate the number of interactive fixed effects consistently.     

The hazards of nuclear power generation—The case for survival

A plan is presented to replace all nuclear electricity-generating plants by the induction heating of lignite and sub-bituminous coal in situ. The hazards of nuclear power are intolerable and these hazards are intensified in areas of seismic activity, drainage areas containing a number of reactors, and reactors draining onto a densely-populated coast. The technique of induction heating is scientifically sound, and requires only the development of full-scale process technology from state-of-the-art science. This process is low in cost, produces large quantities of natural gas and coal tar as additional products, and causes little or no human hazard, air, water, or radiation pollution or environmental damage. Known coal resources are adequate for a century or more.     

Attribution of tumour lethality and estimation of the time to onset of occult tumours in the absence of cause-of-death Information

A new statistical approach is developed for estimating the carcinogenic potential of drugs and other chemical substances used by humans. Improved statistical methods are developed for rodent tumorigenicity assays that have interval sacrifices but not cause-of-death data. For such experiments, this paper proposes a nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation method for estimating the distributions of the time to onset of and the time to death from the tumour. The log-likelihood function is optimized using a constrained direct search procedure. Using the maximum likelihood estimators, the number of fatal tumours in an experiment can be imputed. By applying the procedure proposed to a real data set, the effect of calorie restriction is investigated. In this study, we found that calorie restriction delays the tumour onset time significantly for pituitary tumours. The present method can result in substantial economic savings by relieving the need for a case-by-case assignment of the cause of death or context of observation by pathologists. The ultimate goal of the method proposed is to use the imputed number of fatal tumours to modify Peto's International Agency for Research on Cancer test for application to tumorigenicity assays that lack cause-of-death data.     

Measuring Attitudes About Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: The ATT-IPV Scale

In lower-income settings, women more often than men justify intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet, the role of measurement invariance across gender is unstudied. We developed the ATT-IPV scale to measure attitudes about physical violence against wives in 1,055 married men and women ages 18–50 in My Hao district, Vietnam. Across 10 items about transgressions of the wife, women more often than men agreed that a man had good reason to hit his wife (3 % to 92 %; 0 % to 67 %). In random split-half samples, one-factor exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (N ₁ = 527) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (N ₂ = 528) models for nine items with sufficient variability had significant loadings (0.575–0.883; 0.502–0.897) and good fit (RMSEA = 0.068, 0.048; CFI = 0.951, 0.978, TLI = 0.935, 0.970). Three items had significant uniform differential item functioning (DIF) by gender, and adjustment for DIF revealed that measurement noninvariance was partially masking men’s lower propensity than women to justify IPV. A CFA model for the six items without DIF had excellent fit (RMSEA = 0.019, CFI = 0.994, TLI = 0.991) and an attitudinal gender gap similar to the DIF-adjusted nine-item model, suggesting that the six-item scale reliably measures attitudes about IPV across gender. Researchers should validate the scale in urban Vietnam and elsewhere and decompose DIF-adjusted gender attitudinal gaps.