Precedence tests for equality of two distributions based on early failures of ranked set samples

In this article, two different types of precedence tests, each with two different test statistics, based on ranked set samples for testing the equality of two distributions are discussed. The exact null distributions of proposed test statistics are derived, critical values are tabulated for both set size and number of cycles up to 8, and the exact power functions of these two types of precedence tests under the Lehmann alternative are derived. Then, the power values of these two test procedures and their competitors based on simple random samples and based on ranked set samples are compared under the Lehmann alternative exactly and also under a location-shift alternative by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Finally, the impact of imperfect ranking is discussed and some concluding remarks are presented.     

Selective exposure to partisan media: Moderating factors in evaluations of the president

The conditions in which moderating factors – media trust, mediabias, and political ideology – increase or limit the approval ratings of a politician in a partisan media environment were investigated using data obtained from the 2010 Pew survey. The findings show that media trust and media bias intensify negative presidential evaluations among consumers of conservative news programs, whereas these factors do not influence presidential approval among consumers of liberal news programs. The findings also reveal that conservatives tend to choose to be exposed to news messages that are congenial to their ideological orientations, while liberals select a more balanced diet of news messages. This study proposes that moderating factors have different effects on conservative and liberal news consumers.     

中国文学研究的困境与出路

采用新文学的观念 ,有系统的理论和科学的方法 ,来研究中国古代文学 ,是从 2 0世纪才开始的。从不同的层面对百年来的研究概况进行检讨就会发现 :就文学观念而言 ,散文和小说的分类观念至今尚未厘清 ;就理论系统而言 ,对传统的诗文理论 ,多泛泛模糊之谈 ,对外国理论则往往强加套用 ,给人浮薄无学的感觉 ;就研究方法而言 ,国学根柢越来越薄弱。要突破文学研究的这种困境 ,必须观念要厘清 ,理论要分明 ,方法要落实 ,根柢要深厚 ,还要加上“了解之同情”。     

Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index: Towards an Internationally Acceptable National Success Indicator

Amidst increasing attention to happiness studies by economists, the New Economics Foundation launched in July 2006 the Happy Planet Index (Marks et al. 2006). This is the ratio of the average happy life years (HLY) to the per capita ecological footprint of the country concerned. HLY is in turn the product of the average happiness (or life satisfaction) index and the life expectancy index. Some essential revisions to this index are proposed to reach an internationally acceptable national success indicator that aims positively at long and happy lives but negatively at the external costs of environmental disruption. Hopefully, this ‘environmentally responsible happy nation index’ will lead to some re-orientation of both the market and national governments towards something more fundamentally valuable.

A stochastic representation for the lp-norm symmetric distribution and its applications

The family of l_p-norm symmetric distributions was proposed by Yue and Ma and is a natural generalization to the family of l₁-norm symmetric distributions studied by Fang et al. In this article, we propose a stochastic representation for the l_p-norm symmetric distribution for any constant p > 0. The stochastic representation is expressed through independent and identically distributed uniform U(0, 1) random variables. It is illustrated that the stochastic representation can be applied to statistical simulation and uniform experimental design.     

Environmentally Responsible Happy Nation Index: Refinements and 2015 Rankings

Fifty years have elapsed since Cantril (1965) published his work on The Pattern of Human Concerns. His line of inquiry has stood the test of time. In late 2012, the nationally representative South African Social Attitudes Survey replicated Cantril’s 1960s questions and methodology to elicit South Africans’ hopes and aspirations and worries and fears for self and country and their ratings of where self and country stood—past, present and will stand in future. Although Cantril’s ‘ladder-of life’ scale is still regularly used as a measure of subjective well-being, to our knowledge his full line of preliminary questioning has not been fielded again to date. Our study found that South African aspirations for self were mainly material ones for a decent standard of living and the means to achieve this goal. Hopes for the nation concentrated on economic and political progress to consolidate South Africa’s democracy. A large number of personal and national hopes were mirrored in fears that these aspirations might not be met. Cantril’s method also allowed us to review the main concerns and ratings across the diverse groups of citizens that make up the ‘rainbow nation’. There was a substantial degree of consensus on top hopes and fears but levels of standing on the Cantril ladder of life were still graded according to apartheidera inequalities with black South Africans scoring lower than other race groups. Nonetheless, the majority of South Africans rated their present life better than 5 years ago and projected life to get better in future. Such optimism may place considerable pressure on the state to deliver on personal and societal hopes as the country enters its third decade of democracy.     

Nonparametric methodology for the time-dependent partial area under the ROC curve

To assess the classification accuracy of a continuous diagnostic result, the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve is commonly used in applications. The partial area under the ROC curve (pAUC) is one of the widely accepted summary measures due to its generality and ease of probability interpretation. In the field of life science, a direct extension of the pAUC into the time-to-event setting can be used to measure the usefulness of a biomarker for disease detection over time. Without using a trapezoidal rule, we propose nonparametric estimators, which are easily computed and have closed-form expressions, for the time-dependent pAUC. The asymptotic Gaussian processes of the estimators are established and the estimated variance-covariance functions are provided, which are essential in the construction of confidence intervals. The finite sample performance of the proposed inference procedures are investigated through a series of simulations. Our method is further applied to evaluate the classification ability of CD4 cell counts on patient's survival time in the AIDS Clinical Trials Group (ACTG) 175 study. In addition, the inferences can be generalized to compare the time-dependent pAUCs between patients received the prior antiretroviral therapy and those without it.     

LAG Length Selection and the Construction of Unit Root Tests with Good Size and Power

It is widely known that when there are errors with a moving‐average root close to −1, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and the BIC tend to select a truncation lag (k) that is very small. We consider a class of Modified Information Criteria (MIC) with a penalty factor that is sample dependent. It takes into account the fact that the bias in the sum of the autoregressive coefficients is highly dependent on k and adapts to the type of deterministic components present. We use a local asymptotic framework in which the moving‐average root is local to −1 to document how the MIC performs better in selecting appropriate values of k. In Monte‐Carlo experiments, the MIC is found to yield huge size improvements to the DF^GLS and the feasible point optimal P_T test developed in Elliott, Rothenberg, and Stock (1996). We also extend the M tests developed in Perron and Ng (1996) to allow for GLS detrending of the data. The MIC along with GLS detrended data yield a set of tests with desirable size and power properties.     

Patterns In Discourse About Elderly People In New Zealand

As the number of senior citizens continues to rise, their public profile will grow and political discussion about their future will become increasingly prominent. The present research was designed to approach such debate by providing an assay of naturally occurring data drawn from the New Zealand Royal Commission on Social Policy (1986–1988). Public submissions to the Royal Commission on the specific subject of senior citizens were extracted and examined from a discourse analytic perspective. The results obtained by two independent analyses showed three patterns of discourse, namely, society's obligations to senior citizens, anti-ageism, and old age as a positive resource. This troika of discourse patterns constitute a collective voice through which senior citizens and their supporters defend and advocate the social position of senior citizens.     

“两个根本性转变”与农业剩余劳动力的优化配置

文章论述了中国特殊国情下农业剩余劳动力及其转移的特点,并从农村经济的技术创新、体制创新及城乡劳动力全息循环流动三个方面探讨了农村剩余劳动力的出路。