The social stratification of tongue shape for postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English1

The sociolinguistic modelling of phonological variation and change is almost exclusively based on auditory and acoustic analyses of speech. One phenomenon which has proved elusive when considered in these ways is the variation in postvocalic /r/ in Scottish English. This study therefore shifts to speech production: we present a socioarticulatory study of variation of postvocalic /r/ in CVr (e.g. car) words, using a socially‐stratified ultrasound tongue imaging corpus of speech collected in eastern central Scotland in 2008. Our results show social stratification of /r/ at the articulatory level, with middle‐class speakers using bunched articulations, while working‐class speakers use greater proportions of tongue‐tip and tongue‐front raised variants. Unlike articulatory variation of /r/ in American English, the articulatory variants in our Scottish English corpus are both auditorily distinct from one another, and correlate with strong and weak ends of an auditory rhotic continuum, which also shows clear social stratification.     

CMHS/CSAT Collaborative Demonstration Program for Homeless Individuals

The Collaborative Demonstration Program for Homeless Individuals is providing an opportunity for several community agencies in the United States to explore innovative intervention and treatment strategies to address the needs of homeless people with co-occurring (mental illness and substance abuse) disorders. This cooperative agreement, funded jointly by the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS) and the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment (CSAT), is a $3 million project supporting programs in various community agencies to develop, document, and evaluate programs for persons who are homeless with co-occurring disorders to be used as models in other communities. The program models include: Assertive Community Treatment, Psychosocial Rehabilitation, Therapeutic Community, and an integrated treatment model. The first phase of the two-phase project funded 16 programs in the U.S. to develop manuals within their primary treatment modalities for homeless people with co-occurring disorders. For Phase II of the project, six of the 16 model programs were competitively selected to demonstrate program impact through formal program evaluation efforts. The data derived from the various projects will be compiled into a compendium of information for state agencies and community service providers throughout the U.S.     

A semiparametric method of multiple imputation

In this paper, we describe how to use multiple imputation semiparametrically to obtain estimates of parameters and their standard errors when some individuals have missing data. The methods given require the investigator to know or be able to estimate the process generating the missing data but requires no full distributional form for the data. The method is especially useful for non-standard problems, such as estimating the median when data are missing.     

Personalization of Mail Surveys for General Public and Populations with a Group Identity: Results from Nine Studies*

Abstract The effect of personalization on mail survey response rates was examined in nine studies that included 17 comparisons under several research conditions. A study of this variable across multiple experiments in five agricultural experiment stations was undertaken because of conflicting results from previous research and from concern that the effectiveness of personalization might have decreased over time. Results show that, while response to general public surveys appeared to increase modestly across all treatment groups, there was no positive effect for populations in which a group identity (e.g., Dear Oregon Gardner or Dear ATV Owner) is employed to address respondents in cover letters. Personalization appears to remain useful for improving response in surveys of the general public.     

Social Legislation in Australia

Despite strong public interest in law reform by both state and federal governments, very little has been written about social legislation in Australia. Discussions about social legislation frequently proceed with each participant assuming an individual and subjective definition of social legislation; rarely is there agreement about the role and purpose of social legislation. This paper examines some writings on social policy in an effort to provide a definition of social legislation; a basis for identifying legislation as ‘social’ is provided. It is argued that for legislation to be social it must have a distributional character. Further consideration is given to the role of social legislation and the motivations for introducing legislative measures to deal with social ills. Attention is focused on approach, rights and tokenism in social legislation.     

Revision of Base Period for General-Purpose Indexes

“It is now about two years since… the proposal to launch a new journal with this title …. [The Editor-in-Chief then] gave it as his opinion that the first number of the new journal could be published by June 1964, and it was with great satisfaction that on the morning of the 30th of June one saw the realisation of his ambition…”     

The behavior of estimated measures of association in small and moderate sample sizes for 2×3 tables

We consider the distributions of Goodman and Kruskal's G, Kendall's tau-b, and correlation coefficients rho and rho-s for sample sizes 10‘10’40 from 2×3 tables. The results are compared with asymptotic theory. It is found that the convergence of G to its asymptotic normal distribution is much slower than the convergence of the other measures to theirs, and that G is more likely to be significantly biased. However, the variances and biases of all four measures come close to their asymptotic values for quite moderate sample sizes.     

What the Practitioner Knows Versus What the Client is Told

This article revisits the question, pursued in an interchange between Thomas (1978) and Gambrill and Barth (1980), on whether conflicts exist between service goals and research goals in the use of single-system experimental designs (SSDs) for practice evaluation. The authors approach the issue through an analysis of how informed consent is handled in one widely used textbook promoting the SSD model of practice evaluation. They argue that the text’s suggestions for what to tell the client about reasons for using SSDs ignore knowledge acquisition goals emphasized elsewhere in the text, thus obscuring possible conflicts between the needs of the client and the requirements of SSD methodology. These failures of informed consent reveal largely neglected conflicts between practice and evaluation goals within the SSD model commonly taught to social work students.     

Extremes of Markov chains with tail switching potential

Summary.  A recent advance in the utility of extreme value techniques has been the characteri- zation of the extremal behaviour of Markov chains. This has enabled the application of extreme value models to series whose temporal dependence is Markovian, subject to a limitation that prevents switching between extremely high and extremely low levels. For many applications this is sufficient, but for others, most notably in the field of finance, it is common to find series in which successive values switch between high and low levels. We term such series Markov chains with tail switching potential, and the scope of this paper is to generalize the previous theory to enable the characterization of the extremal properties of series displaying this type of behaviour. In addition to theoretical developments, a modelling procedure is proposed. A simulation study is made to assess the utility of the model in inferring the extremal dependence structure of autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes, which fall within the tail switching Markov family, and generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic processes which do not, being non-Markov in general. Finally, the procedure is applied to model extremal aspects of a financial index extracted from the New York Stock Exchange compendium.