Open and closed birth intervals for once-married spouse-present white women

Using the 1970 1/1,000 Public Use Sample of the U.S. population, the relationships of the closed and open birth intervals with parity and mother's age, with parity and marital duration, and with children ever born/marital duration and mother's age are analyzed. These findings both replicate and expand on Srinivasan's earlier research on the open interval. The open interval is more sensitive as an index of marital fertility when marital duration and parity are controlled than when mother's age and parity are controlled.     

Book Review: The Collaboration Challenge: How Nonprofits and Businesses Succeed through Strategic Alliances. By James E. Austin. Jossey-Bass,San Francisco, 2000

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations -     

Klassenspaltung Im Wahlverhalten — Eine Reanalyse

The note reports results of a Re-analysis of data used in an earlier article published in this journal (KZfSS 50, 1998: 3–45). The new analysis is based on more recent data (from Allbus 1996 and 1998) added to those used in the earlier contribution. Also a coding error in the earlier analysis has been corrected. The results confirm all substantial findings of the earlier analysis with one exception: Working class voters born after World War II have less negative preferences concerning voting for the Greens than their counterparts born before World War II.     

Keeping Australia's Older Workers in the Labour Force. A Policy Perspective

As in other western industrialised countries the structural ageing of the Australian population has significant labour market implications. Government has responded with a range of policies to persuade older workers to abandon early retirement and/or remain in the workforce past traditional retirement ages. But whether this generation of workers will be prepared to change their retirement plans in response to policy encouragement, and whether current policy measures will translate into significant numbers of older workers extending their labour force participation is uncertain. Using the Australian Survey of Retirement Attitudes and Motivations (ASRAM) a recently completed, nationally representative survey of Australian workers aged 40 – 59 years we find that while the Government message about working longer is getting through, older workers are relatively unresponsive to current policy measures. Other policies, especially policies outside the financial realm, are needed to maximise the number of older Australians in the labour force.     

从狩猎到献祭:希腊葬礼仪式剖析

史前史和民族学领域的学者认为,在初民社会中,死人和死去的动物有着同等的对待,因为都是处理死亡,这就决定了葬礼仪式跟狩猎仪式有着某种必然的联系。事实上,从一开始,狩猎和献祭仪式就伴随着葬礼仪式且相互影响。本文论述葬礼仪式的发生以及葬礼过程中的种种仪式行为,如动物献祭、仪式性杀戮、仪式食物的分享、对尸体的处理等。通过具体诠释,表明神话观念对仪式行为的支配性作用,葬礼仪式在确认和维系社会群体持续性中的重要作用。     

Efficient circular neighbour designs for spatial interference model

We consider circular block designs for field-trials when there are two-sided spatial interference between neighbouring plots of the same blocks. The parameter of interest is total effects that is the sum of direct effect of treatment and neighbour effects, which correspond to the use of a single treatment in the whole field. We determine universally optimal approximate designs. When the number of blocks may be large, we propose efficient exact designs generated by a single sequence of treatment. We also give efficiency factors of the usual binary block neighbour balanced designs which can be used when the number of blocks is small.     

Two-stage hierarchical modeling for analysis of subpopulations in conditional distributions

In this work, we develop modeling and estimation approach for the analysis of cross-sectional clustered data with multimodal conditional distributions where the main interest is in analysis of subpopulations. It is proposed to model such data in a hierarchical model with conditional distributions viewed as finite mixtures of normal components. With a large number of observations in the lowest level clusters, a two-stage estimation approach is used. In the first stage, the normal mixture parameters in each lowest level cluster are estimated using robust methods. Robust alternatives to the maximum likelihood estimation are used to provide stable results even for data with conditional distributions such that their components may not quite meet normality assumptions. Then the lowest level cluster-specific means and standard deviations are modeled in a mixed effects model in the second stage. A small simulation study was conducted to compare performance of finite normal mixture population parameter estimates based on robust and maximum likelihood estimation in stage 1. The proposed modeling approach is illustrated through the analysis of mice tendon fibril diameters data. Analyses results address genotype differences between corresponding components in the mixtures and demonstrate advantages of robust estimation in stage 1.     

Low dose risk estimation via simultaneous statistical inferences

Summary.  The paper develops and studies simultaneous confidence bounds that are useful for making low dose inferences in quantitative risk analysis. Application is intended for risk assessment studies where human, animal or ecological data are used to set safe low dose levels of a toxic agent, but where study information is limited to high dose levels of the agent. Methods are derived for estimating simultaneous, one-sided, upper confidence limits on risk for end points measured on a continuous scale. From the simultaneous confidence bounds, lower confidence limits on the dose that is associated with a particular risk (often referred to as a bench-mark dose ) are calculated. An important feature of the simultaneous construction is that any inferences that are based on inverting the simultaneous confidence bounds apply automatically to inverse bounds on the bench-mark dose.