Teaching Sociology in Community College: Balancing Ideals with Institutional Constraints

Many professionals experience conflict between personal ideals about the meaning and importance of their work, and the structural limitations of the workplace. This conflict presents professionals with the challenge of how to hold true to their ideals within a non-supportive or even hostile environment. In this paper, I describe my experiences balancing my ideals about teaching, learning, and the purpose of a college education with the institutional constraints of a community college. There are three main sections in this paper. First is a discussion of the reasons I chose a career in community college teaching. The second section focuses on the institutional constraints I have encountered over the first 5 years of my career. In the third section, I explain how I have attempted to balance my ideals with the structural limitations of the college where I teach. Throughout the paper, I blend personal narrative with the relevant literature. In doing so, I intend to use my personal experience as a lens for discussing the challenges and possibilities that characterize community college teaching in general.     

From Provocation and Combustibility Toward Mutuality: Once More with Less Rage,Please

This paper presents a summary and excerpts taken from the psychoanalytic treatment, spanning over 16 years, of a highly disturbed and provocative male patient. Prior to referral, the man had been unsuccessfully treated psychopharmacologically for a depressive illness with severe somatic and affective symptoms and behavioral disturbances. A highlight of the case is the emergence of a therapeutic impasse that developed around the patient's attempt to connect intensely with the analyst; the patient attempted to repair his own damaged phallic narcissism by demanding that the analyst participate in a ritualized sexual enactment, which threatened the destruction of the treatment process. The resolution of the impasse was accomplished through the analyst's reaffirming the frame and recovering his own disrupted composure and ref lectiveness, while maintaining a compassionate and caring attitude toward the patient.     

Shared frailty model based on reversed hazard rate for left censored data

Frailty models are used in the survival analysis to account for the unobserved heterogeneity in the individual risks to disease and death. To analyze the bivariate data on related survival times (e.g., matched pairs experiments, twin or family data), the shared frailty models were suggested. In this article, we introduce the shared gamma frailty models with the reversed hazard rate. We develop the Bayesian estimation procedure using the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique to estimate the parameters involved in the model. We present a simulation study to compare the true values of the parameters with the estimated values. We apply the model to a real life bivariate survival dataset.     

Applications of quadrivariate exponential distribution to a three-unit warm standby system with dependent structure

Two-unit warm standby systems have been elaborately dealt within the literature. However, the study of standby systems with more than two units, though very relevant in state-of-the-art practical situations, has received little attention because of mathematical intricacies involved in analyzing them. Also, such systems have been studied assuming: (i) the lifetime or repair time of the units to be exponential, or (ii) the lifetime and repair time to be independent. The present contribution is an improvement in the state-of-the-art in the sense that three-unit warm standby system with dependent structure is shown to be capable of comprehensive analysis.     

Approximate Confidence Limits for the Difference between Parameters of Two Pólya Distributions

The problem of calculating approximate confidence limits for the difference between success probability parameters of two Pólya distributions is solved for the first time. We suggest some new methods for determining these approximate confidence limits and consider their application to special cases: namely for the binomial and hypergeometric distributions. The various approximate confidence limits are evaluated and compared.     

Population structure and correlation between auxiliary and target variables may affect precision of estimates in forest inventory

Simulations of forest inventory in several populations compared simple random with “quick probability proportional to size” (QPPS) sampling. The latter may be applied in the absence of a list sampling frame and/or prior measurement of the auxiliary variable. The correlation between the auxiliary and target variables required to render QPPS sampling more efficient than simple random sampling varied over the range 0.3–0.6 and was lower when sampling from populations that were skewed to the right. Two possible analytical estimators of the standard error of the estimate of the mean for QPPS sampling were found to be less reliable than bootstrapping.     

Peter Schmidt: Econometrician and consummate professional

Peter Schmidt has been one of its best-known and most respected econometricians in the profession for four decades. He has brought his talents to many scholarly outlets and societies, and has played a foundational and constructive role in the development of the field of econometrics. Peter Schmidt has also served and led the development of Econometric Reviews since its inception in 1982. His judgment has always been fair, informed, clear, decisive, and constructive. Respect for ideas and scholarship of others, young and old, is second nature to him. This is the best of traits, and Peter serves as an uncommon example to us all. The seventeen articles that make up this Econometric Reviews Special Issue in Honor of Peter Schmidt represent the work of fifty of the very best econometricians in our profession. They honor Professor Schmidt's lifelong accomplishments by providing fundamental research work that reflects many of the broad research themes that have distinguished his long and productive career. These include time series econometrics, panel data econometrics, and stochastic frontier production analysis.     

Mean square error comparison among variance estimators with known coefficient of variation

The improved estimators for the population parameters were considered by several statisticians under various conditions. Recently Laheetharan and Wijekoon (Improved estimation of the population parameters when some additional information is available. Stat Papers doi:, 2008) demonstrated a generalized procedure for obtaining optimal shrunken estimators, and derived such estimators for both population mean and variance when coefficient of variation is known. In this article the mean square errors of those estimators were compared, and a numerical illustration was done using the scaled mean square error loss as used by Kanefuji and Iwase (Stat Papers 39:377–388, 1998) to understand the efficiency of the estimators with increasing sample size.