Understanding the Alternative Globalisation Movement

Resistance to neo‐liberalism had been gathering pace for sometime before it crystallised into the alternative globalisation movement (AGM) in 1999 at the Third Ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, WA, USA. Since then, many more protests have ensued in cities around the globe against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8. The emergence of this phenomenon has precipitated new research and debates for social movement studies and social sciences generally. This paper critically reviews some of the new academic perspectives on the AGM including, post‐structuralist anarchist, autonomist, complexity theorisations, as well as new applications of older social movement theories such as the political process approach and new social movement theory. The paper explains the emergence and establishment of the World Social Forum (WSF) and the theoretical and practical difficulties of a charter which suggests such an inclusive an open ended rubric. Finally, the paper concludes by arguing that further research on the tensions within the WSF and the AGM is required if an answer is to be provided to the question: Is another World Possible?     

The Securitization of Migration: A Racial Discourse1

As we enter the informational economy, freedom of human mobility has nearly disappeared. Instead, powerful words are travelling the globe unhindered: risk and security. They are being strung together with the present “migration phenomena”, leaving migrants bound by the chain of the new security discourse: the securitization of migration. This discourse is racism's most modern form. Discursive practices, as seen through the press portrayal of 599 migrants reaching Canada's western coast, have transformed migrants into agents which threaten “human security” How discourse informs government policy is illustrated through an examination of Canada's new immigration legislation.     

Models for survival data from cancer prevention studies

Summary. We propose a new parametric survival model for cancer prevention studies. The formulation of the model is in the spirit of stochastic modelling of the occurrences of tumours through two stages: initiation of an undetected tumour and promotion of the tumour to a detectable cancer. Several novel properties of the model proposed are derived. In addition, we examine the relationship of our model with the existing lagged regression model of Zucker and Lakatos. Also, we bridge the difference between two distinct stochastic modelling methods for cancer data, one used primarily for cancer therapeutic trials and the other used for cancer prevention trials.     

Circumcising the body: negotiating difference and belonging in Germany

ABSTRACT

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.     

Cure rate models: A unified approach

The authors propose a novel class of cure rate models for right‐censored failure time data. The class is formulated through a transformation on the unknown population survival function. It includes the mixture cure model and the promotion time cure model as two special cases. The authors propose a general form of the covariate structure which automatically satisfies an inherent parameter constraint and includes the corresponding binomial and exponential covariate structures in the two main formulations of cure models. The proposed class provides a natural link between the mixture and the promotion time cure models, and it offers a wide variety of new modelling structures as well. Within the Bayesian paradigm, a Markov chain Monte Carlo computational scheme is implemented for sampling from the full conditional distributions of the parameters. Model selection is based on the conditional predictive ordinate criterion. The use of the new class of models is illustrated with a set of real data involving a melanoma clinical trial.     

A simulation study on SPSS ridge regression and ordinary least squares regression procedures for multicollinearity data

This study compares the SPSS ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and ridge regression procedures in dealing with multicollinearity data. The LS regression method is one of the most frequently applied statistical procedures in application. It is well documented that the LS method is extremely unreliable in parameter estimation while the independent variables are dependent (multicollinearity problem). The Ridge Regression procedure deals with the multicollinearity problem by introducing a small bias in the parameter estimation. The application of Ridge Regression involves the selection of a bias parameter and it is not clear if it works better in applications. This study uses a Monte Carlo method to compare the results of OLS procedure with the Ridge Regression procedure in SPSS.     

Academic Buildings and Their Influence on Students’ Wellbeing in Higher Education Institutions

The purpose of this study is to explore the perception of students about aspects of academic building that affect their wellbeing. The study adopts focus group discussion using semi structured interview guide to elicit their responses. Six different groups of students participated in the study. Interviews were recorded using digital audio recorder and were later transcribed to text. The qualitative data obtained was analysed through content analysis. Six key themes that emerged from the analysis are: comfort; health and safety; access and quality of facilities; space provision and adequacy; participation and inclusiveness; interaction. These six items are considered as parameters that are important to students’ wellbeing in relation to academic buildings. The most emphasised aspects of academic building that are essential to meeting students need include thermal conditions, internet access, furniture, duration of access, availability of refreshment facilities, availability of discussion room and availability of personal workstation. This implies that facilities managers in higher education institutions should give adequate attention to these identified aspects of academic buildings as they can potentially affect students output.     

Outlier Detection in a Circular Regression Model Using COVRATIO Statistic

In this article, we model the relationship between two circular variables using the circular regression models, to be called JS circular regression model, which was proposed by Jammalamadaka and Sarma (1993). The model has many interesting properties and is sensitive enough to detect the occurrence of outliers. We focus our attention on the problem of identifying outliers in this model. In particular, we extend the use of the COVRATIO statistic, which has been successfully used in the linear case for the same purpose, to the JS circular regression model via a row deletion approach. Through simulation studies, the cut-off points for the new procedure are obtained and its power of performance is investigated. It is found that the performance improves when the resulting residuals have small variance and when the sample size gets larger. An example of the application of the procedure is presented using a real dataset.