Growth of U.S. population, 1940–1971, in the light of an interactive two-sex model

Since it is logically impossible to hold constant both male and female age-specific fertility rates, the intrinsic growth rates or the net reproduction rates for males and females, based on that assumption, are internally inconsistent. The interactive two-sex model presented in this paper holds constant a set of bivariate age-specific fertility rates by age of men and women and allows the male and female age-specific fertility rates to adjust themselves to achieve stability. The model gives the same intrinsic growth rate for both sexes and generates intrinsic age-specific fertility rates and intrinsic net reproduction rates for males and females which are consistent and can operate simultaneously on a population. The model is applied to the U.S. data for 1940–1971, and the results are compared with those obtained from the one-sex models.     

Personality, drug preference, drug use, and drug availability

This study examined the relationship between drug preference, drug use, drug availability, and personality among individuals (n = 100) in treatment for substance abuse in an effort to replicate the results of an earlier study (Feldman, Kumar, Angelini, Pekala, & Porter, 2007) designed to test prediction derived from Eysenck's (1957, 1967) theories. Drug preference was measured by the method of paired-comparison and personality was measured with the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire-50 CC. Contrary to expectations, high compared with low scorers on Sociability and Impulsive-Sensation Seeking preferred depressants. Surprisingly, low compared with high scorers on neuroticism did not differ in preference for alcohol. As in the previous study, drug preference, use, and availability were highly correlated, although ease of availability was slightly more predictive of drug use than drug preference. Clinical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Comparison of genomic sequences using the Hamming distance

The paper considers the problem of homogeneity among groups by comparison of genomic sequences. Some alternative procedures that attach less emphasis on the likelihood approach, and more on alternative measures that deal with similar homogeneity problems are considered here. On this approach, a one-sided hypothesis test is considered and the classical ANOVA decomposition can be directly adapted to sample measures based on the Hamming distance, without necessarily going through their second moments. Some results of U-statistics theory will be useful for the decomposition of the test statistic and to find its asymptotic distribution. An application of this test with real data is shown and the p-value of the test statistic is found via bootstrap resampling.     

Use of n-ary block designs in diallel crosses evaluation

To fill the gap between theory and practice of modern statistical designs, this paper presents the use of n-ary block designs in the evaluation of balanced incomplete block (BIB) designs for all the four Griffing's (1956) complete dialled crosses (CDC) systems, the construction of which is proposed here by adopting a suitable BIB design and associating its treatments with the crosses under a CDC system.     

Joint confidence regions in the multivariate calibration problem

Consider a vector valued response variable related to a vector valued explanatory variable through a normal multivariate linear model. The multivariate calibration problem deals with statistical inference on unknown values of the explanatory variable. The problem addressed is the construction of joint confidence regions for several unknown values of the explanatory variable. The problem is investigated when the variance covariance matrix is a scalar multiple of the identity matrix and also when it is a completely unknown positive definite matrix. The problem is solved in only two cases: (i) the response and explanatory variables have the same dimensions, and (ii) the explanatory variable is a scalar. In the former case, exact joint confidence regions are derived based on a natural pivot statistic. In the latter case, the joint confidence regions are only conservative. Computational aspects and the practical implementation of the confidence regions are discussed and illustrated using an example.