When Precaution Creates Misunderstandings: The Unintended Effects of Precautionary Information on Perceived Risks,the EMF Case

In the past decade, growing public concern about novel technologies with uncertain potential long‐term impacts on the environment and human health has moved risk policies toward a more precautionary approach. Focusing on mobile telephony, the effects of precautionary information on risk perception were analyzed. A pooled multinational experimental study based on a 5 × 2 × 2 factorial design was conducted in nine countries. The first factor refers to whether or not information on different types of precautionary measures was present, the second factor to the framing of the precautionary information, and the third factor to the order in which cell phones and base stations were rated by the study participants. The data analysis on the country level indicates different effects. The main hypothesis that informing about precautionary measures results in increased risk perceptions found only partial support in the data. The effects are weaker, both in terms of the effect size and the frequency of significant effects, across the various precautionary information formats used in the experiment. Nevertheless, our findings do not support the assumption that informing people about implemented precautionary measures will decrease public concerns.     

论我国货币政策传导机制中的障碍

通过对近年来我国出现的通货紧缩现象的分析 ,可以看到中央银行所采取的稳健的货币政策的内容及其执行状况。经济的不景气不是由于货币供应量不足而是在于货币政策的传导机制的不畅。我们应找出传导机制不畅的原因 ,并提出相应的对策     

The Age of Confusion: Why So Many Teens are Getting Pregnant,Turning to Welfare and Ending Up Homeless

The ongoing debate over the flaws in the nation's welfare system centers primarily on two highly charged social ills: teen-age pregnancy and long-term dependence on public assistance. For the poorest and fastest growing segment of the welfare population—homeless mothers—these problems are both severe and inextricably linked. At an alarmingly young age, these women are becoming trapped in a chaotic cycle that offers little structure and few alternatives.     

Gender, home and family in cultural capital theory

The paper argues that Bourdieu's stress on early familiarization for the highest value of cultural capital is closely linked to his idea, strongly emphasized in Distinction, about the role of family and domestic life for individual development and social positions. The role of women, as mothers and homemakers, is crucial in this process. Yet, Bourdieu defines social origin as deriving from the father. The centrality to Bourdieu's thinking of a resilient traditional pattern of masculine domination and feminine submission constitutive of the Western gender habitus explains both his stress on ‘normalcy’ for the production of legitimate dispositions, and his resistance to incorporating into his thinking the implications of recent transformations in home family living, which have destabilized the gender order. It is thus important to consider contemporary feminist analyses of the family and home life and their significance for a renewed theory of cultural capital. The paper considers two sets of literature. Firstly, it addresses the manners in which home and family are conceptualized in Bourdieu's key texts where these issues were prominent in the development of his thinking on cultural capital. The second set of literature includes texts by feminist academics in the fields of family, gender and the body, which analyse the destabilizing of the gender order and everyday family living in contemporary society. Two questions are addressed on the basis of these reflections: (1) Is cultural capital an individual or a household resource? (2) How does cultural capital relate to personal interdependencies at the level of family and households?     

On the Bayesian analysis of categorical data: the problem of nonresponse

It is demonstrated how a suitably chosen prior for the frequency parameters can streamline the Bayesian analysis of categorical data with missing entries due to nonresponse or other causes. The two cases where the data follow the Multinomial or the Hypergeometric model are treated separately. In the first case it is adequate to restrict the prior (for the cell probabilities) to the class of Dirichlet distributions. In the case of the Hypergeometric model it is convenient to select a prior from the class of Dirichlet-Multinomial (DM) distributions. The DM distributions are studied in some details.     

Unit Roots: Bayesian Significance Test

The unit root problem plays a central role in empirical applications in the time series econometric literature. However, significance tests developed under the frequentist tradition present various conceptual problems that jeopardize the power of these tests, especially for small samples. Bayesian alternatives, although having interesting interpretations and being precisely defined, experience problems due to the fact that that the hypothesis of interest in this case is sharp or precise. The Bayesian significance test used in this article, for the unit root hypothesis, is based solely on the posterior density function, without the need of imposing positive probabilities to sets of zero Lebesgue measure. Furthermore, it is conducted under strict observance of the likelihood principle. It was designed mainly for testing sharp null hypotheses and it is called FBST for Full Bayesian Significance Test.     

Waiting time to exhaust lottery numbers

Questions related to lotteries are usually of interest to the public since people think there is a magic formula which will help them to win lottery draws. This note shows how to compute the expected waiting time to observe specific numbers in a sequence of lottery draws and show that surprising facts are expected to occur.     

A Note on Influence Assessment in Score Tests

Recently, [1] Ebrahimi, N. 1996. How to measure uncertainty about residual life time. Sankhya Ser. A, 58: 48–57.  [Google Scholar] proposed a dynamic measure based on differential entropy applied to the residual lifetime. This measure has been used for the classification and ordering of survival functions. More recently, [2] Ebrahimi, N. 1997. Testing whether lifetime distribution is decreasing uncertainty. Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference, 64: 9–19. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] has considered the problem of testing the monotonicity of this measure. We propose and study several kernel type estimators of the entropy of residual life through the estimation of f(x) log f(x). These estimators can be applied to the classification and comparison of lifetime distribution.     

Nenparametric Two-Group Classification: Concepts and a SAS-Based Software Package

This article introduces BestClass, a set of SAS macros, available in the mainframe and workstation environment, designed for solving two-group classification problems using a class of recently developed nonparametric classification methods. The criteria used to estimate the classification function are based on either minimizing a function of the absolute deviations from the surface which separates the groups, or directly minimizing a function of the number of misclassified entities in the training sample. The solution techniques used by BestClass to estimate the classification rule use the mathematical programming routines of the SAS/OR software. Recently, a number of research studies have reported that under certain data conditions this class of classification methods can provide more accurate classification results than existing methods, such as Fisher's linear discriminant function and logistic regression. However, these robust classification methods have not yet been implemented in the major statistical packages, and hence are beyond the reach of those statistical analysts who are unfamiliar with mathematical programming techniques. We use a limited simulation experiment and an example to compare and contrast properties of the methods included in Best-Class with existing parametric and nonparametric methods. We believe that BestClass contributes significantly to the field of nonparametric classification analysis, in that it provides the statistical community with convenient access to this recently developed class of methods. BestClass is available from the authors.