Wealth in Middle and Old Age in Mexico: The Role of International Migration1

This article examines the impact that past migration to the U.S. has on the current economic well‐being of individuals in middle or old age who have returned to Mexico. A priori, the net effect of U.S. migration on wealth among return migrants is difficult to predict; there are counteracting factors that can affect wealth positively or negatively. Using data from the Mexican Health and Aging Study 2001 and correcting for selection factors, the long‐term effect of U.S. migration for return migrants was found consistently positive in terms of their accumulated personal wealth at middle and old age. This article speculates about the possible mechanisms that can explain this apparent advantage.     

Privatising health: the demise of MEDICARE?

Health policy was an integral component of the post‐war welfare state, which represented a nationally based class compromise providing concessions in the form of income support and service provision outside the ambit of the market. In Australia, development of a universal health system was delayed until the introduction of Medibank, and subsequently Medicare. Since its inception, Medicare has been subjected to retrenchment pressures that have dominated welfare state developments since the mid 1970s. This paper traces developments in the Australian health system, revealing that the major trends, privatisation and the transfer of responsibility from the collective to the private sphere, represent a movement towards a more residual system that threatens the Medicare goal of equitable access to quality medical treatment.     

Textbooks, the History of Sociology, and the Sociological Stock of Knowledge

Textbooks increasingly reflect changes in our sociological stock of knowledge about the founders of the discipline. Richard Hamilton is unaware of this research and its documentation of the flaws in earlier accounts of the history of the profession. In an effort to expand his disciplinary understanding, I briefly review the extensive scholarship on the sociology of Harriet Martineau which has been published over the last quarter of a century.     

Incorporating disabled students within an inclusive higher education environment

This study investigated disabled students' perceptions and experiences of learning in a single university. The paper reports the views of disabled student volunteers with a range of impairments who were selected to discuss experiences of teaching and assessment that they commonly encountered. Four group interviews were organized in 2002, before the Disability Discriminants Act (DDA) part IV came on stream, in which disabled students were invited to reflect together on their experiences as learners at the case study university. In addition to teaching and assessment, the students also identified issues to do with access to, and the use of, information as important in their learning experience. We conclude that further studies will need to adopt a more integrated approach to understanding disabled students' experiences as learners.     

Multiple testing using the posterior probabilities of directional alternatives,with application to genomic studies

This paper aims to connect Bayesian analysis and frequentist theory in the context of multiple comparisons. The authors show that when testing the equality of two sample means, the posterior probability of the one‐sided alternative hypothesis, defined as a half‐space, shares with the frequentist P‐value the property of uniformity under the null hypothesis. Ultimately, the posterior probability may thus be used in the same spirit as a P‐value in the Benjamini‐Hochberg procedure, or in any of its extensions.     

Parallelizing MCMC for Bayesian spatiotemporal geostatistical models

When MCMC methods for Bayesian spatiotemporal modeling are applied to large geostatistical problems, challenges arise as a consequence of memory requirements, computing costs, and convergence monitoring. This article describes the parallelization of a reparametrized and marginalized posterior sampling (RAMPS) algorithm, which is carefully designed to generate posterior samples efficiently. The algorithm is implemented using the Parallel Linear Algebra Package (PLAPACK). The scalability of the algorithm is investigated via simulation experiments that are implemented using a cluster with 25 processors. The usefulness of the method is illustrated with an application to sulfur dioxide concentration data from the Air Quality System database of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.