The Escalator: A Conveyor of Hong Kong's Culture

People believe that escalators provide a moreattractive, convenient, and physically less-demandingpedestrian access from one place to another. However, itdoes not mean all of us have to like them. Escalators do not only affect our perception of speed, butthe most important concern is that this urban objectalso influences our social relationships and humancommunication. Under the transmission of this urban object, we are treated as components (a what),rather than human beings (a who). Thus, this articlediscusses how modernist thinking affects how we see thisobject and ourselves, and examines the relative worth of it, in relation to the social lossincurred in the present or future. This article alsodiscusses how its presence in many of the daily settingsof urban life affects the culture, meaning and quality of life.Requests for reprints should be addressed SIU Kin Wai Michael, School of Design, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hunghom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.     

On diagnostic checking of the autoregressive conditional intensity model

The autoregressive conditional intensity model proposed by Russell (1998) is a promising option for fitting multivariate high frequency irregularly spaced data. The authors acknowledge the validity of this model by showing the independence of its generalized residuals, a crucial assumption of the model formulation not readily recognized by researchers. The authors derive the large‐sample distribution of the autocorrelations of the generalized residual series and use it to construct a goodness‐of‐fit test for the model. Empirical results compare the performance of their test with other off‐the‐shelf tests such as the Ljung–Box test. They illustrate the use of their test with transaction records of the HSBC stock.     

Reliability sampling plans for the Weibull distribution under Type II progressive censoring with binomial removals

This paper presents reliability sampling plans for the Weibull distribution under Type II progressive censoring with random removals (PCR), where the number of units removed at each failure time follows a binomial distribution. To construct the sampling plans, the sample size n and the acceptance constant k are determined based on asymptotic distribution theory. The resulting sampling plans are tabulated for selected specifications under the proposed censoring scheme. Furthermore, a Monte Carlo simulation is conducted to validate the true probability of acceptance for the designed sampling plans.     

Assessing Lund's critical values for testing for outliers in linear regression models

This note assesses Lund's critical bounds as approximations to the critical values of a size-a test for detecting single outlier in a multiple linear regression model. A Monte Carlo experiment shows that the empirical sizes are very close to the nominal sizes, and the regressors have little effect on the empirical sizes. Lund's tables are revised to higher accuracy.     

Relations Between Social Problem Solving and Indicators of Interpersonal and Family Well-Being Among Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong

This study evaluated the dimensionality of the construct of social problem solving and examined the relationships between social problem solving and empathy, emotional well-being and family well-being in a sample of secondary school students in Hong Kong (N=1462). The participants completed measures of social problem solving (the 25-item short form of the Chinese version of the Social Problem-Solving Inventory: C-SPSI-R), empathy (the Chinese Interpersonal Reactivity Scale), emotional well-being (the Chinese Vengeance Scale) and family well-being (the Chinese Family Assessment Instrument and the Conflict Behaviour Questionnaire). Regarding the dimensionality of the C-SPSI, confirmatory factor analysis showed that the scale has a stable five-factor structure (RMSEA=0.05) and that the related subscales were reliable (with ranging from 0.65 to 0.81). Participants with higher levels of social problem solving had higher levels of empathy and lower personal distress in applying empathy, which suggested that these personal competencies were inter-related. Higher levels of social problem solving were also related to better emotional well-being (less tendency to take revenge) and better family quality of life (better family functioning and fewer parent-adolescent conflicts).     

The research pendulum: multiple roles and responsibilities as a researcher

Qualitative research on sexual identities has highlighted the use of oral narratives to understand the lives of lesbians and gay men. Feminist ethnographers, sociologists and queer theorists have further posed methodological inquiries to the issues of insider/outsider, the possibilities of an erotic subject and the matter of representation. Using interview data with Hong Kong lesbians, this paper discusses a researcher's multiple positionalities and its effects on both the researched and the researcher. Being self-reflexive requires a researcher to test her or his own boundaries and to take up social responsibilities as the interpreter of texts. This paper calls for further dialogue between a researcher's subject positions, research processes and the final presentation of findings. doi:10.1300/J155v10n03_02.     

Positive False Discovery Rate Estimate in Step-Wise Variable Selection

Selecting predictors to optimize the outcome prediction is an important statistical method. However, it usually ignores the false positives in the selected predictors. In this article, we advocate a conventional stepwise forward variable selection method based on the predicted residual sum of squares, and develop a positive false discovery rate (pFDR) estimate for the selected predictor subset, and a local pFDR estimate to prioritize the selected predictors. This pFDR estimate takes account of the existence of non null predictors, and is proved to be asymptotically conservative. In addition, we propose two views of a variable selection process: an overall and an individual test. An interesting feature of the overall test is that its power of selecting non null predictors increases with the proportion of non null predictors among all candidate predictors. Data analysis is illustrated with an example, in which genetic and clinical predictors were selected to predict the cholesterol level change after four months of tamoxifen treatment, and pFDR was estimated. Our method's performance is evaluated through statistical simulations.