“I Was in Crisis”

This article explores the illicit labor and imprisonment of two women, Cynthia and Dinah, in the Santa Monica prison in Lima, Peru through the lens of gendered motherwork. Because the unequal distribution of care places the burden of this labor on women, Cynthia and Dinah were primarily responsible for the care of their adult children who were diagnosed with AIDS. Both women entered the transnational cocaine commodity chain in order to provide their children with medication that was not administered by the state. Neoliberal healthcare in the form of cuts to national health systems makes the motherwork of poor women more difficult to perform. In order to afford care for their children's health, Cynthia and Dinah entered a labor market that is criminalized by punitive war on drug policies and they were subsequently imprisoned. Illicit labor was therefore an extension of their motherwork and the removal of this care from their children resulted in tragic health consequences. This article is based on ethnographic dissertation fieldwork in 2008–09 in the largest women's prison in Peru.     

Using Visual Art Workshops with Female Survivors of Domestic Violence in Portugal and England: A Comparative Reflection

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a reflection on the use of visual art workshops in an interdisciplinary feminist project with female survivors of domestic violence living in refuges in England and Portugal. The paper discusses the fieldwork in each location with attention to the interaction between participants, between participants and the researcher/s, and the cultural and institutional structures influencing the research and the images produced. Despite some key differences in the context, the analysis highlights key resonances and commonalities amongst the objects that survivors of domestic abuse depicted in each location. We use the feminist notion of ‘giving voice’ as an analytical tool throughout the paper. The paper argues that ‘giving voice’ was not unproblematically accomplished by using visual methods and suggests that our understanding remained partial and often reliant on verbal narratives accompanying the visual images produced. We also highlight issues of power emerging when exhibiting art generated through the study.     

Do Infants Show Distinct Negative Facial Expressions for Fear and Anger? Emotional Expression in 11‐Month‐Old European American,Chinese, and Japanese Infants

Do infants show distinct negative facial expressions for different negative emotions? To address this question, European American, Chinese, and Japanese 11‐month‐olds were videotaped during procedures designed to elicit mild anger or frustration and fear. Facial behavior was coded using Baby FACS, an anatomically based scoring system. Infants' nonfacial behavior differed across procedures, suggesting that the target emotions were successfully elicited. However evidence for distinct emotion‐specific facial configurations corresponding to fear versus anger was not obtained. Although facial responses were largely similar across cultures, some differences also were observed. Results are discussed in terms of functionalist and dynamical systems approaches to emotion and emotional expression.     

A Novel Evolutionary Formulation of the Maximum Independent Set Problem

We introduce a novel evolutionary formulation of the problem of finding a maximum independent set of a graph. The new formulation is based on the relationship that exists between a graphs independence number and its acyclic orientations. It views such orientations as individuals and evolves them with the aid of evolutionary operators that are very heavily based on the structure of the graph and its acyclic orientations. The resulting heuristic has been tested on some of the Second DIMACS Implementation Challenge benchmark graphs, and has been found to be competitive when compared to several of the other heuristics that have also been tested on those graphs.     

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Irregular Transmigrants’ Journeys and Mental Mapping Methodology

The development of border clusters and transit control regimes aiming to detain irregular migrants before they reach their destination countries is constructed upon a multidimensional geopolitical narrative driven by border security agreements. The Mexican Transit Control Regime illustrates that 16 years of trying to control migration in transit to the United States has not reduced it but has only succeeded in pushing migrants into dangerous routes and risky practices. Using mental maps as a technique to approach transmigrants’ voices, this article aims to contribute to the understanding of the ways irregular migrants in transit live and represent their journey.     

Efficient Estimation of Data Combination Models by the Method of Auxiliary-to-Study Tilting (AST)

We propose a locally efficient estimator for a class of semiparametric data combination problems. A leading estimand in this class is the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT). Data combination problems are related to, but distinct from, the class of missing data problems with data missing at random (of which the average treatment effect (ATE) estimand is a special case). Our estimator also possesses a double robustness property. Our procedure may be used to efficiently estimate, among other objects, the ATT, the two-sample instrumental variables model (TSIV), counterfactual distributions, poverty maps, and semiparametric difference-in-differences. In an empirical application, we use our procedure to characterize residual Black–White wage inequality after flexibly controlling for “premarket” differences in measured cognitive achievement. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

Father Involvement and Children's Early Learning: A Critical Review of Published Empirical Work from the Past 15 Years

ABSTRACT

Parent involvement research predominantly focuses on the involvement of mothers in children's educational experiences, and rarely speaks to the role of the “other” parent – fathers. Yet, there is building interest in the role that fathers play in children's development, and how this role may be especially salient during early childhood and the transition into formal schooling. This review critically evaluates father involvement literature from 1990 to 2005 within this early childhood population. In particular, it provides systematic evidence that to some degree researchers have been responsive to recent critiques, and lays out a path of sampling, methodological and conceptual challenges still left to be tackled.     

The performance of the truncated mixed control chart

Abstract

When the mixed chart proposed by Aslam et al. (2015 Aslam, M., M. Azam, N. Khan, and C.-H. Jun. 2015. A mixed control chart to monitor the process. International Journal of Production Research 53 (15):4684–93. doi:10.1080/00207543.2015.1031354.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is in use, the sample items are classified as defective or not defective and, depending on the number of defectives, the quality characteristic X of the sample items are also measured. In this case, an Xbar chart decides the state of the process. The previous conforming/non-conforming classification truncates the X distribution and, because of that, the mathematical development to obtain the ARLs is complex. Aslam et al. (2015 Aslam, M., M. Azam, N. Khan, and C.-H. Jun. 2015. A mixed control chart to monitor the process. International Journal of Production Research 53 (15):4684–93. doi:10.1080/00207543.2015.1031354.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) didn’t pay attention to the fact that the X distribution is truncated and, due to that, they obtained incorrect ARLs.     

General mathematical properties,regression and applications of the log-gamma-generated family

The construction of some wider families of continuous distributions obtained recently has attracted applied statisticians due to the analytical facilities available for easy computation of special functions in programming software. We study some general mathematical properties of the log-gamma-generated (LGG) family defined by Amini, MirMostafaee, and Ahmadi (2014 Amini, M., S. M. T. K. MirMostafaee, and J. Ahmadi. 2014. Log-gamma-generated families of distributions. Statistics 48:913–32.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). It generalizes the gamma-generated class pioneered by Risti? and Balakrishnan (2012 Risti?, M. M., and N. Balakrishnan. 2012. The gamma exponentiated exponential distribution. Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation 82:1191–206.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We present some of its special models and derive explicit expressions for the ordinary and incomplete moments, generating and quantile functions, mean deviations, Bonferroni and Lorenz curves, Shannon entropy, Rényi entropy, reliability, and order statistics. Models in this family are compared with nested and non nested models. Further, we propose and study a new LGG family regression model. We demonstrate that the new regression model can be applied to censored data since it represents a parametric family of models and therefore can be used more effectively in the analysis of survival data. We prove that the proposed models can provide consistently better fits in some applications to real data sets.