Bowling Alone in Taiwan? Political Trust and Civic Participation of Taiwanese and Their Appraisal of Liberal Democracy and Personal Wellbeing

Social Indicators Research - Based on a nationwide survey dataset collected by Taiwan’s Executive Yuan (2017) (N?=?2737) and adopting structural equation modelling with...     

A Comparison of Methods for Estimating the Benchmark Dose Based on Overdispersed Data from Developmental Toxicity Studies

Developmental anomalies resulting from prenatal toxicity can be manifested in terms of both malformations among surviving offspring and prenatal death. Although these two endpoints have traditionally been analyzed separately in the assessment of risk, multivariate methods of risk characterization have recently been proposed. We examined this and other issues in developmental toxicity risk assessment by evaluating the accuracy and precision of estimates of the effective dose ( ED ₀₅) and the benchmark dose ( BMD ₀₅) using computer simulation. Our results indicated that different variance structures (Dirichlet-trinomial and generalized linear model) used to characterize overdispersion yielded comparable results when fitting joint dose response models based on generalized estimating equations. (The choice of variance structure in separate modeling was also not critical.) However, using the Rao-Scott transformation to eliminate overdispersion tended to produce estimates of the ED ₀₅ with reduced bias and mean squared error. Because joint modeling ensures that the ED ₀₅ for overall toxicity (based on both malformations and prenatal death) is always less than the ED ₀₅ for either malformations or prenatal death, joint modeling is preferred to separate modeling for risk assessment purposes.     

WHAT MAKES THE LOCAL? A BRIEF CONSIDERATION OF THE REJUVENATION OF HONG KONG IDENTITY

This paper ascertains what makes the local and why the local is important, in the context of change in Hong Kong due to the political transition to PRC sovereignty.In doing so, I hope to pose a modest polemical challenge to cultural studies' tendency to overlook seemingly simplistic empirical information. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has led to a contraction of the political sphere, as the convergence of political structures curbed the development of local identities. The label or category ‘Hong Kong people’ was then appropriated with a specific meaning for the local to resist encroachment of the national. It was true that the high intensity of dominant national discourses during the political transition created a favourable atmosphere for re-nationalization. However, as soon as the political transition was over, Hong Kongers re-adhered to their own label in their struggle for cultural autonomy.Their strong cultural affect toward various national icons during the transition quickly diminished. This multiyear discourse study (1996–1998), which utilizes social scientific methods in conjunction with cultural theories, illustrates important political and methodological impulses necessary for the formulation of a socio-political approach to cultural studies within the Hong Kong context.     

A case study on the perception of aging and participation in physical activities of older Chinese immigrants in Australia

This qualitative study explores how older Hong Kong ChineseAustralians perceive aging and to what extent this perception affects their participation in physical activities. The main methods used were in-depth interviews with 22 participants ranging in age from 60 to 91 years. Interviews were translated from Chinese (Cantonese) and transcribed into English. Content analysis was used to find recurring themes from the interview data. The main findings indicate that the perception of aging is to some extent influenced by culture. Some participants defined aging as being measured in years, and others defined it by the state of one's physical health, appearance, and capacity to continue fulfilling one's social roles. These perceptions strongly influenced their preferences for and participation in physical activities. Acknowledging the fact that Chinese-speaking people are not culturally homogeneous, this article makes some recommendations to health service providers with regard to the development of appropriate physical activity programs.     

Bidirectionality in kindergarten children's school readiness and emotional regulation

This study examined the longitudinal associations of emotional regulation and school readiness among Chinese kindergarten children. Data were collected from 523 children (mean age at time 1 = 52.42 months; 52.9% male) at two time points separated by approximately 1 year in Hong Kong, China. At times 1 and 2, children's school readiness was assessed by their teachers and parents while their emotional regulation was directly tested. Teachers also rated children's emotional regulation at both time points. The results from the two reciprocal path models showed that, controlling for the corresponding autoregressive effects, school readiness at time 1 was predictive of emotional regulation at time 2. However, emotional regulation at time 1 did not emerge as a significant predictor of school readiness at time 2. Theoretically, these results underscored children's school readiness as a potential contributor to their emotional regulation. Practically, these findings suggested the utility of supporting children's school readiness to foster their emotional regulation.     

A statistical-test-complemented graphical method for detecting multiple outliers in two-way tables

A statistic Rk which has a simple relationship with Qk is proposed for the analysis of outliers in two-way tables and the rationale is discussed. The critical values of the test statistic, minimum Rk, can be well approximated by existing values based on univariate Grubbs-type outlier test statistics. The test statistics are complemented with plots of the largest Wk values, which have a simple monotonic inverse relationship with the values of Rk, against their expected quantiles which are approximated using a conditional independence argument. Two examples are analysed with satisfactory results.     

Online interval scheduling: randomized and multiprocessor cases

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of equal-length intervals arriving online, where each interval is associated with a weight and the objective is to maximize the total weight of completed intervals. An optimal 4-competitive algorithm has long been known in the deterministic case, but the randomized case remains open. We give the first randomized algorithm for this problem, achieving a competitive ratio of 3.5822. We also prove a randomized lower bound of 4/3, which is an improvement over the previous 5/4 result. Then we show that the techniques can be carried to the deterministic multiprocessor case, giving a 3.5822-competitive 2-processor algorithm, and a 4/3 lower bound for any number of processors. We also give a lower bound of 2 for the case of two processors. A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of COCOON 2007, LNCS, vol. 4598, pp. 176–186. The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from City University of Hong Kong (SRG 7001969), and NSFC Grant No. 70525004 and 70702030.     

Weighted empirical likelihood for generalized linear models with longitudinal data

In this paper, we introduce the empirical likelihood (EL) method to longitudinal studies. By considering the dependence within subjects in the auxiliary random vectors, we propose a new weighted empirical likelihood (WEL) inference for generalized linear models with longitudinal data. We show that the weighted empirical likelihood ratio always follows an asymptotically standard chi-squared distribution no matter which working weight matrix that we have chosen, but a well chosen working weight matrix can improve the efficiency of statistical inference. Simulations are conducted to demonstrate the accuracy and efficiency of our proposed WEL method, and a real data set is used to illustrate the proposed method.     

D-distribution and its applications

We derive the distribution of the sum ofn independent doubly truncated Poisson variables not necessarily identically distributed. This distribution is called a D-distribution. Its p.d.f. can be expressed in terms of a D-number and an incomplete exponential function which are both defined in this paper. We investigate the relationship between these numbers and distributions, and use these relationships to derive recurrence relations and other properties of the D-distribution. A minimum variance unbiased estimates of the p.d.f. of this D-distribution is also obtained. Some example are included at the end to illustrate the use of this D-distribution.     

Computational Comparison Studies of Quadratic Assignment Like Formulations for the In Silico Sequence Selection Problem in De Novo Protein Design

In this paper an O(n²) mathematical formulation for in silico sequence selection in de novo protein design proposed by Klepeis et al. (2003, 2004), in which the number of additional variables and linear constraints scales with the square of the number of binary variables, is compared to three O(n) formulations. It is found that the O(n²) formulation is superior to the O(n) formulations on most sequence search spaces. The superiority of the O(n²) formulation is due to the reformulation linearization techniques (RLTs), since the O(n²) formulation without RLTs is found to be computationally less efficient than the O(n) formulations. In addition, new algorithmic enhancing components of RLTs with inequality constraints, triangle inequalities, and Dead-End Elimination (DEE) type preprocessing are added to the O(n²) formulation. The current best O(n²) formulation, which is the original formulation from Klepeis et al. (2003, 2004) plus DEE type preprocessing, is proposed for in silico sequence search. For a test problem with a search space of 3.4×10⁴⁵ sequences, this new improved model is able to reduce the required CPU time by 67%.