Hesitant Madams in a Global City: Japanese Expat Wives and their Global Householding in Hong Kong

Care work, once a sanctioned labor of love, is increasingly commodified in transnational contexts. The picture of migrant women shouldering the housework and child care of local professonal women may seem like a mutually beneficial arrangement—matching the “needs” of the haves and have-nots—, but the global care chain ultimately works to maintain the traditional gendered division of labor as well as global inequality. To this trend of globalization of care work, Japan has been an exception; however, how much longer it will be so is now in a question, as the government paves the way for importing domestic labor from abroad. This article focuses on Japanese expat wives in Hong Kong in order to locate Japanese women vis-à-vis the global care chain. The narrative analysis on how they decide whether to hire a domestic worker in their home away from home highlights the sociopolitical nature of their supposedly private choices. Some drew on cultural ideal of wifehood and motherhood to rationalize their choice while others referred to racialized or even overtly racist and classist images of foreign domestic workers. A few women spoke against the system itself, showing awareness of its inherent social injustice. All such narratives are never purely personal; their decisions and the rationalization behind them sustain the prevailing discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, culture, and class, which, in turn, envelop their attempts at global householding.     

北京主导优势产业链发展战略

本文分析了北京工业发展的优势和劣势以及当前面临的主要问题,在此基础上提出了未来北京工业发展的新思路。作者认为,北京工业发展应面向京津冀和环渤海地区,实行大工业、大市场的一体化战略,即适当控制和强化那些具有突出优势的核心部分,而甩掉或转移扩散那些不具有优势或优势不突出的非核心部分,打造一体化的开放式跨区域主导优势产业链。当前,应着重打造八条一体化的开放式产业链。     

民国海疆版图演变与南海断续国界线的形成

南海诸岛,主要是指处于南海之上的东沙群岛,西沙群岛,中沙群岛和南沙群岛。历史上这些群岛,分别以"涨海崎头"、"磁石"、"千里长沙"、"万里石塘"为名归入中国版图。但是到了清末民初,外国列强屡屡犯边,其中,日本和法国曾相继占领和控制了南海诸岛部分岛礁达40年之久。本研究从新近陆续查核到的历史地图证实,中国的海疆界线经历了一个从清末全面收缩到民国末年的部分恢复的过程。并指出,我国南海断续国界线主张与同期美国提出的大陆架主张、南美国家提出的200海里领海权主张一样,都是主权国家主张海洋边界的模式,因而理应得到国际法的尊重。     

Hostage taking: Understanding terrorism event dynamics

This paper employs advanced time series methods to identify the dynamic properties of three hostage taking series. The immediate and long run multipliers of three covariates—successful past negotiations, violent ends, and deaths—are identified. Each hostage series responds differently to the covariates. Past concessions have the strongest impact on generating future kidnapping events, supporting the conventional wisdom to abide by a stated no-concession policy. Each hostage series has different changepoints caused by a variety of circumstances. Skyjackings and kidnappings are negatively correlated, while skyjackings and other hostage events are positively correlated. Policy recommendations are offered.     

试论生态美学中的生态中心主义原则

生态美学在美学的发展过程中最重要的突破就在于从“人类中心主义”过渡到“生态中心主义”。学术界对于这种“生态中心主义”的看法分歧甚大,有人批判其为“反人类”。这其实是一种误解,因为“生态中心主义”中的“生态平等”是人与万物在“生命环链”之中的相对平等,而不是绝对平等。因此,它实质上是对于人的生存权利的充分尊重与保护,是一种更具普适性的人道主义,所以,它不是“反人类”的。生态中心主义原则对于以海德格尔为代表的当代存在论美学突破“人类中心主义”走向“生态中心主义”起了决定性的作用。这就是海德格尔的“天地神人四方游戏说”美学观的提出。     

论道德的供求关系

如同经济学的供求关系一样,社会道德水平的状况与道德的有效供给之间有着内在的关联.道德的多元化特征与社会利益的多元化需求是一致的,多元化的利益需求引发多元化的道德需求,缺乏有效的道德供给,特别是缺乏有效的主流道德供给,是道德危机产生的原因.而主流道德的有效供给取决于社会当前及未来的政治、经济走向和社会文化底蕴,以及宣传教育等等手段.     

Expanding our sociolinguistic horizons? Geographical thinking and the articulatory potential of commodity chain analysis

Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely “extra‐situational” in much talk/text‐directed scholarship. I propose we think more geographically by properly engaging spatiality à la Harvey (1990) and especially the radical politics of simultaneity (Massey, 2005)—the literal, “right‐now” connectedness of places and people. To this end, and allied with deepening interest in political economy, I combine the principles of articulation theory with the procedures of commodity chain analysis for picking apart an epitomic, contemporary manifestation of extreme privilege: the business‐class meal. The proposed discourse‐centred commodity chain analysis offers an ecumenical but systematic framework for tracking how commodity fetishism is actually and discursively accomplished (or not) across dispersed voices, stories, and social meanings.     

Importance sampling type estimators based on approximate marginal Markov chain Monte Carlo

We consider importance sampling (IS) type weighted estimators based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) targeting an approximate marginal of the target distribution. In the context of Bayesian latent variable models, the MCMC typically operates on the hyperparameters, and the subsequent weighting may be based on IS or sequential Monte Carlo (SMC), but allows for multilevel techniques as well. The IS approach provides a natural alternative to delayed acceptance (DA) pseudo-marginal/particle MCMC, and has many advantages over DA, including a straightforward parallelization and additional flexibility in MCMC implementation. We detail minimal conditions which ensure strong consistency of the suggested estimators, and provide central limit theorems with expressions for asymptotic variances. We demonstrate how our method can make use of SMC in the state space models context, using Laplace approximations and time-discretized diffusions. Our experimental results are promising and show that the IS-type approach can provide substantial gains relative to an analogous DA scheme, and is often competitive even without parallelization.     

A Bayesian mixture of experts approach to covariate misclassification

This article considers misclassification of categorical covariates in the context of regression analysis; if unaccounted for, such errors usually result in mis-estimation of model parameters. With the presence of additional covariates, we exploit the fact that explicitly modelling non-differential misclassification with respect to the response leads to a mixture regression representation. Under the framework of mixture of experts, we enable the reclassification probabilities to vary with other covariates, a situation commonly caused by misclassification that is differential on certain covariates and/or by dependence between the misclassified and additional covariates. Using Bayesian inference, the mixture approach combines learning from data with external information on the magnitude of errors when it is available. In addition to proving the theoretical identifiability of the mixture of experts approach, we study the amount of efficiency loss resulting from covariate misclassification and the usefulness of external information in mitigating such loss. The method is applied to adjust for misclassification on self-reported cocaine use in the Longitudinal Studies of HIV-Associated Lung Infections and Complications.     

The competing risks analysis for parallel and series systems using Type-II progressive censoring

Abstract

Recently, the study of the lifetime of systems in reliability and survival analysis in the presence of several causes of failure (competing risks) has attracted attention in the literature. In this paper, series and parallel systems with exponential lifetime for each item of the system are considered. Several causes of failure independently affect lifetime distributions and observations of failure times of the systems are considered under progressive Type-II censored scheme. For series systems, the maximum likelihood estimates of parameters are computed and confidence intervals for parameters of the model are obtained using Fisher information matrix. For parallel systems, the generalized EM algorithm which uses the Newton-Raphson algorithm inside the EM algorithm is used to compute the maximum likelihood estimates of parameters. Also, the standard errors of the maximum likelihood estimates are computed by using the supplemented EM algorithm. The simulation study confirms the good performance of the introduced approach.