Linguists and other animals

Book reviewed in this article:
Joan Dunayer, Animal Equality: Language and Liberation     

Olive Oil Consumption in Greece: A Microeconometric Analysis

In this paper, the factors affecting at-home demand for three types of oils and fats in Greece, with emphasis on olive oil, are investigated using the linear approximation of the Almost Ideal Demand System and family budget survey data. To overcome the econometric problem created with the existence of zero expenditure, a generalization of the two-stage Heckman procedure is employed. In order to investigate the role of self-consumption, two different samples were used. The first includes all households; the second excludes those that acquire olive oil only from own production. According to the results, there are important differences in the first stage of the decision process between the two samples. Unlike the first stage, the second stage of the decision process found no important differences between the results for the two samples.     

Ethnic patterns in the phonetics of Montreal English

Most North American cities no longer display strong ethnic differentiation of speech within the European‐origin population. This is not true in the English‐speaking community of Montreal, Canada, where English is a minority language. Differences in the phonetic realization of vowels by Montrealers of Irish, Italian, and Jewish ethnic origin are investigated by means of acoustic analysis. A statistical analysis of ethnic differences in formant frequencies shows that ethnicity has a significant effect on several variables, particularly the phonetic position of /u:/ and /ou/ and the allophonic conditioning of /æ/ and /au/ before nasal consonants. The unusual tenacity of ethnophonetic variation in Montreal English is explained in light of the minority status of English, and the social and residential segregation of ethnic groups in distinct neighborhoods, which limits their exposure to speakers of Standard Canadian English who might otherwise serve as models for assimilation.     

Estimation of Hazard, Density and Survivor Functions for Randomly Censored Data

Maximum likelihood estimation and goodness-of-fit techniques are used within a competing risks framework to obtain maximum likelihood estimates of hazard, density, and survivor functions for randomly right-censored variables. Goodness-of- fit techniques are used to fit distributions to the crude lifetimes, which are used to obtain an estimate of the hazard function, which, in turn, is used to construct the survivor and density functions of the net lifetime of the variable of interest. If only one of the crude lifetimes can be adequately characterized by a parametric model, then semi-parametric estimates may be obtained using a maximum likelihood estimate of one crude lifetime and the empirical distribution function of the other. Simulation studies show that the survivor function estimates from crude lifetimes compare favourably with those given by the product-limit estimator when crude lifetimes are chosen correctly. Other advantages are discussed.     

Holistic trajectories: a study of combined employment, housing and family careers by using multiple-sequence analysis

Summary.  Social science applications of sequence analysis have thus far involved the development of a typology on the basis of an analysis of one or two variables which have had a relatively low number of different states. There is a yet unexplored potential for sequence analysis to be applied to a greater number of variables and thereby a much larger state space. The development of a typology of employment experiences, for example, without reference to data on changes in housing, marital and family status is arguably inadequate. The paper demonstrates the use of sequence analysis in the examination of multivariable combinations of status as they change over time and shows that this method can provide insights that are difficult to achieve through other analytic methods. The data that are examined here provide support to intuitive understandings of clusters of common experiences which are both life course specific and related to socio-economic factors. Housing tenure is found to be of key importance in understanding the holistic trajectories that are examined. This suggests that life course trajectories are sharply differentiated by experience of social housing.     

Multivariate outlier detection in incomplete survey data: the epidemic algorithm and transformed rank correlations

Summary.  As a part of the EUREDIT project new methods to detect multivariate outliers in incomplete survey data have been developed. These methods are the first to work with sampling weights and to be able to cope with missing values. Two of these methods are presented here. The epidemic algorithm simulates the propagation of a disease through a population and uses extreme infection times to find outlying observations. Transformed rank correlations are robust estimates of the centre and the scatter of the data. They use a geometric transformation that is based on the rank correlation matrix. The estimates are used to define a Mahalanobis distance that reveals outliers. The two methods are applied to a small data set and to one of the evaluation data sets of the EUREDIT project.     

Estimating household structure in ancient China by using historical data: a latent class analysis of partially missing patterns

Summary.  Social data often contain missing information. The problem is inevitably severe when analysing historical data. Conventionally, researchers analyse complete records only. Listwise deletion not only reduces the effective sample size but also may result in biased estimation, depending on the missingness mechanism. We analyse household types by using population registers from ancient China (618–907 AD) by comparing a simple classification, a latent class model of the complete data and a latent class model of the complete and partially missing data assuming four types of ignorable and non-ignorable missingness mechanisms. The findings show that either a frequency classification or a latent class analysis using the complete records only yielded biased estimates and incorrect conclusions in the presence of partially missing data of a non-ignorable mechanism. Although simply assuming ignorable or non-ignorable missing data produced consistently similarly higher estimates of the proportion of complex households, a specification of the relationship between the latent variable and the degree of missingness by a row effect uniform association model helped to capture the missingness mechanism better and improved the model fit.     

Estimator Choice and Fisher's Paradox: A Monte Carlo Study

This paper argues that Fisher's paradox can be explained away in terms of estimator choice. We analyse by means of Monte Carlo experiments the small sample properties of a large set of estimators (including virtually all available single-equation estimators), and compute the critical values based on the empirical distributions of the t-statistics, for a variety of Data Generation Processes (DGPs), allowing for structural breaks, ARCH effects etc. We show that precisely the estimators most commonly used in the literature, namely OLS, Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and non-prewhitened FMLS, have the worst performance in small samples, and produce rejections of the Fisher hypothesis. If one employs the estimators with the most desirable properties (i.e., the smallest downward bias and the minimum shift in the distribution of the associated t-statistics), or if one uses the empirical critical values, the evidence based on US data is strongly supportive of the Fisher relation, consistently with many theoretical models.     

Doing Gender unto the Other: Fiction as a Mode of Studying Gender Discrimination in Organizations

Although ‘doing gender’ has been recently defined as an accomplishment, an element of social practice, this understanding of the concept needs to be extended to coercive action such as subtle workplace discrimination. Even though great effort has been invested in revealing the dynamic of such social practices, the researcher's task is not easy for a variety of reasons. This type of study is difficult to conduct by following traditional research design and many alternative approaches have been tried. This article presents the possibility of using fiction as one possible and relatively unexploited venue of research.     

体验、解析、会通——张岱年哲学方法论的综合创新

体验、解析、会通的有机统一,是张岱年《天人五论》所建构的哲学方法论。这种方法论排斥直觉法,因而不同于现代新儒家和清华学派的哲学家;同时,它把辩证法看成一般的学术方法而非独立的哲学方法,这又使其不同于当时的新唯物论者。这种方法论是在综合中西哲学方法以及近现代各派哲学方法基础上的一个综合创造。