Ethical uneasiness and the need for open-ended reflexivity: the case of research into older people with a wish to die

This article focuses on research ethics in highly intimate research with possible impact on life and death. In order to stimulate an open-ended dialogue about research ethics, we reflect on four ethical challenges that came up during our research into older people with a wish to die. Drawing on our experiences, we discuss (1) the possibly confirming influence of our research on the death wish (moral experience of whether or not to disregard responsibility); (2) the suggested duty to intervene (moral experience of whether or not to compromise the person’s autonomy); (3) the researcher’s authority and power over the data (moral experience of threatening a person’s self-narrative) and (4) the dilemma of intimacy (moral experience of encountering the tragic). For guidance in addressing these challenges, we draw upon work on research ethics from phenomenological and care ethics scholars, as well as from those writing about relational ethics in health research. We suggest that being open about ethical uneasiness is important, because in most cases of a grey area, there are only open-ended answers needing an enquiring mind, rather than clear and fixed guidelines. Acknowledgement of ethical uneasiness and open-ended reflexivity are indispensable to constitute a morally good research practice.     

Optimal split‐plot orthogonal arrays

It is well known that many industrial experiments have split‐plot structures. Compared to completely randomised experiments, split‐plot designs are more economical and thus have received much attention among researchers. Much work has been done for two‐level split‐plot designs. In this article, we consider split‐plot designs with factors of three, more than three, or mixed levels and with both qualitative and quantitative factors. We show that if two designs with both qualitative and quantitative factors are geometrically isomorphic, then their generalised wordlength patterns are identical. Three design scenarios are considered for optimal designs. The corresponding wordlength patterns are defined and the minimum aberration mixed‐level split‐plot designs having 18 and 36 runs are tabulated.     

宗教组织在民族地区社会经济发展过程中的功能——以西道堂为例

宗教组织在民族地区社会经济发展中的功能主要体现为：通过采取一系列措施来规范教徒的社会、经济生活，使自身逐步形成一个在经济、社会等诸多领域均有规范的社区，从而在本组织内部实现一种制序化。     

行政指导与韩国发展——行政指导制度的国别实证研究

行政指导是现代行政法治的重要组成部分，行政指导制度在韩国社会与经济发展过程中起着十分重要的作用。通过考察韩国行政指导制度的社会背景、制度特点、实践运行等不同侧面，可正确分析行政指导在韩国取得良好社会效果的内在原因。行政指导是一种弹性的、能够广泛适应社会现代化和民主化发展的有效行政方式。     

Geometric Anisotropic Spatial Point Pattern Analysis and Cox Processes

We consider spatial point processes with a pair correlation function, which depends only on the lag vector between a pair of points. Our interest is in statistical models with a special kind of ‘structured’ anisotropy: the pair correlation function is geometric anisotropic if it is elliptical but not spherical. In particular, we study Cox process models with an elliptical pair correlation function, including shot noise Cox processes and log Gaussian Cox processes, and we develop estimation procedures using summary statistics and Bayesian methods. Our methodology is illustrated on real and synthetic datasets of spatial point patterns.     

中等职业教育对厦门经济发展影响的实证研究

分析厦门经济特区成立以来中等职业教育与经济发展的关系，研究证明：中职的发展与第三产业的相关性最高；中职招生波动滞后于经济波动，而人才培养的周期性使得中职的毕业生在数量和质量上与经济的差距难以避免。中职应重点预测第三产业的发展趋势，超前培养技术人才，主动参与产业结构的优化升级，国家也应该注重灵活自主的社会职业培训机构。随着人们日益追求高层次的教育和初中阶段适龄青年的减少，中职即将进入逐步下降阶段，应该注重可持续发展，为将来部分条件好的中职院校升格高职院校预留条件。     

教研共同体——大学英语新教师职后教育的新形式研究

共同体的概念在政治、经济、教育等各领域都得到了应用。研究了共同体理论在大学英语教师队伍发展领域的一种新形式——教学研究共同体,指出教研共同体区别于其他的教师在职培训形式,及其在大学英语新教师职后教育阶段所能具备的特殊作用和意义。     

An International Pooled Analysis for Obtaining a Benchmark Dose for Environmental Lead Exposure in Children

Lead is a recognized neurotoxicant, but estimating effects at the lowest measurable levels is difficult. An international pooled analysis of data from seven cohort studies reported an inverse and supra‐linear relationship between blood lead concentrations and IQ scores in children. The lack of a clear threshold presents a challenge to the identification of an acceptable level of exposure. The benchmark dose (BMD) is defined as the dose that leads to a specific known loss. As an alternative to elusive thresholds, the BMD is being used increasingly by regulatory authorities. Using the pooled data, this article presents BMD results and applies different statistical techniques in the analysis of multistudy data. The calculations showed only a limited variation between studies in the steepness of the dose‐response functions. BMD results were quite robust to modeling assumptions with the best fitting models yielding lower confidence limits (BMDLs) of about 0.1–1.0 μ g/dL for the dose leading to a loss of one IQ point. We conclude that current allowable blood lead concentrations need to be lowered and further prevention efforts are needed to protect children from lead toxicity.     

Updating discriminant functions estimated from inverse gaussian populations

The problem of updating discriminant functions estimated from inverse Gaussian populations is investigated in situations when the additional observations are mixed (unclassified) or classified. In each case two types of discriminant functions, linear and quadratic, are considered. Using simulation experiments the performance of the updating procedures is evaluated by means of relative efficiencies.     

Influence measure for the L1 regression

Because outliers and leverage observations unduly affect the least squares regression, the identification of influential observations is considered an important and integrai part of the analysis. However, very few techniques have been developed for the residual analysis and diagnostics for the minimum sum of absolute errors, L₁ regression. Although the L₁ regression is more resistant to the outliers than the least squares regression, it appears that outliers (leverage) in the predictor variables may affect it. In this paper, our objective is to develop an influence measure for the L₁ regression based on the likelihood displacement function. We illustrate the proposed influence measure with examples.