Efficacy of Statistical Outlier Analysis for Monitoring Quality of Care

Researchers have proposed that hospitals with excessive statistically unexplained mortality rates are more likely to have quality-of-care problems. The U.S. Health Care Financing Administration currently uses this statistical “outlier” approach to screen for poor quality in hospitals. Little is known, however, about the validity of this technique, since direct measures of quality are difficult to obtain. We use Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the performance of the outlier technique as parameters of the true mortality process are varied. Results indicate that the screening ability of the technique may be very sensitive to how widespread quality-related mortality is among hospitals but insensitive to other factors generally thought to be important.     

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U. S. National Income Series Revised—Congress Votes No on Censuses of Business and Manufactures—Britain Revises Living Cost Index-U. S. and U. K. Surveys Uncover Lacks in Statistical Training-Forthcoming Statistical Conferences     

Identifying Preferences for Conditional Cooperation Using Individual Beliefs

The relationship between contributions and elicited beliefs in a repeated two-person public good experiment is modeled with the help of a parsimounious random-utility function that allows for conditionally cooperative, opportunistic, and altruistic patterns of behavior. Under standard assumptions, a latent-class mixed logit specification with three sub-populations is shown to capture well heterogeneity in individual contribution levels over time, while also accomodating for different degrees of heteroscedasticity. The estimation results are consistent with the conjecture that the majority of players in public goods games are strongly conditional cooperators, with smaller fractions of the population leaning to opportunistic or altruistic behavior.     

Using a mixture model for multiple imputation in the presence of outliers: the 'Healthy for life' project

Summary.  We consider the problem of obtaining population-based inference in the presence of missing data and outliers in the context of estimating the prevalence of obesity and body mass index measures from the 'Healthy for life' study. Identifying multiple outliers in a multivariate setting is problematic because of problems such as masking, in which groups of outliers inflate the covariance matrix in a fashion that prevents their identification when included, and swamping, in which outliers skew covariances in a fashion that makes non-outlying observations appear to be outliers. We develop a latent class model that assumes that each observation belongs to one of K unobserved latent classes, with each latent class having a distinct covariance matrix. We consider the latent class covariance matrix with the largest determinant to form an 'outlier class'. By separating the covariance matrix for the outliers from the covariance matrices for the remainder of the data, we avoid the problems of masking and swamping. As did Ghosh-Dastidar and Schafer, we use a multiple-imputation approach, which allows us simultaneously to conduct inference after removing cases that appear to be outliers and to promulgate uncertainty in the outlier status through the model inference. We extend the work of Ghosh-Dastidar and Schafer by embedding the outlier class in a larger mixture model, consider penalized likelihood and posterior predictive distributions to assess model choice and model fit, and develop the model in a fashion to account for the complex sample design. We also consider the repeated sampling properties of the multiple imputation removal of outliers.     

中国医疗卫生行业发展影响因素的提炼与甄别

关于卫生行业发展影响因素的现有研究多数基于定性分析，而实证研究较少。为从静态和动态两个角度将经济社会发展对卫生行业发展的制约关系进行量化与应用研究，建立多元线性回归模型和ARMA（1，1）模型将社会经济因素对卫生行业发展的影响程度和影响方向进行提炼与甄别，结果表明：人均收入水平、财政卫生支出是影响中国卫生服务业发展的两个主要因素，城乡收入比和人口老龄化对卫生行业发展的影响还不是很显著。     

《汉语新词新语年编2003—2005》词目年代研究——兼论《编年本〈汉语新词语〉系列词典部分词目的著录年代》

《汉语新词新语年编2003-2005》一书面世后,陶炼先生发表了《编年本〈汉语新词语〉系列词典部分词目的著录年代》,全文使用《人民日报》报刊检索作为研究新词词目年代的唯一方法。此种方法作为词目搜索范围过于狭窄。为了比较准确查找新词出现的相关年代,应当扩大搜索范围：除使用《人民日报》外．智能查找新词出现年代的方法还可使用人民网等在线报刊网站．利用谷歌、百度等搜索引擎进行网页查找也是可行的方法。新词词目的年代断定在实践中是非常复杂且易出纰满的。新词词典词目年代的断定不能保证完全准确。     

梁漱溟生命化儒学对其乡村建设思想的影响

人生态度的不同决定了中国文化与西方文化有着不同的前途。新中国的嫩芽必由旧中国的老根——乡村长出。乡建时期较之“五四”时期梁漱溟的理论具有更浓厚的儒学色彩,但并未改其生命哲学特质,并在多方面影响着乡村建设思想:对生命主体性的认识使其注重农民自觉;有机整体思想使其反对阶级斗争;中庸之道导致其思想的第三条道路特色;相对主义导向政治的改良主义。     

The EPA Health Risk Assessment of Methylcyclopentadienyl Manganese Tricarbonyl (MMT)

This paper describes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's assessment of potential health risks associated with the possible widespread use of a manganese (Mn)-based fuel additive, methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (MMT). This assessment was significant in several respects and may be instructive in identifying certain methodological issues of general relevance to risk assessment. A major feature of the inhalation health risk assessment was the derivation of Mn inhalation reference concentration (RfC) estimates using various statistical approaches, including benchmark dose and Bayesian analyses. The exposure assessment component used data from the Particle Total Exposure Assessment Methodology (PTEAM) study and other sources to estimate personal exposure levels of particulate Mn attributable to the permitted use of MMT in leaded gasoline in Riverside, CA, at the time of the PTEAM study; on this basis it was then possible to predict a distribution of possible future exposure levels associated with the use of MMT in all unleaded gasoline. Qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of the risk characterization are summarized, along with inherent uncertainties due to data limitations.     

新媒体思想政治教育研究:现状、问题与出路

新媒体已经成为审视与研究思想政治教育的重要场域,处于思想政治教育理论研究与实践工作中的前沿.自21世纪初,新媒体受到思想政治教育学界的关注以来,人们对其的认识有冲击论、工具论到环境论三种观点,且形成了三种观点并存的局面,在研究中广泛运用了传播学、社会治理等理论资源.但受限于对新媒体、思想政治教育的传统认知,思想政治教育新媒体研究仍然存在着研究思维、研究视野、研究方法以及研究观点的局限.新媒体实现了媒介、信息以及互动交流前所未有的融合,其所引发的不仅是交往方式的变化,而且是意识形态传播机制的变化.进一步拓深思想政治教育新媒体研究,应结合马克思的交往理论、政治传播理论以及我国特有的政治文化传统,实现对新媒体思想政治教育意义的跨学科解读.     

Humanitarian response and stress in Kenya: gendered problems and their implications

ABSTRACT

Stress-related conditions such as burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder are a growing concern in the humanitarian sector. Aid workers themselves report not only that mental health problems are common, but that the support they receive from their employers is insufficient. Problematically, the experience of the international aid worker – particularly those who are white and from the global North – is often foregrounded in explaining what constitutes stress and related mental health problems. This indicates a wider problem of what is required of ‘the perfect humanitarian’ – a personality that is gendered and racialised – and how this influences the different experiences and treatment of national and international staff from aid agencies. This article explores the organisational culture and working conditions of humanitarian settings and their impact on the mental health and well-being of staff. It argues that there is a structural dimension to stress that is less to do with external security threats and more to do with the specific infrastructure, policies, and practices of humanitarian operations, with implications for aid workers which cut across dimensions of race, gender, and nationality.