在反思与批判中彰显史学理性之光——小阿瑟·施莱辛格史学观述评

美国当代著名史学家小阿瑟·施莱辛格对政治的积极参与常使他遭学界指责,认为他有将史学研究政治化、简单化的倾向.本文通过追溯其学术取向的形成过程及对其史学思想的解剖指出,施莱辛格深知参与政治实践可能影响学术研究立场,并在长期的学术生涯中不断自觉地加以反思,形成了强调历史的学术功能,追求客观主义理想的史学观,对历史与政治的关系亦有独到见解.这使他较好地处理了治学与从政的关系.     

历史哲学与科学哲学

沃尔什《历史哲学导论》主要探讨所谓分析的历史哲学。分析的历史哲学重点涵盖四组基本问题,即历史学中的"史实"真理性问题、解释问题、预言问题和客观性问题,质言之,历史学是不是科学的问题。本文将这四组问题与科学哲学中的同类问题进行了比较研究,并进一步以辩证唯物主义和历史唯物主义观点剖析了现代西方历史哲学和科学哲学中共同的基础性问题。由此得到的结论是:历史学不仅是一门科学,而且就是一门自然科学意义上的科学。     

解读劳伦斯的二元论创作思想

二元论是西方哲学的基本理论思想之一,二元论思想也曾多次出现在西方文学作品中。劳伦斯是英国著名作家,由于他一生思想复杂多变,国内外的文学评论界对他的创作思想众说纷纭。但是如果用哲学的二元论思想分析他的作品,就会更深入地理解作者的思想。劳伦斯生长在工业革命的大历史背景下,社会变革和家庭背景让他认为:世界是由对立矛盾组成的。在完成自传体作品《儿子与情人》的过程中,通过反思自身经历,他的二元对立观点逐渐形成。但是,随着作家思想的成熟,劳伦斯的二元对立观逐渐转变成为“二元一体”的理论体系,说明作者最终超越了广义二元论的单纯的对立理论。     

严译名著与中国文化的现代化——以严复译《群学肄言》为例的考察

运用跨语际文本分析的方法,对严译八大名著之一的《群学肄言》进行考察,可以看到严复译《群学肄言》译文中包含大量严氏自己的思想,译者不仅传达了斯宾塞原作中所固有的西方思想,同时通过有意识地选用特定的语汇,将中国儒家的思想精华,尤其是荀子有关"群"的思想和朱熹一派的理学思想精华有机地融入其中,反映出严复立足中华文化,努力吸收当代西方科学思想,希望从源头上将以儒家为代表的中国思想文化现代化的真诚愿望。严复此种保持民族性、体现时代性的努力,堪称中国思想文化发展史上继孔子、朱熹之后的又一个里程碑,为中华文化在近代的复兴奠定了初步基础。     

The BLUE's covariance matrix revisited: A review

In this paper we comment on and review some unexpected but interesting features of the BLUE (best linear unbiased estimator) of the expectation vector in the general linear model and in particular, the BLUE's covariance matrix. Most of these features appear in the literature but are rather scattered or hidden.     

Waiting time distributions for a run with additional constraints

This paper proposes a method for obtaining the exact probability of occurrence of the first success run of specified length with the additional constraint that at every trial until the occurrence of the first success run the number of successes up to the trial exceeds that of failures. For the sake of the additional constraint, the problem cannot be solved by the usual method of conditional probability generating functions. An idea of a kind of truncation is introduced and studied in order to solve the problem. Concrete methods for obtaining the probability in the cases of Bernoulli trials and time-homogeneous {0,1}$\{0,1\}$-valued Markov dependent trials are given. As an application of the results, a modification of the start-up demonstration test is studied. Numerical examples which illustrate the feasibility of the results are also given.     

On the comparison of the pre-test and shrinkage estimators for the univariate normal mean

The estimation of the mean of an univariate normal population with unknown variance is considered when uncertain non-sample prior information is available. Alternative estimators are defined to incorporate both the sample as well as the non-sample information in the estimation process. Some of the important statistical properties of the restricted, preliminary test, and shrinkage estimators are investigated. The performances of the estimators are compared based on the criteria of unbiasedness and mean square error in order to search for a ‘best’ estimator. Both analytical and graphical methods are explored. There is no superior estimator that uniformly dominates the others. However, if the non-sample information regarding the value of the mean is close to its true value, the shrinkage estimator over performs the rest of the estimators. Received: June 19, 1999; revised version: March 23, 2000     

Likelihood analysis of joint marginal and conditional models for longitudinal categorical data

The authors develop a Markov model for the analysis of longitudinal categorical data which facilitates modelling both marginal and conditional structures. A likelihood formulation is employed for inference, so the resulting estimators enjoy the optimal properties such as efficiency and consistency, and remain consistent when data are missing at random. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed method performs well under a variety of situations. Application to data from a smoking prevention study illustrates the utility of the model and interpretation of covariate effects. The Canadian Journal of Statistics © 2009 Statistical Society of Canada     

Trimmed and Winsorized means based on a scaled deviation

Trimmed (and Winsorized) means based on a scaled deviation are introduced and studied. The influence functions of the estimators are derived and their limiting distributions are established via asymptotic representations. As a main focus of the paper, the performance of the estimators with respect to various robustness and efficiency criteria is evaluated and compared with leading competitors including the ordinary Tukey trimmed (and Winsorized) means. Unlike the Tukey trimming which always trims a fixed fraction of sample points at each end of data, the trimming scheme here only trims points at one or both ends that have a scaled deviation beyond some threshold. The resulting trimmed (and Winsorized) means are much more robust than their predecessors. Indeed they can share the best breakdown point robustness of the sample median for any common trimming thresholds. Furthermore, for appropriate trimming thresholds they are highly efficient at light-tailed symmetric models and more efficient than their predecessors at heavy-tailed or contaminated symmetric models. Detailed comparisons with leading competitors on various robustness and efficiency aspects reveal that the scaled deviation trimmed (Winsorized) means behave very well overall and consequently represent very favorable alternatives to the ordinary trimmed (Winsorized) means.     

An alternative form of the Watson efficiency

Watson [1951. Serial correlation in regression analysis. Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Experimental Statistics, North Carolina State College, Raleigh] introduced a relative efficiency, which is often called the Watson efficiency in literatures, to measure the inefficiency of the least squares in linear regression models. The Watson efficiency is defined by determinant, but we shall show by two examples that such a criterion does not always work well in some cases. In this paper, an alternative form based on Euclidean norm of the Watson efficiency is proposed and some examples are given to illustrate superiority of the new relative efficiency.