Black (w)Holes: A Researcher's Place in Her Research

This paper is presented in three major parts. The Prelude serves as an introduction to the issue of researcher bias. To illustrate how my own personal experience with homelessness biases my place in the research of homeless youth, three voices are presented in the Interlude. My voice, the voices of homeless youth, and voices of authority are displayed in three columns. The closing part of this paper returns to the motif: issues of researcher bias. In the Postlude I discuss how I see my biases influencing my research with homeless youth.     

Autonomy,Fairness and Active Relationships: Children's Experiences of Well‐being in Childcare

Researchers and policy‐makers are increasingly concerned with children's well‐being in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) and Outside School Hours Care (OSHC) settings. Recent research identifies the value of using qualitative methods to understand children's experiences of well‐being in ECEC/OSHC, but there remain few such studies. This article presents findings from a child‐centric qualitative study with Australian children of nurses and police, which sought to understand their experiences of well‐being in ECEC/OSHC. Children's experiences of well‐being were shaped by parental relationships, how informed they were about the rationale for their care arrangements and the degree of age‐appropriate autonomy they experienced.     

Planning Interventions: Urban Bias,Social Reform and the City

The planning profession struggled for urban amelioration, but avoided confronting the conflict between the redistributive public interest and the goals of industrial capital, resulting in a devaluing of social planning in the US. This article classifies social biases in planning and relates them to sanctuary cities. In the current crisis, launched by the federal government’s hostile rhetoric to immigrants, the planning apparatus is forced to confront what it has sought to avoid – planning for the just, inclusive city that has to reckon with the presence of some of the poorest urban populations.     

Hijab Micropractices: The Strategic and Situational Use of Clothing by Qatari Women

The hijab, the headscarf and cloak worn by some Muslim women, is often viewed through a lens of constraint, but in this article I emphasize its flexible use by women in Qatar, a wealthy, conservative Arabian Gulf nation. As part of a neoliberal agenda, the Qatari government frequently depicts female citizens using an “empowered woman” narrative that touts increased college enrollment, workforce participation, and sports involvement as evidence of a progressive gender milieu. Yet Qatar continues to be steeped in patriarchy and institutional gender discrimination. This domination finds its most visible expression in the scrutiny and regulation of women's clothing. In this article, I describe how Qatari women strategically modify, adjust, reimagine, and remove their hijabs to suit changing circumstances. These hijab micropractices—women's strategic and situational use of traditional Muslim clothing—are at times so infinitesimal they are easy to overlook. Yet they are significant because they enable Qatari women to exercise agency within the confines of clothing that is believed to signify Islamic patriarchy and female oppression. I argue that hijab micropractices are a means by which Qatari women resist these conditions, while maintaining a religious identity and commitment to family.     

Estimation of a parametric function associated with the lognormal distribution

Estimation of the mean of the lognormal distribution has received much attention in the literature beginning with Finney (1941 Finney, D.J. (1941). On the distribution of a variate whose logarithm is normally distributed. Supp. J. Royal Stat. Soc. 7(2):155–161.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). The problem is of significant practical importance because of the ubiquitous use of log-transformation. In this article, we consider the estimation of a parametric function associated with the lognormal distribution of which the mean, median, and moments are special cases. We generalize various estimators from the literature for the mean to this parametric function and propose a new simple estimator. We present the estimators in a unified framework and use this framework to derive asymptotic expressions for their biases and mean square errors (MSEs). Next, we make asymptotic and small-sample comparisons via simulations between them in terms of their MSEs. Our proposed estimator outperforms many of the previously proposed estimators. A numerical example is given to illustrate the various estimators.     

Joint influence of measurement error and non response on estimation of population mean

In this paper, we propose a method to jointly incorporate measurement error and non response in the estimators of population mean using auxiliary information in simple random sampling. We have not only studied some available estimators but also suggested three new estimators in the presence of two types of non sampling errors occurring jointly: the measurement error and the non response. The expressions for the bias and mean square errors of proposed estimator have been derived. A comparative study is made among the proposed estimators, the Hansen and Hurwitz (1946 Hansen, M.H., Hurwitz, W.N. (1946). The problem of non-response in sample surveys. J. Am. Stat. Assoc. 41:517–529.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) estimator, the Cochran's (1977 Cochran, W.G. (1977). Sampling Techniques, 3rd Edn. New York: John Wiley &; Sons, Inc. [Google Scholar]) estimator, and the Singh and Kumar (2008 Singh, H.P., Karpe, N. (2008). Estimation of population variance using auxiliary information in the presence of measurement errors. Stat. Trans. New Ser. 9(3):443–470. [Google Scholar]) estimator.     

"理性"、"经验"和"神秘体验"——兼论认知路线的新划分

对人类知识可靠性来源问题的研究,传统认识论总是有否定“形而上学”、否定宗教,甚至否定哲学的倾向,致使人类逐渐丧失了精神家园和道德根基,社会物欲横流。用现象学的方法分析“理性”和“经验”,认为“神秘体验(非理性经验)也是人类获取可靠知识的一个重要途径”,由此,便消解了理性和非理性、科学和宗教的尖锐对立,从而展现了人类文化为什么会是一个理性文化和神秘主义文化共生并进格局的逻辑根源。     

韩国提高人口素质的主要举措及经验

20世纪60～70年代,人口素质的提高在韩国经济腾飞过程中起到了不可忽视的作用。韩国政府通过实施家庭生育计划,完善教育制度和社会保障制度以及开展"新村运动"等在短期内大幅度提高了国民的人口素质。总结韩国政府的主要举措可以得出如下经验:注重传统儒家文化在幼儿教育中的作用;建立多层次教育体系满足各类市场人才需求;寻求多样化的教育经费投入来源;重视提高农民的受教育水平;建立完善的社会保障制度。     

关于马克思主义大众化过渡性阶段的探究——由中国共产党马克思主义大众化的历史与经验引起的思考

中国共产党在推进马克思主义大众化的过程中,积累了许多宝贵的历史经验。然而在物质快速发展、科技日益更新、意识形态逐渐多元化的当代社会,马克思主义大众化在大力普及并继续深化的同时,也出现了不少问题,如内热外冷、官热民冷、政热经冷和媒热民冷等。解决这些问题的可行性途径之一,就是将马克思主义大众化的整体目标进行阶段性划分,即把目标细化,方能取得立竿见影的效果。