Looking for a ‘cure’: negotiating ‘walking’ in a Turkish rehabilitation hospital

This article explores discourses surrounding ‘walking’ in a Turkish rehabilitation hospital and their impact on in-hospital relationships, patients’ attitudes towards disability, and constructions of ‘bodily normality’. Interviews were conducted with 29 patients, 11 medical personnel, and two non-medical personnel. Three categories of discourses emerged. First, hope for walking is kept alive in doctor–patient relationships, either through a state of silence on the matter or an emphasis on time, determination, and faith in God. Second, patients are virtually assured of the retrieval of walking, mostly through interactions with fellow patients and their accompanying family members (refakatçis). Third, a possible non-walking future is highlighted, either within a framework closer to a disability rights perspective or through an emphasis on gratitude. Diverse discourses on walking emerge due to the informality of in-hospital practices. Still, the ‘normal body’ is predominantly reproduced as the ‘walking body’. Thus, patients refuse discharge before regaining the ability to walk.     

Entropic representation and estimation of diversity indices

This paper serves a twofold purpose. First, a unified perspective on diversity indices is introduced based on an entropic basis. It is shown that the class of all linear combinations of the entropic basis, referred to as the class of linear diversity indices, covers a wide range of diversity indices used in the literature. Second, a class of estimators for linear diversity indices is proposed and it is shown that these estimators have rapidly decaying biases and asymptotic normality.     

Non-parametric Estimation of Tail Dependence

Abstract.  Dependencies between extreme events (extremal dependencies) are attracting an increasing attention in modern risk management. In practice, the concept of tail dependence represents the current standard to describe the amount of extremal dependence. In theory, multi-variate extreme-value theory turns out to be the natural choice to model the latter dependencies. The present paper embeds tail dependence into the concept of tail copulae which describes the dependence structure in the tail of multivariate distributions but works more generally. Various non-parametric estimators for tail copulae and tail dependence are discussed, and weak convergence, asymptotic normality, and strong consistency of these estimators are shown by means of a functional delta method. Further, weak convergence of a general upper-order rank-statistics for extreme events is investigated and the relationship to tail dependence is provided. A simulation study compares the introduced estimators and two financial data sets were analysed by our methods.     

Asymptotic Normality of Kernel-Type Deconvolution Estimators

Abstract.  We derive asymptotic normality of kernel-type deconvolution estimators of the density, the distribution function at a fixed point, and of the probability of an interval. We consider so-called super smooth deconvolution problems where the characteristic function of the known distribution decreases exponentially, but faster than that of the Cauchy distribution. It turns out that the limit behaviour of the pointwise estimators of the density and distribution function is relatively straightforward, while the asymptotic behaviour of the estimator of the probability of an interval depends in a complicated way on the sequence of bandwidths.     

试论当前影响和制约律师业发展的主要因素及对策

中国加入世界贸易组织已经五年了,作为担负着司法行政两大职能即法律服务与法律保障为主体力量的律师队伍,正面临着极大的机遇和挑战。虽然经过近三十年的改革开放,中国的律师事业得到了很大的发展。但是,我们也应清醒地意识到,中国的律师队伍应积极应对机遇和挑战,法律服务应与国际接轨。通过对当前影响和制约律师事业发展的因素进行探讨,在此基础上提出应采取的对策。     

A Note on Robustness of the β-Trimmed Mean

Qualitative robustness of the β-trimmed mean has already been observed in terms of relative efficiency and weak continuity of that estimator in neighbourhoods of the exponential distribution. Two more robustness considerations are given here in favour of the β-trimmed mean: the statistical functional representing this estimator is Fréchet differentiable; and it is a special case of the trimmed likelihood estimator. Further, simulations suggest that a fixed proportion of trimming is preferable to adaptive estimation in this case.     

The role of the drift in I(2) systems

Summary This paper discussed the role of the drift in vector autoregressive processes allowing for integrated components up to order 2. It is shown how the drift can generate linear and quadratic deterministic trends. A two-stage statistical analysis of the system in the presence of quadratic trends is proposed. The analysis of the system allows to define a consistent sequence of tests on the numbers of common components integrated of a given order, called the integration indices of the system. The relevant asymptotic distributions are non-standard, belong to the Limiting Gaussian Functional family and are tabulated by simulation. The proposed procedure can also be consistently combined with other procedures proposed by the author for the cases of a linear trend and of no deterministic trends in the system. Invited paper at the Conference held in Bologna, Italy, 27–28 May 1993, on “Statistical Tests: Methodology and Econometric Applications”. Partial financial support is acknowledged from Italian MURST grants 40% and 60%.     

Hypothesis testing for quantitative trait locus effects in both location and scale in genetic backcross studies

Testing the existence of a quantitative trait locus (QTL) effect is an important task in QTL mapping studies. Most studies concentrate on the case where the phenotype distributions of different QTL groups follow normal distributions with the same unknown variance. In this paper we make a more general assumption that the phenotype distributions come from a location-scale distribution family. We derive the limiting distribution of the likelihood ratio test (LRT) for the existence of the QTL effect in both location and scale in genetic backcross studies. We further identify an explicit representation for this limiting distribution. As a complement, we study the limiting distribution of the LRT and its explicit representation for the existence of the QTL effect in the location only. The asymptotic properties of the LRTs under a local alternative are also investigated. Simulation studies are used to evaluate the asymptotic results, and a real-data example is included for illustration.     

Local asymptotic properties for Cox-Ingersoll-Ross process with discrete observations

In this paper, we consider a one-dimensional Cox-Ingersoll-Ross (CIR) process whose drift coefficient depends on unknown parameters. Considering the process discretely observed at high frequency, we prove the local asymptotic normality property in the subcritical case, the local asymptotic quadraticity in the critical case, and the local asymptotic mixed normality property in the supercritical case. To obtain these results, we use the Malliavin calculus techniques developed recently for CIR process together with the estimation for positive and negative polynomial moments of the CIR process. In this study, we require the same conditions of high frequency and infinite horizon as in the case of ergodic diffusions with globally Lipschitz coefficients studied earlier in the literature. However, in the non-ergodic cases, additional assumptions on the decreasing rate are required due to the fact that the square root diffusion coefficient of the CIR process is not regular enough.     

Asymptotic normality of generalized maximum spacing estimators for multivariate observations

In this paper, the maximum spacing method is considered for multivariate observations. Nearest neighbor balls are used as a multidimensional analogue to univariate spacings. A class of information-type measures is used to generalize the concept of maximum spacing estimators of model parameters. Asymptotic normality of these generalized maximum spacing estimators is proved when the assigned model class is correct, that is, the true density is a member of the model class.