《无名的裘德》中的主题悖论

《无名的裘德》是一部杰出的现实主义作品,是哈代“性格与环境”小说中极为成功的一部。小说通过“主题对立”这一艺术手法深刻地揭示了人性,暴露了人类社会中许多错综复杂的关系,揭示了人类生存与存在中的一系列悖论,显示出极大的反讽效果。     

农村人口流迁动因研究评说

关于乡—城人口流迁的动因,历来为国内外学者所重视,研究成果颇多。那么迄今为止,都有哪些关于人口流迁动因的理论和观点?这些理论和观点能否完全解释20世纪80年代中后期中国的农村人口流迁现象?这些众多的理论和观点可以概括为三种:第一,宏观社会结构影响说;第二,生存与发展困境说;第三,劳动力剩余说。这三派观点各自都在自己所限定的范围内从一般意义上较为可信地解释了农村人口流迁的原因,但是由于方法论上的整体主义与个体主义的矛盾等原因,这些观点又有其局限性,因此,我们在借鉴这些观点解释20世纪80年代中后期以来中国农民的流迁动因的时候,应持审慎的态度。     

对《野性的呼唤》中巴克形象的再解读

《野性的呼唤》是美国著名作家杰克.伦敦的作品。小说描写一只名叫巴克的狗被骗卖到北方之后逐渐由狗变成狼的过程。该文通过对巴克形象的塑造,以狗喻人,来反映作者对现实“文明社会”的看法,阐述自己的人生哲学。     

资源型城市人口生存与发展问题分析及对策选择

在资源型城市所面临的诸多问题中,人口生存与发展问题是最基本的问题。资源型城市的失业率高,社会保障程度低,教育落后,生态环境污染严重,这些问题直接影响着社会的稳定。这些问题的出现,既与国家过去资源开发的政策有关,也与资源型城市中人口自身的原因有关。因此,要解决这些问题,资源型城市自身要努力转型,同时也离不开国家的救援机制。     

“两型社会”的文化生态学思考

社会是人生存的家园,文化生态是人在融合了生态智慧的自我构建和社会构建过程中所展现出来的生存状态.文化生态的发展变化必然导致社会的转型,而"两型社会"建设是社会转型的体现,对"两型社会"进行文化生态学思考成为社会转型过程中必然要关注的课题."两型社会"建设实际上就是文化生态建设,文化生态与"两型社会"是一种互惠共生的关系:良好的文化生态为"两型社会"的构建提供着丰富的资源给养,"两型社会"建设促进了文化生态的繁荣与发展,文化生态的繁荣与发展使"两型社会"得以实现,最终实现人的全面发展.     

生存·游戏·确证——论儿童文化的功能属性

儿童文化既构成儿童生存的现实又构成儿童对现实生存的理解、叙述和表达,儿童文化的这一深度图景,在功能属性上显现出儿童文化与儿童生存之间复杂的关联.只有当儿童游戏时,他才是儿童.潜藏在儿童文化中的游戏功能,对儿童的生存理解具有卓越性的意义.儿童文化是一个完整、多样、丰富的儿童世界,在生存理解所实现的秩序化方面,它显现为儿童对自我力量的确证和所属共同体的认同.     

Modelling period fertility: Schooling and intervals following a birth in Eastern Africa

We describe a regression-based approach to the modelling of age-, order-, and duration-specific period fertility, using retrospective survey data. The approach produces results that are free of selection biases and can be used to study differential fertility. It is applied to Demographic and Health Survey data for Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe to investigate differential trends in fertility by education. Parity progression fell and the intervals following each birth lengthened between the 1970s and 2000s in all four countries. Fertility fell most among women with secondary education. In contrast to other world regions, postponement of successive births for extended periods accounted for much of the initial drop in fertility in these African countries. However, family size limitation by women with secondary education in Ethiopia and Kenya and longer birth spacing in Zimbabwe also played significant roles. Thus, birth control is being adopted in Eastern Africa in response to diverse changes in fertility preferences.     

A computationally simple bivariate survival estimator for efficacy and safety

Both treatment efficacy and safety are typically the primary endpoints in Phase II, and even in some Phase III, clinical trials. Efficacy is frequently measured by time to response, death, or some other milestone event and thus is a continuous, possibly censored, outcome. Safety, however, is frequently measured on a discrete scale; in Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group clinical trial E2290, it was measured as the number of weekly rounds of chemotherapy that were tolerable to colorectal cancer patients. For the joint analysis of efficacy and safety, we propose a non-parametric, computationally simple estimator for the bivariate survival function when one time-to-event is continuous, one is discrete, and both are subject to right-censoring. The bivariate censoring times may depend on each other, but they are assumed to be independent of both event times. We derive a closed-form covariance estimator for the survivor function which allows for inference to be based on any of several possible statistics of interest. In addition, we derive its covariance with respect to calendar time of analysis, allowing for its use in sequential studies.     

Number of children and later-life mortality among Finns born 1938–50

We investigated the association between number of offspring and later-life mortality of Finnish men and women born 1938–50, and whether the association was explained by living conditions in own childhood and adulthood, chronic conditions, fertility timing, and unobserved characteristics common to siblings. We used a longitudinal 1950 census sample to estimate mortality at ages 50–72. Relative to parents of two children, all-cause mortality is highest among childless men and women, and elevated among those with one child, independently of observed confounders. Fixed-effect models, which control for unobserved characteristics shared by siblings, clearly support these findings among men. Cardiovascular mortality is higher among men with no, one, or at least four children than among those with two. Living conditions in adulthood contribute to the association between the number of children and mortality to a greater extent than childhood background, and chronic conditions contribute to the excess mortality of the childless.     

Temporal prediction of future state occupation in a multistate model from high-dimensional baseline covariates via pseudo-value regression

In many complex diseases such as cancer, a patient undergoes various disease stages before reaching a terminal state (say disease free or death). This fits a multistate model framework where a prognosis may be equivalent to predicting the state occupation at a future time t. With the advent of high-throughput genomic and proteomic assays, a clinician may intent to use such high-dimensional covariates in making better prediction of state occupation. In this article, we offer a practical solution to this problem by combining a useful technique, called pseudo-value (PV) regression, with a latent factor or a penalized regression method such as the partial least squares (PLS) or the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), or their variants. We explore the predictive performances of these combinations in various high-dimensional settings via extensive simulation studies. Overall, this strategy works fairly well provided the models are tuned properly. Overall, the PLS turns out to be slightly better than LASSO in most settings investigated by us, for the purpose of temporal prediction of future state occupation. We illustrate the utility of these PV-based high-dimensional regression methods using a lung cancer data set where we use the patients’ baseline gene expression values.