Potential exposures and risks from beryllium-containing products.

Beryllium is the strongest of the lightweight metals. Used primarily in military applications prior to the end of the Cold War, beryllium is finding new applications in many commercial products, including computers, telecommunication equipment, and consumer and automotive electronics. The use of beryllium in nondefense consumer applications is of concern because beryllium is toxic. Inhalation of beryllium dust or vapor causes a chronic lung disease in some individuals at concentrations as low as 0.01 microg/m3 in air. As beryllium enters wider commerce, it is prudent to ask what risks this might present to the general public and to workers downstream of the beryllium materials industry. We address this question by evaluating the potential for beryllium exposure from the manufacturing, use, recycle, and disposal of beryllium-containing products. Combining a market study with a qualitative exposure analysis, we determine which beryllium applications and life cycle phases have the largest exposure potential. Our analysis suggests that use and maintenance of the most common types of beryllium-containing products do not result in any obvious exposures of concern, and that maintenance activities result in greater exposures than product use. Product disposal has potential to present significant individual risks, but uncertainties concerning current and future routes of product disposal make it difficult to be definitive. Overall, additional exposure and dose-response data are needed to evaluate both the health significance of many exposure scenarios, and the adequacy of existing regulations to protect workers and the public. Although public exposures to beryllium and public awareness and concern regarding beryllium risks are currently low, beryllium risks have psychometric qualities that may lead to rapidly heightened public concern.     

Assessing accuracy of a continuous screening test in the presence of verification bias

Summary.  In studies to assess the accuracy of a screening test, often definitive disease assessment is too invasive or expensive to be ascertained on all the study subjects. Although it may be more ethical or cost effective to ascertain the true disease status with a higher rate in study subjects where the screening test or additional information is suggestive of disease, estimates of accuracy can be biased in a study with such a design. This bias is known as verification bias. Verification bias correction methods that accommodate screening tests with binary or ordinal responses have been developed; however, no verification bias correction methods exist for tests with continuous results. We propose and compare imputation and reweighting bias-corrected estimators of true and false positive rates, receiver operating characteristic curves and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for continuous tests. Distribution theory and simulation studies are used to compare the proposed estimators with respect to bias, relative efficiency and robustness to model misspecification. The bias correction estimators proposed are applied to data from a study of screening tests for neonatal hearing loss.     

Estimating rating transition probabilites with missing data

In this article we provide a rigorous treatment of one of the central statistical issues of credit risk management. GivenK-1 rating categories, the rating of a corporate bond over a certain horizon may either stay the same or change to one of the remainingK-2 categories; in addition, it is usually the case that the rating of some bonds is withdrawn during the time interval considered in the analysis. When estimating transition probabilities, we have thus to consider aK-th category, called withdrawal, which contains (partially) missing data. We show how maximum likelihood estimation can be performed in this setup; whereas in discrete time our solution gives rigorous support to a solution often used in applications, in continuous time the maximum likelihood estimator of the transition matrix computed by means of the EM algorithm represents a significant improvement over existing methods.     

On pooling data summaries in the absence of interactions “response-by-study”

The standard hypothesis testing procedure in meta-analysis (or multi-center clinical trials) in the absence of treatment-by-center interaction relies on approximating the null distribution of the standard test statistic by a standard normal distribution. For relatively small sample sizes, the standard procedure has been shown by various authors to have poor control of the type I error probability, leading to too many liberal decisions. In this article, two test procedures are proposed, which rely on thet—distribution as the reference distribution. A simulation study indicates that the proposed procedures attain significance levels closer to the nominal level compared with the standard procedure.     

关于高等学校教师流动的探讨

高校教师是高层次的教学、文化和科技工作者 ,在市场经济体制下必然成为各用人单位争取引进的对象。高校教师的流动具有频繁性、方式的多样性、失衡性等特点。究其原因有需要因素、环境因素和文化因素。采取协调、控制和顺应高校教师需要 ,创新激励机制 ,发挥人才市场导向功能等对策 ,可以促进高校教师合理流动     

翻译中的若干技巧

听、说、读、写、译能准确反映出一名英语学习者的英语掌握程度 ,而若想译得准确、流利 ,这的确存在一定的难度。着重阐述了翻译(英译汉 )的标准、方法和若干实用的基本技巧 ,这些技巧包括 :转换法 ,增减法 ,正反、反正表达法和分句、合句法等。如掌握了这些技巧 ,定能起到事半功倍的作用     

Population Policy in Early Victorian England

This paper argues that the generally-held belief that there was no population policy in Great Britain during its fertility transition is incorrect. There were, in fact, clear and implicit and explicit policies in place by the early 19th Century which aimed at reducing population growth. These were negative, involving elimination of family allowances (the famous Poor Laws), and also positive, through subsidised emigration and ``transportation' of felons to the colonies. Moreover, a changed ``ideation' on the part of the nation's political, intellectual and spiritual leaders, changed norms about marriage and child-bearing, raising sharply the perceived economic and psychic cost of children. Lacking acceptable means to control pregnancies, many working class women resorted to abortion, infanticide and child abandonment to reduce their family size. The policy's actual impact on overall fertility is uncertain but it did constitute a deliberate attempt by society to affect demographic behaviour and outcomes.     

Race and Population Change: A Longitudinal Look at Cleveland Neighborhoods

This paper investigates the relationship of racial composition to neighborhood population change from 1910 to 1990 in the Cleveland metropolitan area. To better understand the long-term dynamics of urban neighborhood change, we focus our analysis upon the longitudinal relationship of race, socioeconomic status, and life cycle stage to changes in neighborhood population densities. First, we find that the more established neighborhoods of the African-American community have experienced dramatic declines in population since 1950, a pattern that represents a clear change from the earlier part of the twentieth century. Second, population loss is experienced through a variety of mechanisms, including the demolition of dwellings, the increase in housing vacancy, and the decline of household size. Third, much of this population loss should be interpreted within the context of high economic distress, occurring most frequently in older African-American communities. Over time, economic distress appears to be more important than race in and of itself in leading to the loss of neighborhood populations.     

均线形态组合在证券分析中的应用

应用结构模式识别的方法建立多阶均线形态组合序列通过对股市历史数据的变换和分析考查各形态组合序列对应的盈利和亏损概率建立新的证券投资分析方法即均线形态组合预测法其优点是可以部分弥补传统技术分析中的滞后性和不确定性能根据市场的变化及时调整相应的参数指标有效提高预测的成功率并易用计算机作出识别     

社会转型时代的管理创新

人类社会已经步入了 2 1世纪 ,我们正处在社会的转型时代。知识经济的步步紧逼 ,无时无刻不在激励着人们在社会生产经营等各项活动中不断创新。管理的创新则是创新的灵魂。对创新资源的深入发掘 ,引出了我们对社会转型时代管理创新的内涵、原则、方法的讨论