Full of Sound and Fury,Signifying Something: The Impact of Autonomic Arousal on EGM Gambling

An experiment was conducted to observe the influence of autonomic arousal on subsequent gambling behavior. Thirty-seven male and 32 female regular Electronic Gaming Machine (EGM) players were recruited through newspaper advertisements. Participants were randomly assigned to either: (1) a control condition, or (2) an experimental condition that introduced a loud white-noise event (80 db) at fixed 120 s intervals throughout the 5-min EGM gambling session. Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) measurements showed that the manipulation was successful in elevating autonomic arousal. The results showed differences in behavioral response to the manipulation based on prior experience with gambling problems. Persons with many gambling problems had lower average bet-sizes in the white-noise condition compared to the control, while those with few or no problems had higher average bet-sizes. The results suggest that arousal may provide different signals to gamblers with few versus many problems. Gamblers with many problems may interpret their arousal as a sign that they will soon lose money, while gamblers with few or no problems may associate feelings of arousal exclusively with winning.     

An Experiment on the Social Facilitation of Gambling Behavior

Research and theory regarding the social facilitation effect generates the expectation that the presence of other gamblers (or co-actors) in a gaming venue is likely to intensify individual gambling behavior and magnify losses. Fifty male and 66 female participants (116 total) played a computer-simulated electronic gaming machine with a fixed winning sequence, followed by an indefinite losing sequence. Measures of the intensity of gambling behavior included the final payout (a direct measure of losses), average bet-size, number of trials played, and the speed of play. Some participants received false feedback from the computer designed to suggest that other gamers in adjacent rooms were playing and sometimes winning at the same game. Persons who received both sight and sound information, including winning bells and instant messages regarding the wins of other (fake) players, placed more bets and lost more money compared to the other conditions with less information.     

Estimability and Linear Hypotheses

A proposition is given which provides an easily justified reason as to why attention should be confined to estimable parametric vectors when formulating linear hypotheses. The possibility of justifying one's linear estimation effort on the estimable parametric functions via an identifiability condition is also mentioned.     

Recovery of inter-block information: extensions in a two variance component model

For a two variance component mixed linear model, it is shown that under suitable conditions there exists a nonlinear unbiased estimator that is better than a best linear unbiased estimator defined with respect to a given singular covariance matrix. It is also shown how this result applies to improving on intra-block estimators and on estimators like the unweighted means estimator in a random one-way model.     

Variation in Perspective: The Employment Success of Ethnic Minority Males in the Netherlands, 1988–2002

This article investigates the job chances of ethnic minority males in the Dutch labour market. Using information from the Social Position and Use of Facilities by Immigrants (SPVA) surveys for the years 1988, 1991, 1994, 1998, and 2002, we trace the employment pattern of various ethnic minority groups and Dutch natives, and study some determining factors for the job chances in the Netherlands during this period. The analysis reveals a clear variation in the employment patterns for different ethnic minority groups. Individual characteristics, such as marital status and especially educational level, turn out to be important factors in explaining the job chances for all groups. Moreover, support is found for the effect of the regional demand for labour on the employment chances for most of the analysed ethnic groups, which implies that no support is found for the queuing theory.     

Privatization—A cure for all ills?

Before a troubled State-owned company can be privatized, the management dimension must be examined. The privatization strategy must be closely linked with the overall business strategy to ensure that the opportunities afforded by the operation provide for long-term profit enhancement. The logic behind the state-owned enterprise is described and the objectives of privatization, the pros and cons, are analysed.     

Some sufficient conditions for establishing (M,S)-optimality

Two sufficient conditions are given for an incomplete block design to be (M,S- optimal. For binary designs the conditions are (i) that the elements in each row, excluding the diagonal element, of the association matrix differ by at most one, and (ii) that the off-diagonal elements of the block characteristic matrix differ by at most one. It is also shown how the conditions can be utilized for nonbinary designs and that for blocks of size two the sufficient condition in terms of the association matrix can be attained.     

A note on the satterthwaite confidence interval for a variance

When using a Satterthwaite chi-squared approximation, it is generally thought that the approximation is satisfactory when it is applied to a positive linear combination of mean squares. In this note, we describe how the Williams - Tukey idea for getting a confidence interval for the among groups variance in a random one-way model can be incorporated into Satterthwaite’s procedure for getting a confidence interval for a variance. This adjusted Satterthwaite procedure insures that his chi-squared approximation is always applied to positive linear combinations of mean squares. A small simulation is included which suggests that the adjustment to the Satterthwaite procedure is effective.