Professions as "callings"

The idea of an occupation as a "calling" refers to some moral and perhaps religious motives and to a vision of the larger ends and purposes that work serves. Professions are characterized by mastery of technical information, concepts and theories that guide choices, institutionalization that exercises social controls, and, at least traditionally, a service orientation. "Calling" without professionalization is inept, and a profession without a calling lacks moral and humane roots, loses human sensitivity, and restricts the vision of the purposes of human good that are served.     

Development of Vocal Protests From 3 to 18 Months

Infants often protest the activities of their caregivers, and this particular social interaction may provide an important window on early communication and its development. This study used naturalistic methods to investigate the development of vocal protests. Fifteen mother‐infant dyads at each of 5 ages, from 3 to 18 months, were observed at home. Maternal behaviors of caregiving and prohibiting were tallied from videotapes, as were infants' protests of these behaviors. Maternal caregiving decreased with age, but maternal prohibitions increased. There were no changes over age in the probability of protesting maternal caregiving behavior; however, 12‐month‐olds were more likely to protest prohibitions than 6‐ or 8‐month‐olds. Older infants were also more likely to use intense protests, such as screams, than younger infants. These age‐related changes were mirrored by the differences in prohibitions and protests observed between 8‐month‐olds who could crawl and those who could not. Findings from this study were related to previous research on infant crying as an important part of the prelinguistic communication system.     

Describing the Dynamics of Attention to TV Commercials: A Hierarchical Bayes Analysis of the Time to Zap an Ad

This paper provides insights into the dynamics of attention to TV commercials via an analysis of the length of time that commercials are viewed before being 'zapped'. The model, which incorporates a flexible baseline hazard rate and captures unobserved heterogeneity across both consumers and commercials using a hierarchical Bayes approach, is estimated on two datasets in which commercial viewing is captured by a passive online device that continually monitors a household's TV viewing. Consistent with previous findings in psychology about the nature of attentional engagement in TV viewing, baseline hazard rates are found to be non-monotonic. In addition, the data show considerable ad-to-ad and household-to-household heterogeneity in zapping behavior. While one of the datasets contains some information on characteristics of the ads, these data do not reveal any firm links between the ad heterogeneity and the ad characteristics. A number of methodological and computational issues arise in the hierarchical Bayes analysis.     

Business Travel from the Traveller’s Perspective: Stress,Stimulation and Normalization

For growing numbers of businesspeople, managers and public officials, work involves travel. This study investigates what business travel means to travellers. What are their experiences of travel and what are the consequences of travel for their professional and personal lives? Qualitative interviews with frequent business travellers and corporate travel managers show that travel may be both stressful and stimulating. It may be associated with physical and psychological strain, increased workloads and difficulties in balancing work and private life, but also with enriching experiences, social and professional status and a cosmopolitan identity. It may also promote travellers’ professional careers. However, in some respects, an ongoing normalization of travel seems to have moderating effects on both stress and stimulation among travellers. This normalization occurs on three different levels: the societal, organizational and individual.     

Conservative prior distributions for variance parameters in hierarchical models

Bayesian hierarchical models typically involve specifying prior distributions for one or more variance components. This is rather removed from the observed data, so specification based on expert knowledge can be difficult. While there are suggestions for “default” priors in the literature, often a conditionally conjugate inverse‐gamma specification is used, despite documented drawbacks of this choice. The authors suggest “conservative” prior distributions for variance components, which deliberately give more weight to smaller values. These are appropriate for investigators who are skeptical about the presence of variability in the second‐stage parameters (random effects) and want to particularly guard against inferring more structure than is really present. The suggested priors readily adapt to various hierarchical modelling settings, such as fitting smooth curves, modelling spatial variation and combining data from multiple sites.     

The effect of mixing-distribution misspecification in conjugate mixture models

Parametric mixture models are commonly used in the analysis of clustered data. Parametric families are specified for the conditional distribution of the response variable given a cluster-specific effect, and for the marginal distribution of the cluster-specific effects. This latter distribution is referred to as the mixing distribution. If the form of the mixing distribution is misspecified, then Bayesian and maximum-likelihood estimators of parameters associated with either distribution may be inconsistent. The magnitude of the asymptotic bias is investigated, using an approximation based on infinitesimal contamination of the mixing distribution. The approximation is useful when there is a closed-form expression for the marginal distribution of the response under the assumed mixing distribution, but not under the true mixing distribution. Typically this occurs when the assumed mixing distribution is conjugate, meaning that the conditional distribution of the cluster-specific parameter given the response variable belongs to the same parametric family as the mixing distribution.     

Some aspects of inflation and published accounts

Company accounts are at present drafted in an uneasy compromise between different objectives. It is not yet generally appreciated that no single figure or set of figures can sum up the whole financial state of an enterprise. The basic tools of financial management are short and long-run cash projections and the reports of actual flows which monitor these. The problem in drafting annual accounts so that they will help shareholders and others to make decisions is that financial reality requires a look into the future and this in turn calls for subjective judgement. But the more realistic are the accounts in this sense, the less susceptible are they to objective audit. Inflation adds a further level of distortion, but the effects of this can be brought out in a relatively simple way by making corrections based on movements in a general index of prices. Although there are considerable practical difficulties it seems likely that a more fundamental improvement would be the introduction of a ‘current value’ or modified ‘replacement cost’ approach to ordinary accounting in addition to (but not in place of) the general index inflation correction.