《麦克白》咒语现象解析

咒语现象是《麦克白》整出戏剧极富魅力的表现元素。它既为剧本奠定了一种神秘而阴森的基调,同时确定全局总纲,为剧情发展起到重要的推动作用。咒语与主人公的性格、行为以及内心活动、命运走向息息相关,并最终导致麦克白命运悲剧的发生。集众恶于一身的女巫是咒语现象的主体,艰深晦涩、言辞激烈的诗体是咒语的具体表现形式,咒语的预言性质笼罩全篇,影响着人物的内心恶念,推动剧情发展,成为贯穿全剧始终的主题线索。     

A New Methodology for Before–After Safety Assessment Using Survival Analysis and Longitudinal Data

The widely used empirical Bayes (EB) and full Bayes (FB) methods for before–after safety assessment are sometimes limited because of the extensive data needs from additional reference sites. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel before–after safety evaluation methodology based on survival analysis and longitudinal data as an alternative to the EB/FB method. A Bayesian survival analysis (SARE) model with a random effect term to address the unobserved heterogeneity across sites is developed. The proposed survival analysis method is validated through a simulation study before its application. Subsequently, the SARE model is developed in a case study to evaluate the safety effectiveness of a recent red‐light‐running photo enforcement program in New Jersey. As demonstrated in the simulation and the case study, the survival analysis can provide valid estimates using only data from treated sites, and thus its results will not be affected by the selection of defective or insufficient reference sites. In addition, the proposed approach can take into account the censored data generated due to the transition from the before period to the after period, which has not been previously explored in the literature. Using individual crashes as units of analysis, survival analysis can incorporate longitudinal covariates such as the traffic volume and weather variation, and thus can explicitly account for the potential temporal heterogeneity.     

裴迪考论

裴迪是和王维同时而稍后的田园诗人 ,他的一生中大概有 2 0年是跟随着王维度过的。裴迪在唐代并不是显赫的诗人。但是他与当时除了李白以外的其他大诗人都有或多或少的联系。考证他的事迹和与这些诗人的关系 ,也可以使这些诗人得到更多的还原以被人们了解。     

Bayesian networks for imputation

Summary.  Bayesian networks are particularly useful for dealing with high dimensional statistical problems. They allow a reduction in the complexity of the phenomenon under study by representing joint relationships between a set of variables through conditional relationships between subsets of these variables. Following Thibaudeau and Winkler we use Bayesian networks for imputing missing values. This method is introduced to deal with the problem of the consistency of imputed values: preservation of statistical relationships between variables ( statistical consistency ) and preservation of logical constraints in data ( logical consistency ). We perform some experiments on a subset of anonymous individual records from the 1991 UK population census.     

文学翻译的艺术性

翻译的语言学理论将翻译提到科学的高度加以描述,可以说比传统理论前进了一步。但是如果因此而否认了翻译的艺术性,就无法阐明翻译中的许多问题。翻译的艺术性至少包括三个方面的内容,即形式表现、异质同构和艺术冲动。     

Deposit Insurance,Institutions, and Bank Interest Rates

Many recent institutional reforms of the financial system have relied on the introduction of an explicit scheme of deposit insurance. This instrument aims at two main targets, contributing to systemic stability and protecting depositors. However, it may also affect the interest rate spread in the banking system, which can be viewed as an indicator of either inefficiency or market power in this financial segment. This paper provides an empirical investigation of the effect of deposit insurance and other institutional and economic variables on bank interest rates across countries. We find that deposit insurance increases the lending–deposit spread in banking. The main effect seems to arise not from the deposit side though, but from an increase in the lending rate. We interpret this result as evidence of the presence of moral hazard problems related to this instrument. We also find that higher quality of institutions is associated with lower spreads, thus contributing to eroding sources of market power in the banking sector.     

Will taxpayers ever like taxes?: Responses to the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986

Major policy changes like the 1986 Tax Reform Act (TRA) in the United States provide natural experiments to study attitudinal and behavior responses to law. Surprisingly, public evaluations of the TRA became increasingly negative after passage, while general support for the tax system became more positive in response to the changes. To explain this puzzle, we propose a dynamic model of taxpayer attitudes that is consistent with the observed loose linkage between logically-connected concepts. We briefly review the political context, objectives and impacts of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and present several studies testing the impact of self-interest, prior beliefs, and social discussion on changes in attitudes and behavior.Results suggest that the complexity of taxes and difficulty in knowing objective impacts weakens the role of self-interest in attitudinal changes, thereby strengthening the role of prior beliefs and discussion. Evaluations of tax laws are most responsive to more politically-oriented influences.     

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.