COMPARISONS AND SELECTION OF TWO-PARAMETER EXPONENTIAL POPULATIONS

For two-parameter exponential populations with the same scale parameter (known or unknown) comparisons are made between the location parameters. This is done by constructing confidence intervals, which can then be used for selection procedures. Comparisons are made with a control, and with the (unknown) “best” or “worst” population. Emphasis is laid on finding approximations to the confidence so that calculations are simple and tables are not necessary. (Since we consider unequal sample sizes, tables for exact values would need to be extensive.)     

Parent/carer views on personal health budgets for disabled children who use rehabilitation therapy services

Personalised budgets are promoted as the person-centred alternative to generically provided services. Nine parents/carers of disabled children (aged 18 years or younger) who accessed at least two rehabilitation therapy services (physiotherapy, occupational therapy, and speech and language therapy) were recruited from one region in England. Focus group/interviews explored their views on the proposed introduction of personalised budgets. Parents and carers viewed a personal health budget with caution and perceived benefits were tempered by their experiences of current provision. Concerns were raised about entitlement and how a personal budget would work in practice.     

Mining,indigeneity, alterity: or,mining Indigenous alterity?

In this special issue on ‘extraction’, we think critically about two urgent and entangled questions, examining the political economy of mining and Indigenous interests in Australia, and the moral economy of Indigenous cultural difference within Cultural Studies and Anthropology. In settler colonial states such as Australia, Indigenous cultural difference is now routinely presented as commensurate with, rather than obstructive of, extractive industry activity. Meanwhile, the renewed interest in ‘radical alterity’ across these disciplines has seen a movement away from regarding authoritative claims about ‘others’ as morally suspect – as only extracting from or mining Indigenous worlds for insights and academic prestige. The ‘ontological turn’, however, leads us to question the empirical status of the ontologies circulating through academic discussions. What happens when Indigenous people disappoint, in their embrace of environmentally destructive industries such as mining, for example? We argue that in cases where ‘they’ are not as different as ‘we’ might hope them to be, scholars should be concerned to foreground the potential role of colonial history and processes of domination in the production and reduction of ontological difference. Second, we call for critical assessment of the political, epistemological, and social effects of both academic and societal evaluations of difference. We conclude by urging for a scholarship that does not pick and choose between agreeable and less agreeable forms of cultural difference.     

△-correct decision for location and scale parameters

In selecting t out of k populations, a △-correct decision is said to be made if the smallest location parameter for the selected populations is not more than △ below the largest location parameter for the non-selected populations. (For seal? parameters there is a similar definition in terms of ratio3.) The minimum probability of △-correct decision over the entire parameter pace is shown to be equal to the minimum probability of correct selection over a preference zone determined by △.     

Partitioning with Respect to a Control: Unequal Sample Sizes Case

This article describes a method for partitioning with respect to a control for the situation in which the treatment sample sizes are unequal and also for the situation where the treatment sample sizes are equal except for a few missing values. Calculation of the critical values required for finding confidence limits is discussed and tables are presented for the “almost equal” sample size case. An application of this method to length of stay data for congestive heart failure patients is also provided.     

Least significant spacing for ‘one versus the rest’ normal populations

Consider sample means from k(≥2) normal populations where the variances and sample sizes are equal. The problem is to find the ‘least significant difference’ or ‘spacing’ (LSS) between the two largest means, so that if an observed spacing is larger we have confidence 1 - α that the population with largest sample mean also has the largest population mean.

When the variance is known it is shown that the maximum LSS occurs when k = 2, provided a < .2723. In other words, for any value of k we may use the usual (one-tailed) least significant difference to demonstrate that one population has a population mean greater than (or equal to) the rest.

When the variance is estimated bounds are obtained for the confidence which indicate that this last result is approximately correct.     

Sustainability and sociology

Sociologists have been slow to address directly the questions raised by the issue of sustainability, despite the prominence of the idea in other disciplines and policy fields. This article argues that sociologists are “missing the boat” by ignoring the questions that sustainability raises. In addition, it is suggested that sociology is uniquely equipped with the theoretical and methodological background to contribute scientifically accurate understandings of this phenomenon to a world much in need of such guidance. The article concludes that addressing questions of sustainability may nudge sociology into new and fruitful directions of inquiry. This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation grant number CMS-9312647, which is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks, also, to Gary Marx, Alice Fothergill and Sharon Erickson Nepstad.     

Perception of Multisensory Gender Coherence in 6‐ and 9‐Month‐Old Infants

One of the most salient social categories conveyed by human faces and voices is gender. We investigated the developmental emergence of the ability to perceive the coherence of auditory and visual attributes of gender in 6‐ and 9‐month‐old infants. Infants viewed two side‐by‐side video clips of a man and a woman singing a nursery rhyme and heard a synchronous male or female sound track. Results showed that 6‐month‐old infants did not match the audible and visible attributes of gender, and 9‐month‐old infants matched only female faces and voices. These findings indicate that the ability to perceive the multisensory coherence of gender emerges relatively late in infancy and that it reflects the greater experience that most infants have with female faces and voices.     

What's wrong is right: A response to the state of the discipline

In the June issue ofSociological Forum, several authors addressed the question, What's Wrong with Sociology. Answers included increased fragmentation of the discipline, and the lack of an identifiable cumulative core of sociological knowledge. This paper examines many of the claims made by the contributors to the June 1994Sociological Forum, reframes their arguments, and by placing debates regarding the problems in sociology in a broader perspective, identifies many of the recent advances made by the discipline. Focusing on such notable contributions to the field as feminist and postmodern scholarship, we locate the positive side of multiple perspective research.Feminist Scholars in Sociology is a collective of researchers and teachers at the University of Colorado interested in exploring and sharing feminist theory and methodology.