Is There a Woodwork Effect? Addressing a 200-Year Debate on the Impacts of Expanding Community-Based Services

In U.S. social welfare history, many have suggested that if benefits were too attractive, consumers would come out of the woodwork to take advantage of the opportunity. Clinical trials have provided evidence of the woodwork effect’s existence, suggesting caution when expanding home- and community-based services (HCBS). However, it is unclear whether these studies are best suited to assess whether a system-level effect occurs. Using state and federal data tracking Ohio’s long-term services and support (LTSS) system from 1995 to 2015, this paper examines changes in the utilization rates and expenditures of Medicaid LTSS to explore whether a woodwork effect occurred as Ohio moved to improve its LTSS system balance (80% Nursing Home [NH], 20% HCBS) to (49% Nursing Home [NH], 51% HCBS). After accounting for population growth of individuals older than 60 and those with two or more impairments in activities of daily living, there was no change in utilization rates of older people with severe disability (1995: 491 per 1000 population, 2015: 495 per 1000 population) or overall LTSS expenditures (1997: $2.7 million [in 2013 dollars], 2013: $2.9 million). Our results suggest that states can make significant strides in HCBS expansion without increasing the overall long-term services utilization rate.     

Reordering Public and Private in Iranian Cyberspace: Identity,Politics, and Mobilization

The capacity of cyberspace to bypass some of the spatial divisions that underpin social inequality endows it with political significance. This article examines some of the ways in which cyberspace has contributed to redrawing the boundaries between public and private and some of the consequences of this for people, things, and ideas in Iran and the Iranian diaspora. It shows how cyberspace influences a wide range of political phenomena including political mobilization and censorship, intergenerational communication, identity formation, sexuality, sense of belonging, and forms and location of symbolic capital. The relationship between net users in the diaspora and cyberspace involves a circuit of reorderings of one's understanding of the diaspora, one's contact with it in cyberspace, of one's own ideas on the basis of what one finds there, and of social relationships established and maintained in cyberspace. Paradoxically, the very richness and diversity of the ideas and opinions found in Iranian cyberspace may undermine the idea of there actually being a single Iranian diaspora.     

On a nonlinear Birnbaum–Saunders model based on a bivariate construction and its characteristics

Abstract

The Birnbaum-Saunders (BS) distribution is an asymmetric probability model that is receiving considerable attention. In this article, we propose a methodology based on a new class of BS models generated from the Student-t distribution. We obtain a recurrence relationship for a BS distribution based on a nonlinear skew–t distribution. Model parameters estimators are obtained by means of the maximum likelihood method, which are evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations. We illustrate the obtained results by analyzing two real data sets. These data analyses allow the adequacy of the proposed model to be shown and discussed by applying model selection tools.     

Ordinal ridge regression with categorical predictors

In multi-category response models, categories are often ordered. In the case of ordinal response models, the usual likelihood approach becomes unstable with ill-conditioned predictor space or when the number of parameters to be estimated is large relative to the sample size. The likelihood estimates do not exist when the number of observations is less than the number of parameters. The same problem arises if constraint on the order of intercept values is not met during the iterative procedure. Proportional odds models (POMs) are most commonly used for ordinal responses. In this paper, penalized likelihood with quadratic penalty is used to address these issues with a special focus on POMs. To avoid large differences between two parameter values corresponding to the consecutive categories of an ordinal predictor, the differences between the parameters of two adjacent categories should be penalized. The considered penalized-likelihood function penalizes the parameter estimates or differences between the parameter estimates according to the type of predictors. Mean-squared error for parameter estimates, deviance of fitted probabilities and prediction error for ridge regression are compared with usual likelihood estimates in a simulation study and an application.     

New control charts for simultaneous monitoring of the mean vector and covariance matrix of multivariate multiple linear profiles

Simultaneous monitoring of the mean vector and covariance matrix in multivariate processes allows practitioners to avoid the inflated false alarm rate that results from using two independent control charts. In this paper, we extend exponentially weighted moving average semicircle and generally weighted moving average semicircle control charts to monitor the mean vector and covariance matrix of multivariate multiple linear regression profiles in Phase II simultaneously. These new control charts are compared with the existing control charts in the literature in terms of the average run length criterion. Finally, a case is considered to show the application of the proposed charts.     

Self-Starting control charts for monitoring logistic regression profiles

In some applications, quality engineers cannot monitor the processes at the beginning of the production process. Because the process parameters are unknown and there are not enough initial samples to estimate the process parameters. Self-starting control charts are applied to monitor processes at the start-up stages with no enough initial samples. In this paper, we propose three self-starting control charts to monitor a logistic regression profile which models the relationship between a binomial response variable and explanatory variables. Also, we compare the proposed control charts with each other through simulation studies in terms of average run length (ARL) criterion.     

The free movement of people around the world would be Utopian: IUAES World Congress 2013: Evolving Humanity,Emerging Worlds, 5–10 August 2013

This article contains the text and discussion of a debate held at the IUAES World Congress in Anthropology at Manchester University in 2013. The motion was proposed by Bela Feldman-Bianco (State University of Campinas), seconded by Noel Salazar (University of Leuven) and was opposed by Shahram Khosravi (Stockholm University), seconded by Nicholas de Genova (then at Goldsmiths’ College). The debate was chaired by Simone Abram (Durham University).