Adaptive designs for selecting drug combinations based on efficacy–toxicity response

We propose a new adaptive procedure for dose-finding in clinical trials with combination of two drugs when both efficacy and toxicity responses are available. We model the distribution of this bivariate binary endpoint using the bivariate probit model. The analytic formulae for the Fisher information matrix are obtained, that form the basis for derivation of the locally optimal, minimax, Bayesian, and adaptive designs in the framework of optimal design theory.     

Corruption,Policing and Migration: Exploring the Interaction Between Migrant Workers and Police in Russia,Ukraine and the UK

The rights of migrant workers and their experiences in host countries have been high on the political agendas of Europe and beyond. This article uses data from 138 semi‐structured interviews conducted with migrant workers in the UK, Russia and Ukraine to study their relationships with the police in host countries. We aim to contribute to the literature on policing and migration by analysing three different host countries, and the experience of temporary migrant workers regarding policing within each country. We suggest that the interplay between the experiences of policing in home and host countries can provide important insights into the practicalities of policing, but should not be considered apart from the context of the ethnic origin of migrant workers.     

Consequences of dichotomization

Dichotomization is the transformation of a continuous outcome (response) to a binary outcome. This approach, while somewhat common, is harmful from the viewpoint of statistical estimation and hypothesis testing. We show that this leads to loss of information, which can be large. For normally distributed data, this loss in terms of Fisher's information is at least 1-2/pi (or 36%). In other words, 100 continuous observations are statistically equivalent to 158 dichotomized observations. The amount of information lost depends greatly on the prior choice of cut points, with the optimal cut point depending upon the unknown parameters. The loss of information leads to loss of power or conversely a sample size increase to maintain power. Only in certain cases, for instance, in estimating a value of the cumulative distribution function and when the assumed model is very different from the true model, can the use of dichotomized outcomes be considered a reasonable approach.     

New Material on the USSR Population Census

The USSR Central Statistical Administration has just released new data on the occupational composition and educational level of the Soviet population. This material is summarized in the following article from Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, December 20, 1960.     

Social Polarization

The origins and evolution of children's literature in Russia are explored from the eighteenth century to the present day.     

The Language of the Presidential Election Campaign in Ukraine

The objective of the article is to trace and analyze Ukrainian language use in the recent presidential election campaign, paying particular attention to lexical innovations, neologisms, and satirical allusions. These changes are presented as the continuation of a steady process of democratization or liberalization of the Ukrainian language, a phenomenon some researchers previously attributed only to Russian. The language practices of the "Kuchma-Yanukovych regime" is presented and analyzed. The view of Yushchenko by his supporters as the narodnyi kandydat/prezydent (the people’s candidate/President) finds its antipode in political neologisms coined by Yanukovych’s camp (e.g., nashysty/nashysts’kyi), which were designed to attribute fascist tendencies to Yushchenko’s bloc, Nasha Ukraina ’Our Ukraine’. The egg farce during the campaign showed the vulnerability of Yanukovych’s camp to satire.     

Regional Features and the Socio-Demographic Development of the Jews of Podilia

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the Jewish national minority of Podilia – a historical-geographical region mainly in the central part of Ukraine – formed. Considerable attention is given to the demographic processes within the Jewish environment of the region and features of formation of the social characteristics of the Jewish population that manifested themselves in its resettlement, formation of localities, self-government, and professional employment. This article shows that one of the biggest Eastern European Jewish communities was formed in Podilia before the beginning of World War II. This community was represented by the largest Jewish subethnic group – Ashkenazim. The social features of the Jews of the region were determined by the fact that the Jewish population lived in small towns of the primarily agrarian region. In addition, during this period, its social structure and professional employment were determined by both national customs and traditions and the power policy.

This study shows that after the 1940s, the Jewish community in Podilia changed. The Jews suffered from the Holocaust, which forever changed the social characteristics of the Jewish population of Podilia.

Active anti-Jewish policy during the postwar totalitarian regime, latent antisemitism during the “thaw,” and the authoritarian conservative regime in the USSR from 1964 to the mid 1980s, caused significant changes in the demographic processes of the Jewish population of the region. From the 1940s to the 1980s, the Jewish population of Podilia steadily decreased. The Jewish community before the end of the 1980s noticeably lost its influence in the region, but remained the largest ethnic community there, after Russians.     

Deriving Approximations in a Random Effects Model for Multicenter Clinical Trials with Binary Response

The design and analysis of multicenter trials based on a random effects model is well developed for a continuous response, but is less well developed for a binary response. Here we describe a random effects model for a binary response for two treatments and show how maximum likelihood estimates for the unknown treatment difference can be derived using a novel approximation to the likelihood. The suggested approximation is easy to use and seems to be better suited to the problem than the Laplace approximation and the approximation based on adaptive Gaussian quadratures. We also derive an approximation for the Fisher information matrix of the treatment parameters. The results extend those previously reviewed by Agresti and Hartzel (2000 Agresti , A. , Hartzel , J. ( 2000 ). Strategies for comparing treatments on a binary response with multi-centre data . Statist. Med. 19 : 1115 – 1139 .[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).