Grey seals red in tooth and claw: how Darwin helps model their population

Grey seals in Britain are a conservation success, brought back from the brink of extinction by protection in the early 20th century. The public love them. Fishermen hate them. The resurgence of the "grey guzzlers" threatens their livelihood, they say. Len Thomas shows how Charles Darwin's ideas are used to determine seal numbers and population dynamics. Surprisingly, Darwin's theories have also influenced the statistical tools that are used.     

How race affects dismissals of college football coaches

We employ a discretetime hazard model and a Blinder-decomposition approach to explore the possibility of racial discrimination in the dismissal and retention of college football coaches by university administrations. A rich data set consisting of 81 institutions over an 11-year period (1990–2000) that contains, in addition to a coach's race, variables on cumulative winning records, annual on-the-field improvements, and pre-/post-season game participation by institutions and their coaches is employed. Our study finds that black coaches, on average, face a dismissal probability that is 9.6 percentage points below that of their nonblack counterparts, ceteris paribus, suggesting that black head coaches may be the beneficiaries of favorable treatment by university administrators. Such a result likely stems from universities ' approach to social concerns involving race and gender issues. This finding also fits a construct that considers workplace discrimination as multi-dimensional. For example, black representation in the college football coaching ranks may be disproportionately low, possibly as a result of discrimination. However, once hired, black coaches are given more time to succeed than nonblacks, other things constant.     

A UNIFIED FRAMEWORK FOR MODELLING WILDLIFE POPULATION DYNAMICS†

This paper proposes a unified framework for defining and fitting stochastic, discrete‐time, discrete‐stage population dynamics models. The biological system is described by a state‐space model, where the true but unknown state of the population is modelled by a state process, and this is linked to survey data by an observation process. All sources of uncertainty in the inputs, including uncertainty about model specification, are readily incorporated. The paper shows how the state process can be represented as a generalization of the standard Leslie or Lefkovitch matrix. By dividing the state process into subprocesses, complex models can be constructed from manageable building blocks. The paper illustrates the approach with a model of the British grey seal metapopulation, using sequential importance sampling with kernel smoothing to fit the model.     

Fugitives as fish: bounty hunting and exploitation of the commons

This note examines the property rights aspects of bounty hunting, and suggests that fugitives within the criminal justice system represent a common property resource. Economic theory might predict that this resource would be over exploited, perhaps resulting in industry profits being driven to zero. It is argued, however, that, in addition to regulation, recently developed concepts regarding uncertainty and heterogeneity of exploitation skills likely work to limit exploitation effort in bounty hunting. The anecdotal evidence and inference provided in this note make for a compelling pedagogical device for principles and intermediate economics students.     

An open letter to the powers that be

This paper examines a case of discrimination against a deaf person at senior management level in education to illuminate the mechanism of discrimination and how, even when challenged, it can become a full-blown and deliberate victimisation and oppression. It questions the status of non-disabled 'experts' who mislead disabled people by encouraging them to adhere to unrealistic role concepts and expectations in pursuit of the perfect role model of the skilled disabled professional who can function in the absence of appropriate support, by isolating them from their own context, self-image and sense of humanity as disabled people. It further attempts to show the nature and extent of language abuse, institutional cultural monopoly and double standards which relegate disabled people to third class citizenship within diseased institutional frameworks, and suppress the possibility of a diversity of knowledge, skills, understanding and learning which makes for a more healthy 'affective climate' in education and society at large.