Examining the Global North Migration Policies: A “Push Out – Push Back” Approach to Forced Migration

In this paper we focus on adapting the concept of push – pull factors to forced migration by proposing a “push out – push back” approach that underlines two most crucial elements of forced migrants’ experience. On the one hand, it stresses the reasons for leaving countries of origin or of temporary refuge that are not dependant on the will of people who flew those places, thus the “push out” factors. On the other hand, it represents the refusal of the countries of the Global North to accept forced migrants and their use of various practices, amounting to “push back” factors, to prevent them from entering or leaving their territory if they manage to reach it. These factors can be divided into three groups: passive, active, and symbolic.     

Changes in Agriculture

Currently, there are about 13,000 persons of Doukhobor descent living in the Province of British Columbia (mainly in the West Kootenay area). Roughly 60% still speak Doukhobor Russian. Ritual activities among the Doukhobors depend largely on orally transmitted prayers, psalms, and hymns that are based on Russian Church Slavonic; home life in those homes where Russian is still used is conducted in a 19th century South Russian dialect with both Ukrainian and English admixtures. The effort at preventing a full-scale language shift to English is an example of a communal decision to maintain and revive a language in terms of given needs; there are many spokesmen in the Doukhobor community, however, who advocate an emphasis on shifting to world languages (English, Standard Russian). The percentage of Doukhobors, especially in the generation born after 1970, subscribing to this view is increasing, thus raising the much-debated question whether the decline of a language or of a functional style necessarily entails the loss of a culture and of the disappearance of ritual practices. Many First Nations communities, e.g., Cree in Alberta, are engaged in an active endeavour of reversing language shift partly as a necessary healing process. It seems that their efforts serve at least as partial support for maintaining the Doukhobor ritual style, perhaps in a “reconfigured” form allowing codeswitching between cognitive structures (in English) and contextual-mnemonic devices (in Russian/Church Slavonic).     

Nonparametric testing for serial independence using the NRL statistic

Serial independence is tested using two measures of the effects of noise reduction in chaotic data, proposed by Orzeszko (2005 Orzeszko, W. (2005). Identyfikacja i Prognozowanie Chaosu Deterministycznego w Ekonomicznych Szeregach Czasowych. Warsaw: Polish Economic Society. [Google Scholar]). The extensive Monte Carlo simulations on the size and power of the new permutation-based tests are performed. Four popular nonparametric tests for serial independence are employed as a benchmark. The conducted simulations show that the new tests may be effective tools for detecting different kinds of dependencies. Moreover, they can distinguish between nonlinearity in the mean and nonlinearity in the variance.     

Polish Foreign Trade: A Retrospective View

The unspecified visual art referent in Akhmatova’s enigmatic poem, “An Old Portrait” (Staryi portret, 1910), dedicated to the painter Aleksandra Ekster, has long inspired critical speculation. scholars (superfin and Timenchik, Rosslyn, Rubins) have proposed numerous readings, but none has entirely resolved the poem’s mysteries. I will argue that the ballets Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cléopâtre, performed in the first Paris season of the Ballets Russes, provide hitherto unexplored subtexts for the spare but dramatic poem. Considered within the context of the ballets, the poem’s characters and details take on more specific and meaningful contours. By analyzing these ballets’ respective libretti, costume designs and stage sets, it becomes possible to detect in the poem references to the Gobelins portrait depicting the deadly enchantress in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the poisoning of Amoun at the conclusion of Cléopâtre, and Vaclav Nijinsky’s performances as Armida’s servant in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra’s slave in Cléopâtre. The poem also demonstrates Akhmatova’s early fascination with portraiture, especially the complex relationship between artist and sitter. In this sense, “An Old Portrait” anticipates the poet’s eventual cultivation of her own image in portraits painted by her contemporaries.     

Remarks on the L1 distance in statistical data analysis

We propose the L₁ distance between the distribution of a binned data sample and a probability distribution from which it is hypothetically drawn as a statistic for testing agreement between the data and a model. We study the distribution of this distance for N-element samples drawn from k bins of equal probability and derive asymptotic formulae for the mean and dispersion of L₁ in the large-N limit. We argue that the L₁ distance is asymptotically normally distributed, with the mean and dispersion being accurately reproduced by asymptotic formulae even for moderately large values of N and k.     

Limiting admissible estimators for variance components

Simultaneous estimation of the vector of the variance components for mixed and random models under the quadratic loss function is considered. For a large class of such models there are identified classes of admissible biased invariant quadratic estimators that are better than some admissible unbiased estimators. Numerous numerical results presented in the paper show that for many of the commonly used balanced models the improvements in the quadratic risk may be considerable over a large set of the parameter space.