《麦克白》咒语现象解析

咒语现象是《麦克白》整出戏剧极富魅力的表现元素。它既为剧本奠定了一种神秘而阴森的基调,同时确定全局总纲,为剧情发展起到重要的推动作用。咒语与主人公的性格、行为以及内心活动、命运走向息息相关,并最终导致麦克白命运悲剧的发生。集众恶于一身的女巫是咒语现象的主体,艰深晦涩、言辞激烈的诗体是咒语的具体表现形式,咒语的预言性质笼罩全篇,影响着人物的内心恶念,推动剧情发展,成为贯穿全剧始终的主题线索。     

A New Methodology for Before–After Safety Assessment Using Survival Analysis and Longitudinal Data

The widely used empirical Bayes (EB) and full Bayes (FB) methods for before–after safety assessment are sometimes limited because of the extensive data needs from additional reference sites. To address this issue, this study proposes a novel before–after safety evaluation methodology based on survival analysis and longitudinal data as an alternative to the EB/FB method. A Bayesian survival analysis (SARE) model with a random effect term to address the unobserved heterogeneity across sites is developed. The proposed survival analysis method is validated through a simulation study before its application. Subsequently, the SARE model is developed in a case study to evaluate the safety effectiveness of a recent red‐light‐running photo enforcement program in New Jersey. As demonstrated in the simulation and the case study, the survival analysis can provide valid estimates using only data from treated sites, and thus its results will not be affected by the selection of defective or insufficient reference sites. In addition, the proposed approach can take into account the censored data generated due to the transition from the before period to the after period, which has not been previously explored in the literature. Using individual crashes as units of analysis, survival analysis can incorporate longitudinal covariates such as the traffic volume and weather variation, and thus can explicitly account for the potential temporal heterogeneity.     

Trends in the Race and Ethnicity of Eminent Americans

During the last several decades, the ethnic and racial composition of the American elite has changed to include some ethnic minorities and women. This study examines changes in the composition of one segment of the American elite: those who have obtained eminence in their occupations. Lieberson and Carter's study of the ethnic composition of eminent Americans, using Who's Who in America, is replicated with data from the 1990s (Lieberson and Carter, 1979, American Sociological Review 44:347–366). In addition, comparisons between blacks listed in Who's Who in America and blacks listed only in Who's Who among Black Americans are made. During the 20 years since Lieberson and Carter's study, Jews have made remarkable gains in eminent membership, while the rate of black representation has increased only moderately. Women are a small percentage of the eminent regardless of ethnicity, although black women are better represented than their counterparts in white ethnic groups.     

Educational Attainments of Immigrant Offspring: Success or Segmented Assimilation?1

In this article, I study the educational attainments of the adult offspring of immigrants, analyzing data from the 1996 panel of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID). Fielded annually since 1993 by Statistics Canada, respondents are asked for the first time in 1996 to report the birthplaces of their parents, making it possible to define and study not only the foreign‐born population (the first generation), but also the second generation (Canadian born to foreign‐born parents) and the third‐plus generation (Canadian born to Canadian‐born parents). The survey also asked respondents to indicate if they are members of a visible minority group, thus permitting a limited assessment of whether or not color conditions educational achievements of immigrant offspring. I find that “1.5” and second generation adults, age 20–64 have more years of schooling and higher percentages completing high school compared with the third‐plus generation. Contrary to the segmented “underclass” assimilation model found in the United States, adult visible minority immigrant offspring in Canada exceed the educational attainments of other not‐visible‐minority groups. Although the analysis is hampered by small sample numbers, the results point to country differences in historical and contemporary race relations, and call for additional national and cross‐national research.     

裴迪考论

裴迪是和王维同时而稍后的田园诗人 ,他的一生中大概有 2 0年是跟随着王维度过的。裴迪在唐代并不是显赫的诗人。但是他与当时除了李白以外的其他大诗人都有或多或少的联系。考证他的事迹和与这些诗人的关系 ,也可以使这些诗人得到更多的还原以被人们了解。     

Bayesian networks for imputation

Summary.  Bayesian networks are particularly useful for dealing with high dimensional statistical problems. They allow a reduction in the complexity of the phenomenon under study by representing joint relationships between a set of variables through conditional relationships between subsets of these variables. Following Thibaudeau and Winkler we use Bayesian networks for imputing missing values. This method is introduced to deal with the problem of the consistency of imputed values: preservation of statistical relationships between variables ( statistical consistency ) and preservation of logical constraints in data ( logical consistency ). We perform some experiments on a subset of anonymous individual records from the 1991 UK population census.     

文学翻译的艺术性

翻译的语言学理论将翻译提到科学的高度加以描述,可以说比传统理论前进了一步。但是如果因此而否认了翻译的艺术性,就无法阐明翻译中的许多问题。翻译的艺术性至少包括三个方面的内容,即形式表现、异质同构和艺术冲动。     

Deposit Insurance,Institutions, and Bank Interest Rates

Many recent institutional reforms of the financial system have relied on the introduction of an explicit scheme of deposit insurance. This instrument aims at two main targets, contributing to systemic stability and protecting depositors. However, it may also affect the interest rate spread in the banking system, which can be viewed as an indicator of either inefficiency or market power in this financial segment. This paper provides an empirical investigation of the effect of deposit insurance and other institutional and economic variables on bank interest rates across countries. We find that deposit insurance increases the lending–deposit spread in banking. The main effect seems to arise not from the deposit side though, but from an increase in the lending rate. We interpret this result as evidence of the presence of moral hazard problems related to this instrument. We also find that higher quality of institutions is associated with lower spreads, thus contributing to eroding sources of market power in the banking sector.     

A Bayesian Hierarchical Model for the Evaluation of a Website

Consider a website and the surfers visiting its pages. A typical issue of interest, for example while monitoring an advertising campaign, concerns whether a specific page has been designed successfully, i.e. is able to attract surfers or address them to other pages within the site. We assume that the surfing behaviour is fully described by the transition probabilities from one page to another, so that a clickstream (sequence of consecutively visited pages) can be viewed as a finite-state-space Markov chain. We then implement a variety of hierarchical prior distributions on the multivariate logits of the transition probabilities and define, for each page, a content effect and a link effect. The former measures the attractiveness of the page due to its contents, while the latter signals its ability to suggest further interesting links within the site. Moreover, we define an additional effect, representing overall page success, which incorporates both effects previously described. Using WinBUGS, we provide estimates and credible intervals for each of the above effects and rank pages accordingly.