Squashed dreams and rare breeds: ableism and the arbiters of life and death

The week beginning 29 June 2015 is not just historic for the closure of the Independent Living Fund in the United Kingdom, but for me was the week they decided that my life is not worth investing in; they being NHS England, NICE and, with them, the Department of Health. They chose not to support the enzyme replacement therapy that has been not only keeping me alive, but giving me a quality of life – enabling me to return to finish my Disability Studies PhD exploring how Christian leaders explain disability, where ethics have become the main topic, and to rebuild my career – or so I thought.     

Hierarchical Bayesian Modeling of Post-Earthquake Ignition Probabilities Considering Inter-Earthquake Heterogeneity

Post-earthquake fires are high-consequence events with extensive damage potential. They are also low-frequency events, so their nature remains underinvestigated. One difficulty in modeling post-earthquake ignition probabilities is reducing the model uncertainty attributed to the scarce source data. The data scarcity problem has been resolved by pooling the data indiscriminately collected from multiple earthquakes. However, this approach neglects the inter-earthquake heterogeneity in the regional and seasonal characteristics, which is indispensable for risk assessment of future post-earthquake fires. Thus, the present study analyzes the post-earthquake ignition probabilities of five major earthquakes in Japan from 1995 to 2016 (1995 Kobe, 2003 Tokachi-oki, 2004 Niigata–Chuetsu, 2011 Tohoku, and 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes) by a hierarchical Bayesian approach. As the ignition causes of earthquakes share a certain commonality, common prior distributions were assigned to the parameters, and samples were drawn from the target posterior distribution of the parameters by a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation. The results of the hierarchical model were comparatively analyzed with those of pooled and independent models. Although the pooled and hierarchical models were both robust in comparison with the independent model, the pooled model underestimated the ignition probabilities of earthquakes with few data samples. Among the tested models, the hierarchical model was least affected by the source-to-source variability in the data. The heterogeneity of post-earthquake ignitions with different regional and seasonal characteristics has long been desired in the modeling of post-earthquake ignition probabilities but has not been properly considered in the existing approaches. The presented hierarchical Bayesian approach provides a systematic and rational framework to effectively cope with this problem, which consequently enhances the statistical reliability and stability of estimating post-earthquake ignition probabilities.     

稀土硝酸盐与甘氨酸配合物的合成和表征

在水溶液体系中合成了镧、镨、钐和钆四种稀土硝酸盐与甘氨酸的固态配合物,化学分析表明,它们的化学组成分别是L_0(NO_3)_3·(Gly)_3·H_2O,Pr(NO_3)_3·(Gly)_3·H_2O,Sm(NO_3)_3·(Gly)_3·3H_2O和Gd(NO_3)_3·(Gly)_3·3H_2O,用红外光谱法和x射线衍射法测定了配合物的结构特征,表明它们是一类完全不同于稀土硝酸盐和甘氨酸的新化合物,同时考察了配合物在几种常见溶剂中的溶解性。     

水杨酸-邻菲罗啉三元稀土配合物的合成、表征及抑菌作用

在无水乙醇溶液中合成了六种水杨酸-邻菲罗啉-三元稀土配合物,采用元素分析,红外光谱,差热热重等测试方法进行表征,确定配合物的化学组成为RE(Phen)2(Sa l)2C l.H2O(RE=L a3+,P r3+,N d3+,Sm3+,G d3+,D y3+).研究了稀土配合物的抑菌活性,结果表明三元稀土配合物的抑菌效果较单独的稀土氯化物、邻菲罗啉和水杨酸好.     

A general inverse sampling scheme and its application to adaptive cluster sampling

Not having a variance estimator is a seriously weak point of a sampling design from a practical perspective. This paper provides unbiased variance estimators for several sampling designs based on inverse sampling, both with and without an adaptive component. It proposes a new design, which is called the general inverse sampling design, that avoids sampling an infeasibly large number of units. The paper provide estimators for this design as well as its adaptive modification. A simple artificial example is used to demonstrate the computations. The adaptive and non‐adaptive designs are compared using simulations based on real data sets. The results indicate that, for appropriate populations, the adaptive version can have a substantial variance reduction compared with the non‐adaptive version. Also, adaptive general inverse sampling with a limitation on the initial sample size has a greater variance reduction than without the limitation.     

稀土元素Ce对Al－Mg－Si合金断裂韧性的改善及其细观机理分析

用三点弯曲（ＴＰＢ）裂纹试件测定平面应变条件下的断裂韧性Ｊ１ｃ与ＪＲ，试验结果表明，稀土Ｃｅ较大地提高了Ａｌ－Ｍｇ－Ｓｉ合金的起裂韧度值Ｊ１ｃ，特别是，显著地改善了合金的裂纹扩展抗力ＪＲ。金相显微观察和电镜分析表明，稀土Ｃｅ改善了材料的初始细观结构（材料在加载前的组织结构），改变了材料的细观损伤特点，发展了材料的含损伤塑性。     

A new stratified three-stage unrelated randomized response model for estimating a rare sensitive attribute based on the Poisson distribution

This article suggests an efficient method of estimating a rare sensitive attribute which is assumed following Poisson distribution by using three-stage unrelated randomized response model instead of the Land et al. model (2011 Land, M., S. Singh, and S. A. Sedory. 2011. Estimation of a rare sensitive attribute using poisson distribution. Statistics 46 (3):351–60. doi:10.1080/02331888.2010.524300.[Taylor &; Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) when the population consists of some different sized clusters and clusters selected by probability proportional to size(:pps) sampling. A rare sensitive parameter is estimated by using pps sampling and equal probability two-stage sampling when the parameter of a rare unrelated attribute is assumed to be known and unknown.

We extend this method to the case of stratified population by applying stratified pps sampling and stratified equal probability two-stage sampling. An empirical study is carried out to show the efficiency of the two proposed methods when the parameter of a rare unrelated attribute is assumed to be known and unknown.     

Optimal cut-off for rare events and unbalanced misclassification costs

This paper develops a method for handling two-class classification problems with highly unbalanced class sizes and misclassification costs. When the class sizes are highly unbalanced and the minority class represents a rare event, conventional classification methods tend to strongly favour the majority class, resulting in very low detection of the minority class. A method is proposed to determine the optimal cut-off for asymmetric misclassification costs and for unbalanced class sizes. Monte Carlo simulations show that this proposal performs better than the method based on the notion of classification accuracy. Finally, the proposed method is applied to empirical data on Italian small and medium enterprises to classify them into default and non-default groups.     

Consistent Estimation of the Structural Distribution Function

Motivated by problems in linguistics we consider a multinomial random vector for which the number of cells N is not much smaller than the sum of the cell frequencies, i.e. the sample size n . The distribution function of the uniform distribution on the set of all cell probabilities multiplied by N is called the structural distribution function of the cell probabilities. Conditions are given that guarantee that the structural distribution function can be estimated consistently as n increases indefinitely although n / N does not. The natural estimator is inconsistent and we prove consistency of essentially two alternative estimators.     

整合资源 创办公开期刊--发展绍兴市哲学社会科学的一点建议

跟经济社会发展相比,绍兴的社会科学报刊建设处于“欠发达”状态,将会制约现代化建设。因此,绍兴迫切需 要增加社科期刊这种“稀缺资源”。绍兴已具备了由政府发起创办国内外公开发行的综合性社会科学学术期刊的基础条 件,关键在于政府能否着眼于本地优势最大化和利益最大化,整合现有资源,握紧拳头,积极争取。