The End of the World Designed with Men in Mind

According to Derrida, the European self-understanding marking the name “Man” is governed by eschatology and teleology. Man is that being on its way towards its proper end. The times of science seemed to Kant and others to be evidence of just such progress. For Freud, by contrast, the great scientific achievements of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud have cumulatively contributed a series of de-centring blows to our “self-love”. This paper explores the nature of great scientific achievements, and raises the possibility of a further devastating blow to Man, this time in the twentieth century, and connected to the name of Marx.     

Child custody issues and co‐occurrence of intimate partner violence and child maltreatment: controversies and points of agreement amongst practitioners

The situation of families undergoing separation in a context of co‐occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV) and child maltreatment raises certain issues related to child custody. The results presented in this paper were collected and analysed within the framework of a qualitative study aiming to identify the principal points of agreement and the main controversies amongst practitioners in several different types of organizations. Focus groups were held with a total of 43 practitioners from six different settings concerned with child custody in cases of co‐occurrence of IPV and child maltreatment. Although they agreed on the importance of ensuring the safety of victims of violence, their views diverged on three points: (1) the importance of preserving the father–child relationship; (2) collaboration between voluntary organizations and semi‐voluntary or legal agencies; and (3) consideration of cultural differences.     

Extension of two-sided test to multiple treatment trials

In a two-treatment trial, a two-sided test is often used to reach a conclusion, Usually we are interested in doing a two-sided test because of no prior preference between the two treatments and we want a three-decision framework. When a standard control is just as good as the new experimental treatment (which has the same toxicity and cost), then we will accept both treatments. Only when the standard control is clearly worse or better than the new experimental treatment, then we choose only one treatment. In this paper, we extend the concept of a two-sided test to the multiple treatment trial where three or more treatments are involved. The procedure turns out to be a subset selection procedure; however, the theoretical framework and performance requirement are different from the existing subset selection procedures. Two procedures (exclusion or inclusion) are developed here for the case of normal data with equal known variance. If the sample size is large, they can be applied with unknown variance and with the binomial data or survival data with random censoring.     

Proposed best practice for statisticians in the reporting and publication of pharmaceutical industry‐sponsored clinical trials

In this paper we set out what we consider to be a set of best practices for statisticians in the reporting of pharmaceutical industry‐sponsored clinical trials. We make eight recommendations covering: author responsibilities and recognition; publication timing; conflicts of interest; freedom to act; full author access to data; trial registration and independent review. These recommendations are made in the context of the prominent role played by statisticians in the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of pharmaceutical sponsored trials and the perception of the reporting of these trials in the wider community. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bayesian palaeoclimate reconstruction

Summary.  We consider the problem of reconstructing prehistoric climates by using fossil data that have been extracted from lake sediment cores. Such reconstructions promise to provide one of the few ways to validate modern models of climate change. A hierarchical Bayesian modelling approach is presented and its use, inversely, is demonstrated in a relatively small but statistically challenging exercise: the reconstruction of prehistoric climate at Glendalough in Ireland from fossil pollen. This computationally intensive method extends current approaches by explicitly modelling uncertainty and reconstructing entire climate histories. The statistical issues that are raised relate to the use of compositional data (pollen) with covariates (climate) which are available at many modern sites but are missing for the fossil data. The compositional data arise as mixtures and the missing covariates have a temporal structure. Novel aspects of the analysis include a spatial process model for compositional data, local modelling of lattice data, the use, as a prior, of a random walk with long-tailed increments, a two-stage implementation of the Markov chain Monte Carlo approach and a fast approximate procedure for cross-validation in inverse problems. We present some details, contrasting its reconstructions with those which have been generated by a method in use in the palaeoclimatology literature. We suggest that the method provides a basis for resolving important challenging issues in palaeoclimate research. We draw attention to several challenging statistical issues that need to be overcome.     

The Legal Status of Turks in Germany

Turks in Germany constitute the single largest non-national group living in the member states of the European Union. This essay examines the legal dimensions of their entry, residence and integration in Germany during the 1990s up to 2002. The evidence shows that, despite long-term settlement patterns, Turks in Germany have not achieved a high level of formal inclusion. However, recent policy reforms have already gone some way to improving their situation, and the impact of planned reforms should equally ensure that this process continues in the future.     

Bayesian variable selection and regularization for time–frequency surface estimation

Summary.  We describe novel Bayesian models for time–frequency inverse modelling of non-stationary signals. These models are based on the idea of a Gabor regression , in which a time series is represented as a superposition of translated, modulated versions of a window function exhibiting good time–frequency concentration. As a necessary consequence, the resultant set of potential predictors is in general overcomplete—constituting a frame rather than a basis—and hence the resultant models require careful regularization through appropriate choices of variable selection schemes and prior distributions. We introduce prior specifications that are tailored to representative time series, and we develop effective Markov chain Monte Carlo methods for inference. To highlight the potential applications of such methods, we provide examples using two of the most distinctive time–frequency surfaces—speech and music signals—as well as standard test functions from the wavelet regression literature.     

The politics of disability and access: the Sydney 2000 Games experience

The article examines disability and access issues surrounding the Sydney 2000 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Central to this is an examination of the involvement of the Australian community of people with disabilities [1] within the Games. The Sydney Paralympic Games, in particular, was seen as a possible watershed event for developing accessible infrastructure, and raising awareness of disability and access issues. This paper draws on the official documents of the Games, newspaper accounts and disability organisation reports. The article first examines the major bodies charged with organising the Games, and the planning processes used to incorporate disability and access issues. It then examines a range of critical issues and their relationships with the disability community. Finally, the article provides an analysis of any likely legacies that the 2000 Games may have for Sydney's community of people with disabilities.     

Beyond normalization and impairment: theorizing subjectivity in learning difficulties – theory and practice

Normalization and social role valorization continue to play a central role in shaping debates and practice relating to learning difficulties. In the context of recent arguments this paper draws on the work of Foucault to deconstruct these theories. Foucault’s work alerts us to a conceptual confusion at their heart which reproduces a common but problematic individual–society dualism. There is an implicit, and problematic, presence in the theories of a pre‐social individual conceived as having essential impairments and who is passive in the face of negative socialization. We propose that Foucault’s ‘ethical’ domain of inquiry, with its concern for how people actively understand themselves and govern their conduct in relation to specific values and a ‘truth’ that they are obliged to recognize in themselves, provides the basis for returning the individual‐as‐subject to theories in an active, critical manner.