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.     

Exposure to occupational violence and the buffering effects of intra-oranizational support

This paper presents a conceptually distinct analysis of the data first reported by Leather et al. Specifically, it investigates the effects of exposure to a variety of forms of work-related violence upon work attitudes and general well-being within a sample of UK public house licensees—individuals who manage public houses and hold the licence permitting the sale of alcoholic drinks on the premises. In addition, it examines the role of social support in moderating such effects. Based upon a sample of 242 licensees, it reports a consistent interaction between exposure to such violence and the availability of perceived intra-organizational support in determining the size of any negative effects upon individual well-being, job satisfaction and organizational commitment. It is argued that exposure to all forms of work-related violence, including intimidation, verbal abuse and threat, should be seen as a potential stressor within the work environment, the negative effects of which are buffered by perceived support from within the organization, but not by that perceived to be available from informal sources such as family and friends.     

A note on kernel density estimation for non-negative random variables

Kernel-based density estimation algorithms are inefficient in presence of discontinuities at support endpoints. This is substantially due to the fact that classic kernel density estimators lead to positive estimates beyond the endopoints. If a nonparametric estimate of a density functional is required in determining the bandwidth, then the problem also affects the bandwidth selection procedure. In this paper algorithms for bandwidth selection and kernel density estimation are proposed for non-negative random variables. Furthermore, the methods we propose are compared with some of the principal solutions in the literature through a simulation study.     

On cumulative entropies

In analogy with the cumulative residual entropy recently proposed by Wang et al. [2003a. A new and robust information theoretic measure and its application to image alignment. In: Information Processing in Medical Imaging. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2732, Springer, Heidelberg, pp. 388–400; 2003b. Cumulative residual entropy, a new measure of information and its application to image alignment. In: Proceedings on the Ninth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV’03), vol. 1, IEEE Computer Society Press, Silver Spring, MD, pp. 548–553], we introduce and study the cumulative entropy, which is a new measure of information alternative to the classical differential entropy. We show that the cumulative entropy of a random lifetime X can be expressed as the expectation of its mean inactivity time evaluated at X. Hence, our measure is particularly suitable to describe the information in problems related to ageing properties of reliability theory based on the past and on the inactivity times. Our results include various bounds to the cumulative entropy, its connection to the proportional reversed hazards model, and the study of its dynamic version that is shown to be increasing if the mean inactivity time is increasing. The empirical cumulative entropy is finally proposed to estimate the new information measure.     

莎士比亚作品中所体现的同性取向倾向探究——以《威尼斯商人》与十四行诗为例

莎士比亚作为文艺复兴时期杰出的戏剧家和诗人,在欧洲文学史上占有重要的地位,由于莎士比亚的文学地位,使得学术界多以一种崇拜的眼光去解读其作品,而其作品中一些细微之处流露的情绪却很少被人们发觉。男同性恋文学的书写在莎士比亚的作品中对这一命题的表现的十分隐晦,通常欲言又止,但我们还是可以在其作品中发现一些蛛丝马迹。本文旨在通过分析其作品《威尼斯商人》与《莎士比亚十四行诗》来对其作品中所体现的同性化创作倾向与其同性取向倾向进行一些探究。     

汉语方言自动聚类与分区及相关计算方法

本文回顾了学界对汉语方言之间相互关系的三种计量方法：特征统计、词源统计和词汇相似度计量,指出这三种计量方法采用的是非整体的、语音和词汇上受限的考察方法。文章阐述了一种更适用的计算模型,即Levenshtein Distance算法(莱文斯坦距离,或称编辑距离),该方法对语言或方言之间线性字符串的语音相似性和词汇对应性具有协调功能,并蕴含特征比对和词源概率效用。本文自动分区实验汇集了南方吴、闽、粤、湘、客、赣、徽、淮8个分区的78个方言,官话方言有东北、北京、冀鲁、胶辽、中原、兰银、西南108个方言,共计186个汉语方言点。每个方言收集了斯瓦迪士100个基本词,并对方言之间展开相似性计算。计算结果与传统分区基本一致,但更为精准。     

浅谈“神似”理论在唐诗英译中的重要作用——以《送友人》的两个英译版本为例

诗歌是一种独特的艺术表现形式,拥有优美的形式和丰富的内容,唐诗也不例外。英译唐诗时,应以再现诗作精神内容风貌为主,即以达到“神似”为翻译第一目标,才能更好地保持唐诗的原貌。本文选择李白《送友人》的两个英译本,分析了“神似”理论在唐诗英译中的重要作用。     

克拉克高等教育组织变革观述评

从组织的视角来研究高等教育系统,应从学科出发,然后追溯到围绕学科发展起来的集工作、信念和权力各种形态于一体的综合机构。克拉克教授认为高等学校存在源于基层的、领导层推动的、基于学术渗透的、渐进的和无形的等变革模式。建立进取性大学符合高等教育发展的基本规律,此类大学不仅具有广泛的外围发展空间、多渠道的财政资源、活化的学术中心,还具备强有力的领导核心。     

行政规范性文件"上位法依据"的司法判断

规范性文件依据的普遍不明确给司法审查中的"上位法依据"判断带来了困难,法院往往采取极为宽松的审查标准,认可行政机关可依据上位法中的宽泛授权,乃至在上位法空白的情况下根据行政管理的现实需要制定规范性文件.面对这种情况,坚持授权明确性的进路和运用上位法原则性规定进行审查的进路均存在局限;区分权利限制程度进路更加符合现代行政的发展特点,且与我国行政立法体制和《行政诉讼法》立法目的相契合.在具体判断方法上,我国司法实践中已经出现运用比例原则进行审查,将无助于实现行政目的和过度侵害相对人权利的规范性文件认定为不具有上位法依据的做法,这为我国后续的"上位法依据"审查提供了启示.而在比例原则的运用下,"上位法依据"亦可获得更加具体的内涵.     

李达对中国社会主义革命和建设道路的探索

李达是马克思主义中国化的早期探索者,在大论战中对各种"社会思潮"进行了辩证的分析,初步回答了"什么是社会主义"的基本问题,为科学社会主义的传播开辟了主流阵地,并从领导核心、经济建设、发展生产、依靠力量和思想路线等角度系统阐发了社会主义建设需遵循的一般规律。建国后,李达围绕我国社会主义改造、法制建设、外交政策和科教工作展开了具体探索,形成了丰富的社会主义改造和建设思想,对今天的社会主义现代化建设仍具有重要的指导意义。