Construction of weakly CUD sequences for MCMC sampling

In Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling considerable thought goes into constructing random transitions. But those transitions are almost always driven by a simulated IID sequence. Recently it has been shown that replacing an IID sequence by a weakly completely uniformly distributed (WCUD) sequence leads to consistent estimation in finite state spaces. Unfortunately, few WCUD sequences are known. This paper gives general methods for proving that a sequence is WCUD, shows that some specific sequences are WCUD, and shows that certain operations on WCUD sequences yield new WCUD sequences. A numerical example on a 42 dimensional continuous Gibbs sampler found that some WCUD inputs sequences produced variance reductions ranging from tens to hundreds for posterior means of the parameters, compared to IID inputs.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-EJS162 the Electronic Journal of Statistics (http://www.i-journals.org/ejs/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Differential Evaluation of Straight and Gay Men for Nonverbal Effeminate Behavior

The purpose of this study was to determine how violation of gender-based expectancies might influence attitudes toward men who differ by sexual orientation (i.e., straight or gay). While other studies have examined attitudes toward gay and straight men who differ by gender expression, their designs may have been susceptible to demand effects; this study was specifically designed to avoid such methodological issues. This research was informed by Expectancy-Violation Theory (EVT) and the Black Sheep Effect, which together suggest that an effeminate straight man should be evaluated by other straight men more negatively than an effeminate gay man because the former target negatively violated expectations. Additionally, EVT suggests that a masculine gay man should be evaluated more positively than a masculine straight man because the former positively violated expectations. Self-identified straight men evaluated a male target whose sexual orientation and gender conformity were manipulated through a photo and vignette. Moderated mediation analyses were performed to determine if perceived expectancy violation mediated the relationship between sexual orientation and evaluations for both effeminate and masculine men. When sexual prejudice was used as a covariate, straight masculine targets were evaluated more favorably than gay masculine targets. Perceived expectancy violation did not mediate the relationship between sexual orientation and evaluations regardless of gender expression. More research should be conducted to identify the mechanism through which evaluations of straight and gay targets differ based on gender expression

The Meyersville School\u27s Utilization of Windows on Science

This study was designed to determine if the students and teachers of Meyersville School, Meyersville, Texas, liked the Windows on Science® program better than learning and teaching science using the traditional book. All students, grades three through six, and teachers, grades one through six, were surveyed regarding their opinion of Windows on Science®. This field experience indicated the students and teachers liked the Windows on Science® program better than using standard science textbooks. The male students had a higher mean score than the female students or teachers. The teachers felt they needed more experiments to help the students learn Windows on Science® better, but the students didn\u27t think they needed more experiments for this curriculum. As this was the first year for the students and teachers to utilize the Windows on Science® program, the teachers should be more familiar in the coming year and do a better job teaching. The teachers at Meyersville School using this program should attend one of the Teaching Tips workshops sponsored by Windows on Science®. Evaluation of this unique Electronic Instructional Media System (EIMS) curriculum is necessary to prove it is the right path to travel

The Meyersville School\u27s Utilization of Windows on Science

This study was designed to determine if the students and teachers of Meyersville School, Meyersville, Texas, liked the Windows on Science® program better than learning and teaching science using the traditional book. All students, grades three through six, and teachers, grades one through six, were surveyed regarding their opinion of Windows on Science®. This field experience indicated the students and teachers liked the Windows on Science® program better than using standard science textbooks. The male students had a higher mean score than the female students or teachers. The teachers felt they needed more experiments to help the students learn Windows on Science® better, but the students didn\u27t think they needed more experiments for this curriculum. As this was the first year for the students and teachers to utilize the Windows on Science® program, the teachers should be more familiar in the coming year and do a better job teaching. The teachers at Meyersville School using this program should attend one of the Teaching Tips workshops sponsored by Windows on Science®. Evaluation of this unique Electronic Instructional Media System (EIMS) curriculum is necessary to prove it is the right path to travel

Outlier Detection Using Nonconvex Penalized Regression

This paper studies the outlier detection problem from the point of view of penalized regressions. Our regression model adds one mean shift parameter for each of the $n$ data points. We then apply a regularization favoring a sparse vector of mean shift parameters. The usual $L_1$ penalty yields a convex criterion, but we find that it fails to deliver a robust estimator. The $L_1$ penalty corresponds to soft thresholding. We introduce a thresholding (denoted by $\Theta$) based iterative procedure for outlier detection ($\Theta$-IPOD). A version based on hard thresholding correctly identifies outliers on some hard test problems. We find that $\Theta$-IPOD is much faster than iteratively reweighted least squares for large data because each iteration costs at most $O(np)$ (and sometimes much less) avoiding an $O(np^2)$ least squares estimate. We describe the connection between $\Theta$-IPOD and $M$-estimators. Our proposed method has one tuning parameter with which to both identify outliers and estimate regression coefficients. A data-dependent choice can be made based on BIC. The tuned $\Theta$-IPOD shows outstanding performance in identifying outliers in various situations in comparison to other existing approaches. This methodology extends to high-dimensional modeling with $p\gg n$, if both the coefficient vector and the outlier pattern are sparse

Looking westwards and worshipping: The New York 'Creative Revolution' and British advertising, 1956-1980

This article explores the ways in which developments associated with the ?creative revolution? in New York advertising in the 1950s and 1960s were imported into the United Kingdom, helping to reshape advertising practices in London. In locating the development of UK advertising within this history of commercial exchange, this article explores the modes of transmission and the material conduits through which innovations in advertising practice crossed the Atlantic. It also focuses on the role played by a distinctive 1960s formation of practitioners who used an organisation called the Design and Art Directors Association to champion the new idioms of US advertising. Their rise to influence helped to legitimate a new set of criteria for evaluating advertising which placed ?creativity? above ?research? and the ?science of selling? as the principal measure of good advertising. In exploring the exporting of the ?new advertising? to the United Kingdom, this article develops a particular understanding of how Anglo-American advertising relations worked to shape UK advertising practices. This foregrounds the way the US ?creative revolution?, like other forms of US advertising, was adapted, hybridised and indigenised in its importing to Britain. This article shows how the ?new advertising? pioneered in New York was reworked and combined with more local cultural influences. Out of this emerged distinctive styles of British advertising in the 1960s and 1970s

The Meaning of the Seventeenth Amendment and a Century of State Defiance

Nearly a century ago, the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution worked a substantial change in American government, dictating that the people should elect their senators by popular vote. Despite its significance, there has been little written about what the Amendment means or how it works. This Article provides a comprehensive interpretation of the Seventeenth Amendment based on the text of the Amendment and a variety of other sources: historical and textual antecedents; relevant Supreme Court decisions; the complete debates in Congress; and the social and political factors that led to this new constitutional provision. Among other things, this analysis reveals that the Amendment requires states to fill Senate vacancies by holding elections, whether or not they first fill those vacancies by making temporary appointments. In so doing, the Seventeenth Amendment guarantees that the people’s right to vote for senators is protected in all circumstances. Using this interpretation as a baseline, this Article reviews state practice with respect to the filling of vacancies under the Seventeenth Amendment. Since the Amendment was adopted in 1913, there have been 244 vacancies in the U.S. Senate. In one-sixth of these cases, the states have directly violated the Seventeenth Amendment’s core requirement that senators be elected by popular vote by failing to hold any election. In addition, in many more cases the states have delayed significantly the required elections. These practices have cost the people 200 years of elected representation since the Constitution was amended to provide for direct election of senators, and there has been little resistance to this pattern of state defiance of the Constitution

Broken-Symmetry Unrestricted Hybrid Density Functional Calculations on Nickel Dimer and Nickel Hydride

In the present work we investigate the adequacy of broken-symmetry unrestricted density functional theory (DFT) for constructing the potential energy curve of nickel dimer and nickel hydride, as a model for larger bare and hydrogenated nickel cluster calculations. We use three hybrid functionals: the popular B3LYP, Becke's newest optimized functional Becke98, and the simple FSLYP functional (50% Hartree-Fock and 50% Slater exchange and LYP gradient-corrected correlation functional) with two basis sets: all-electron (AE) Wachters+f basis set and Stuttgart RSC effective core potential (ECP) and basis set. We find that, overall, the best agreement with experiment, comparable to that of the high-level CASPT2, is obtained with B3LYP/AE, closely followed by Becke98/AE and Becke98/ECP. FSLYP/AE and B3LYP/ECP give slightly worse agreement with experiment, and FSLYP/ECP is the only method among the ones we studied that gives an unaceptably large error, underestimating the dissociation energy of nickel dimer by 28%, and being in the largest disagreement with the experiment and the other theoretical predictions.Comment: 17 pages, 7 tables, 7 figures; submitted to J. Chem. Phys.; Revtex4/LaTeX2e. v2 (8/5/04): New (and better) ECP results, without charge density fitting (which was found to give large errors). Subtracted the relativistic corrections from all experimental value

Portland Society of Art Annual Spring Exhibition, April 15 to May 15, 1927

A list of works and artists featured in an exhibit at the Portland Society of Art, Spring and High Streets, Portland, Maine, in 1927

Sunshine Of Mine

https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/mmb-vp/2982/thumbnail.jp