Harry Potter and the Meaning of Death

The paper reviews how J.K. Rowling is able to examine death in the Harry Potter book series. In the first part of the text the author touches on the deaths of Harry\u27s parents and the scarring that Harry receives from that, as well as an examination of how the deaths of others, from close friends to acquaintances, have affected Harry, specifically pertaining to his personal responsibility for them and also his grieving process. The paper also goes into how Voldemort\u27s inability to feel love, paired with his fear of dying, have pushed his quest for immortality (using Horcruxes). Harry\u27s mastery of death (using the Hallows), his willingness to accept death, and his sense of love and sacrifice for his friends is what enables him to finally defeat Voldemort. The main message is that the Harry Potter books are great entertainment, but their underlying philosophy on death creates a depth that Rowling wants us to learn from: death is a part of life, and seeking love and friendship is much more important than worrying about death

Re-figuring Federalism: Nation and State in Health Reform's Next Round

Reviews the evolution of national healthcare reform movements and the relationship between the federal and state governments, with international comparisons. Outlines differences to be resolved over Medicaid and other programs under a reformed system

Zeros of Systems of p{\mathfrak p}-adic Quadratic Forms

It is shown that a system of $r$ quadratic forms over a ${\mathfrak p}$-adic field has a non-trivial common zero as soon as the number of variables exceeds $4r$, providing that the residue class field has cardinality at least $(2r)^r$.Comment: Revised version, with better treatment and results for characteristic

The largest prime factor of X3+2X^3+2

The largest prime factor of $X^3+2$ has been investigated by Hooley, who gave a conditional proof that it is infinitely often at least as large as $X^{1+\delta}$, with a certain positive constant $\delta$. It is trivial to obtain such a result with $\delta=0$. One may think of Hooley's result as an approximation to the conjecture that $X^3+2$ is infinitely often prime. The condition required by Hooley, his R$^{*}$ conjecture, gives a non-trivial bound for short Ramanujan-Kloosterman sums. The present paper gives an unconditional proof that the largest prime factor of $X^3+2$ is infinitely often at least as large as $X^{1+\delta}$, though with a much smaller constant than that obtained by Hooley. In order to do this we prove a non-trivial bound for short Ramanujan-Kloosterman sums with smooth modulus. It is also necessary to modify the Chebychev method, as used by Hooley, so as to ensure that the sums that occur do indeed have a sufficiently smooth modulus

Meeting basic needs? Forced migrants and welfare

As the number of forced migrants entering Britain has risen, increasingly restrictive immigration and asylum policy has been introduced. Simultaneously, successive governments have sought to limit the welfare entitlements of forced migrants. Drawing on two sets of semi-structured qualitative interviews, with migrants and key respondents providing welfare services, this paper considers the adequacy of welfare provisions in relation to the financial and housing needs of four different groups of forced migrants i.e. refugees, asylum seekers, those with humanitarian protection status and failed asylum seekers/‘overstayers’. There is strong evidence to suggest that statutory provisions are failing to meet the basic financial and housing needs of many forced migrants

In-season prediction of batting averages: A field test of empirical Bayes and Bayes methodologies

Batting average is one of the principle performance measures for an individual baseball player. It is natural to statistically model this as a binomial-variable proportion, with a given (observed) number of qualifying attempts (called ``at-bats''), an observed number of successes (``hits'') distributed according to the binomial distribution, and with a true (but unknown) value of $p_i$ that represents the player's latent ability. This is a common data structure in many statistical applications; and so the methodological study here has implications for such a range of applications. We look at batting records for each Major League player over the course of a single season (2005). The primary focus is on using only the batting records from an earlier part of the season (e.g., the first 3 months) in order to estimate the batter's latent ability, $p_i$, and consequently, also to predict their batting-average performance for the remainder of the season. Since we are using a season that has already concluded, we can then validate our estimation performance by comparing the estimated values to the actual values for the remainder of the season. The prediction methods to be investigated are motivated from empirical Bayes and hierarchical Bayes interpretations. A newly proposed nonparametric empirical Bayes procedure performs particularly well in the basic analysis of the full data set, though less well with analyses involving more homogeneous subsets of the data. In those more homogeneous situations better performance is obtained from appropriate versions of more familiar methods. In all situations the poorest performing choice is the na\"{{\i}}ve predictor which directly uses the current average to predict the future average.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-AOAS138 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org