A Protestant church

Thesis (B.S.)--University of Illinois, 1900.Typescript.Bound with 8 other B.S. theses in architecture from UIUC, 1900. IU-

Termination of psychotherapy : the relationship between the termination process, judgements of the client's need for further treatment and psychotherapy outcome : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University

This study was based on the data gained from eighty one terminating clients and their therapists at a university Psychological Services Centre. The study investigated the frequency with which clients and therapists agreed about three components of the termination process and if agreement was related to client outcome. The three components of termination investigated were, the reasons therapy was terminated, the mutuality of termination and the degree of need for further therapy. Client narrative responses to the question "Why is your therapy ending?" were coded into categories of reason and mutuality of termination. Raters reliably coded the majority of narrative answers. No difference in the ability of raters to make a coding with regard to the raters experience in Clinical Psychology was found. In approximately fifty percent of cases, therapists and clients did not agree about these three components of termination. It was also found that in those cases where there was agreement, the clients had better psychological outcomes, than in cases where there was no agreement

Agricultural Import Demand in Low-Income, Middle-Income, and Centrally Planned Economies

This report provides summaries of the papers and discussions at the third Consortium on Trade Research held in Washington, D.C., June 23-24, 1981. The cochairmen of the consortium were T. Kelley White, Economic Research Service (ERS), George E. Rossmiller, Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS), and Vernon Sorenson, Michigan State University. The Consortium focused on world demand for agricultural imports and the policies and conditions in low-income, middle-income, and centrally planned countries that influence import demand. An overview paper by Dewain Rahe and Cheryl Christensen assessed future global prospects for agricultural trade. Peter Timmer's paper investigated conceptual and empirical problems in analyzing import demand. Three of the papers discussed the demand for food and agricultural products in the Soviet Union and China. Three additional papers focused on factors affecting import demand in low- and middle-income countries. A final set of papers examined the role of bilateral agreements and stockholding policies in agricultural trade.Trade, import demand, projections, state trading, food reserves, stockholding, bilateral agreements, low-income countries, middle-income countries, centrally planned countries, International Relations/Trade,

Optimal pricing using online auction experiments: A P\'olya tree approach

We show how a retailer can estimate the optimal price of a new product using observed transaction prices from online second-price auction experiments. For this purpose we propose a Bayesian P\'olya tree approach which, given the limited nature of the data, requires a specially tailored implementation. Avoiding the need for a priori parametric assumptions, the P\'olya tree approach allows for flexible inference of the valuation distribution, leading to more robust estimation of optimal price than competing parametric approaches. In collaboration with an online jewelry retailer, we illustrate how our methodology can be combined with managerial prior knowledge to estimate the profit maximizing price of a new jewelry product.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS503 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Improved minimax predictive densities under Kullback--Leibler loss

Let $X| \mu \sim N_p(\mu,v_xI)$ and $Y| \mu \sim N_p(\mu,v_yI)$ be independent p-dimensional multivariate normal vectors with common unknown mean $\mu$. Based on only observing $X=x$, we consider the problem of obtaining a predictive density $\hat{p}(y| x)$ for $Y$ that is close to $p(y| \mu)$ as measured by expected Kullback--Leibler loss. A natural procedure for this problem is the (formal) Bayes predictive density $\hat{p}_{\mathrm{U}}(y| x)$ under the uniform prior $\pi_{\mathrm{U}}(\mu)\equiv 1$, which is best invariant and minimax. We show that any Bayes predictive density will be minimax if it is obtained by a prior yielding a marginal that is superharmonic or whose square root is superharmonic. This yields wide classes of minimax procedures that dominate $\hat{p}_{\mathrm{U}}(y| x)$, including Bayes predictive densities under superharmonic priors. Fundamental similarities and differences with the parallel theory of estimating a multivariate normal mean under quadratic loss are described.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053606000000155 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Bayesian forecasting of Prepayment Rates for Individual Pools of Mortgages

This paper proposes a novel approach for modeling prepayment rates of individual pools of mortgages. The model incorporates the empirical evidence that prepayment is past dependent via Bayesian methodology. There are many factors that influence the prepayment behavior and for many of them there is no available (or impossible to gather) information. We implement this issue by creating a Bayesian mixture model and construct a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm to estimate the parameters. We assess the model on a data set from the Bloomberg Database. Our results show that the burnout effect is a significant variable for explaining normal prepayment activities. This result does not hold when prepayment is triggered by non-pool dependent events. We show how to use the new model to compute prices for Mortgage Backed Securities. Monte Carlo simulation is the traditional method for obtaining such prices and the proposed model can be easily incorporated within simulation pricing framework. Prices for standard Pass-Throughs are obtained using simulation.State of Texas Advanced Research Program 003658-0763National Science Foundation CMMI-0457558, DMS-0605102Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineerin