A grief that cannot be shared: continuing relationships with aborted foetuses in contemporary Vietnam

For Vietnamese women who undergo an abortion, the deeply distressing experience can be extenuated by the stigmatisation of abortion and the disenfranchisement of grief relating to it. Abortion is a sensitive subject in Vietnam, embedded in moral ambiguities concerning youth sexual activities and the ancestral relationship the Vietnamese have with the dead. The aborted fetus is not easily reconciled with the act of ancestor worship and questions arise as to how women express their grief and if a continuing relationship should be sustained with the aborted fetus. Based on twelve months, ethnographic research, this article contends that some Vietnamese women are continuing a relationship with their aborted fetus within the online memorial Nghia Trang Online as a way of performing ancestor worship and expressing their grief. Through the theory of durable biography and disenfranchised grief, it will be demonstrated that a continuing relationship is formed through communication and online offerings to express grief, ask for forgiveness, share past and present experiences, and through prayer and guidance for the fetus in the otherworld.Anthony Heathcot

Estimating marginal cohort working life expectancies from sequential cross-sectional survey data

This article applies recently developed health expectancy methodologies to estimate the average duration of future work life in different states of work ability. Data on working capacity obtained from sequential cross-sectional samples of the cohort population were available from Finnish surveys conducted among active municipal employees. We used these data to estimate cohort marginal probabilities and expected occupancy times in the work ability states. One finding is that the proportion of workers with excellent or good work ability decreased monotonically with advancing age for both genders, but men were prone to have worse work ability and a shorter work career than women. Transition from poor to good or excellent work ability state was estimated to increase working life expectancy of a 45-year-old person by four years for both genders. This study indicates that the work ability of aging Finnish workers deteriorates prematurely, leading to serious socio-economic consequences. Thus it is important to examine the development of work ability already at an early age when it is still possible to intervene in the process

Computing Bayes Factors for Evidence-Accumulation Models Using Warp-III Bridge Sampling

Over the last decade, the Bayesian estimation of evidence-accumulation models has gainedpopularity, largely due to the advantages afforded by the Bayesian hierarchical framework.Despite recent advances in the Bayesian estimation of evidence-accumulation models,model comparison continues to rely on suboptimal procedures, such as posterior parameterinference and model selection criteria known to favor overly complex models. In this paperwe advocate model comparison for evidence-accumulation models based on the Bayesfactor obtained via Warp-III bridge sampling. We demonstrate, using the Linear BallisticAccumulator (LBA), that Warp-III sampling provides a powerful and flexible approachthat can be applied to both nested and non-nested model comparisons, even in complexand high-dimensional hierarchical instantiations of the LBA. We provide an easy-to-usesoftware implementation of the Warp-III sampler and outline a series of recommendationsaimed at facilitating the use of Warp-III sampling in practical applications