A Conversation with Robert V. Hogg

Robert Vincent Hogg was born on November 8, 1924 in Hannibal, Missouri. He earned a Ph.D. in statistics at the University of Iowa in 1950, where his advisor was Allen Craig. Following graduation, he joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Iowa. He was the founding Chair when the Department of Statistics was created at Iowa in 1965 and he served in that capacity for 19 years. At Iowa he also served as Chair of the Quality Management and Productivity Program and the Hanson Chair of Manufacturing Productivity. He became Professor Emeritus in 2001 after 51 years on the Iowa faculty. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the American Statistical Association plus an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He was President of the American Statistical Association (1988) and chaired two of its winter conferences (1992, 1994). He received the ASA's Founder's Award (1991) and the Gottfried Noether Award (2001) for contributions to nonparametric statistics. His publications through 1996 are described in Communications in Statistics--Theory and Methods (1996), 2467--2481. This interview was conducted on April 14, 2004 at the Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, and revised in the summer of 2006.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000637 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Government marriage education programs do little to address gender inequalities

For the past 14 years, the Federal government’s Healthy Marriage Initiative has sought to encourage marriage by helping couples develop relationship skills. While the program may have good intentions, in new research Jennifer M. Randles finds that many of the program’s components reinforce gender stereotypes about how men and women communicate and ignore how gender inequalities can influence power imbalances within relationships

Government “Healthy Marriage” programs should focus less on the benefits of marriage and more on helping couples to cope.

Since the early 2000s, the federal government has spent nearly $1 billion on the Healthy Marriage Initiative which has the aim of strengthening economic mobility via marriage. Jennifer M. Randles observed marriage education classes closely, interviewing participants and training as a marriage educator. She finds that while healthy marriage policy promotes the idea that marital commitment is a bulwark against poverty, those on low-incomes believe that marriage represents the culmination of prosperity – not a means of achieving it. She writes that relationship policies would likely be more useful if they focused less on the benefits of marriage and more on how economic stress can take an emotional toll on relationships

Outlaw Murals

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A deliberative model for self-adaptation middleware using architectural dependency

A crucial prerequisite to externalized adaptation is an understanding of how components are interconnected, or more particularly how and why they depend on one another. Such dependencies can be used to provide an architectural model, which provides a reference point for externalized adaptation. In this paper, it is described how dependencies are used as a basis to systems' self-understanding and subsequent architectural reconfigurations. The approach is based on the combination of: instrumentation services, a dependency meta-model and a system controller. In particular, the latter uses self-healing repair rules (or conflict resolution strategies), based on extensible beliefs, desires and intention (EBDI) model, to reflect reconfiguration changes back to a target application under examination

‘Post-Los Angeles’ : the conceptual city in Steve Erickson’s Amnesiascope

Within Steve Erickson’s texts, we often find setting functioning as a conceptual vehicle, the result of which is the creation of works identifiable by a number of disorienting and tangential qualities. Emanating from such employment is the presence of a symbiotic relationship existent between protagonists and their environment. Not only does this manifest in terms of interpersonal relationships, with topography fluctuating in accordance with the state of these, but we also find it apparent internally, often reflective of individual character. It is worth considering, however, the various elements and influences that inform Erickson’s conceptual settings. The writer’s fifth novel, Amnesiascope (1996), arguably depicts the most arresting of these conceptual settings. Featuring an author surrogate as the text’s central character, we find notable associations with his home city that create a ‘post-Los Angeles’. My essay aims to explore the extent to which Erickson’s own biographic details and personal interests shape this particular setting, detailing its place in the wider context of his work, whilst also analysing how a range of themes manifest within the confines of such a carefully crafted milieu.peer-reviewe