Causality and Association: The Statistical and Legal Approaches

This paper discusses different needs and approaches to establishing ``causation'' that are relevant in legal cases involving statistical input based on epidemiological (or more generally observational or population-based) information. We distinguish between three versions of ``cause'': the first involves negligence in providing or allowing exposure, the second involves ``cause'' as it is shown through a scientifically proved increased risk of an outcome from the exposure in a population, and the third considers ``cause'' as it might apply to an individual plaintiff based on the first two. The population-oriented ``cause'' is that commonly addressed by statisticians, and we propose a variation on the Bradford Hill approach to testing such causality in an observational framework, and discuss how such a systematic series of tests might be considered in a legal context. We review some current legal approaches to using probabilistic statements, and link these with the scientific methodology as developed here. In particular, we provide an approach both to the idea of individual outcomes being caused on a balance of probabilities, and to the idea of material contribution to such outcomes. Statistical terminology and legal usage of terms such as ``proof on the balance of probabilities'' or ``causation'' can easily become confused, largely due to similar language describing dissimilar concepts; we conclude, however, that a careful analysis can identify and separate those areas in which a legal decision alone is required and those areas in which scientific approaches are useful.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/07-STS234 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

"Watch me go invisible": Representing racial passing in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's Incognegro

This is the author accepted manuscript. the final version is available from Johns Hopkins University Press via the DOI in this recordThis essay examines the potential of the graphic novel as a vehicle to explore one of the most enduring tropes in American culture: racial passing. As what Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven term a “hybrid project,” graphic narrative has the potential to pose “a challenge to the structure of binary classification that opposes a set of terms, privileging one.” Since passing narratives are themselves devoted to unsettling binaries – racial binaries – this essay considers the marrying of the graphic novel and the passing narrative in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece's Incognegro (2008). How, in other words, can what Scott McCloud terms “the art of the invisible” (comics) depict what Joel Williamson memorably calls “invisible blackness”? The essay is particular interested in two aspects of Incognegro’s hybridity, one of which relates content, the other to form. First, in terms of content, the collaborators make several significant revisions to the comic book’s signature character, the superhero, amalgamating the conventions of the superhero story with those of passing narratives in order to destabilise some of both genres’ most telling assumptions. Second, in terms of formal devices, this essay examines the particular combination of visual and textual vocabularies deployed in Incognegro to portray the ambiguously-raced subject, comparing it to the ways in which such subjects have been racially-encoded in more conventional literary and cinematic narratives of passing. Ultimately, this essay considers whether Incognegro’s hybrid properties offer new political possibilities for the narrative of racial passing

“The Lost Apostrophe”?: Race, the roots journey and the “Rose of Tralee” pageant

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Taylor & Francis via the DOI in this record.Building on recent scholarship on discourses of race in twentieth-century and contemporary Ireland, this article examines the racialised nature of the “roots journey”, in which subjects of Irish descent–typically white Irish Americans–travel back to Ireland to trace their roots. Outlining arguments that have emphasised both the reactionary and radical potential of the practices of genealogy and the search for roots, the article focuses on recent developments in the Rose of Tralee contest, an annual beauty pageant in which women of Irish descent compete for the title “Rose of Tralee”. Noting that three winners since 1998 (and several other competitors since 1994) have been of mixed race ancestry, and emphasising the subsequent roots journeys undertaken by two of these winners to the Philippines and India, respectively, the article questions whether these roots journey, taking non-white subjects of Irish descent out of Ireland rather than into it, may offer the potential of decoupling “Irishness” and “whiteness” in radical new ways

Temperature in nonequilibrium systems with conserved energy

We study a class of nonequilibrium lattice models which describe local redistributions of a globally conserved energy. A particular subclass can be solved analytically, allowing to define a temperature T_{th} along the same lines as in the equilibrium microcanonical ensemble. The fluctuation-dissipation relation is explicitely found to be linear, but its slope differs from the inverse temperature T_{th}^{-1}. A numerical renormalization group procedure suggests that, at a coarse-grained level, all models behave similarly, leading to a two-parameter description of their macroscopic properties.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, final versio

Integrated Hybrid System Architecture for Risk Analysis

A conceptual design has been announced of an expert-system computer program, and the development of a prototype of the program, intended for use as a project-management tool. The program integrates schedule and risk data for the purpose of determining the schedule applications of safety risks and, somewhat conversely, the effects of changes in schedules on changes on safety. It is noted that the design has been delivered to a NASA client and that it is planned to disclose the design in a conference presentation