"True Believers" or Numerical Terrorism at the Nuclear Power Plant

For decades, there has been a heated debate about whether or not nuclear power plants contribute to childhood cancer in their respective neighbourhoods, with statisticians testifying on both sides. The present paper points to some flaws in the pro-arguments, taking a recent study prepared for the political party "Bündnis 90 / Grüne" as a specimen. Typical mistakes include an understatement of the size of tests of significance, disregard of important covariates and extreme reliance on very few selected data points.

Involvement of German students in NS organisations based on the archive of the Reichsstudentenwerk

Stichprobenartige Daten, die das Reichsstudentenwerk von 1933 bis 1942 gesammelt hat, werden genutzt, um Aussagen hinsichtlich des Prozentsatzes der Studenten, die in Nazi-Organisationen mitarbeiteten, zu machen. Ob diese Daten des Reichsstudentenwerkes repräsentativ sind, wird an Hand allgemeiner Volkszählungsdaten für die gesamte Studentenschaft überprüft. Aussagen können nur mit größter Vorsicht gemacht werden. Die Aktivitäten von Studenten in Nazi-Organisationen wurde als sehr hoch ermittelt. Nur wenige Kerndaten, Geschlecht, Geburtsort und Status des Vaters, waren aus dem Datenmaterial als wichtig zu identifizieren, um die Nazi-Verbindung zu bestimmen. Logische Varianzanalyse wird verwandt, um die Relation der erklärenden variablen Faktoren zu überprüfen. Die Methode des 'Iterative Proportional Fitting' wird benutzt, um das Engagement der Gesamtstudentenschaft in Nazi-Organisationen abzuschätzen. Marginalen Daten der Stichproben, die nicht verhältnismäßig zur Gesamtbevölkerung waren, wurden dabei kontrolliert. (KW)'Sample data from the Reichsstudentenwerk collected from 1933 to 1942 are used to make inferences on the percentage of students involved in Nazi-Organisations. On the basis of available census data the extent of representativity of this body of data for the whole student population is checked. Inferences can only be drawn with great care. Involvement of students in Nazi-Organisations was found to be very high. Of all the variables from the data set only a few - sex, birth cohort and father's status - prove to be important for determining Nazi affiliation. To check for the interrelations of the explanatory variables logistic analysis of variance is used. Finally the method of iterative propotional fitting is applied to estimate the Nazi involvement of the whole student population by controlling for the marginals of the sample not found to be equal in proportion to the total population.' (author's abstract

Mental Health and Looked After Children Time for change not more of the same

There are fundamental difficulties currently existing with mental health provision for all children including LAC at this time within the UK. Investment into service provision is highlighted as the main barrier in providing support or intervention for children or adolescents, there appears to be little regard for the longer term costs of not providing support or intervention. This includes a deterioration mental wellbeing, and overall health as portrayed within the ACE study. These factors directly correlate to any future employment and adult service need. More concerning are the wider impact indicators for LAC as they progress throughout adolescence. It is well documented that LAC individually and collectively achieve less academically than their peers, and are more likely to be excluded within behaviour policies for schools in addition to being identified as having SEN compared to their peers. Within the Youth Justice system there are proportionally more LAC than their non LAC peers and higher levels of substance misuse. All recommendations addressing early intervention for the mental wellbeing of not only LAC but all children, highlight the positive outcomes in economic terms for the Government and for the individual both short and long term. Whilst a review of current provision may be urgently required, this appears to be a repetition of what is already known. This report argues that it is now time for change not more of the same and whilst on the 9th January 2017 Theresa May, Prime Minister for the UK, announced new approaches to Mental Health for Children and Young People asking that the Care Quality Commission lead a review of Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to ascertain what works well and what does not. Whilst this may be commendable, a review of this nature has been available since 2009. This suggests that even when recommendations are made little changes in the real world for these childre

Psychoanalytische Theorien der Psychosen

Der Verbindung von Philosophie und Psychoanalyse ist auf vielfache Weise nachgegangen worden - sei es als Aufarbeitung der philosophischen Vorgeschichte des Freudschen Werkes oder in Form einer wissenschaftstheoretischen oder hermeneutischen Auseinandersetzung mit diesem. Was aufgrund der vielfältigen Zugänge zur traditionellen Psychoanalyse jedenfalls verdeutlicht scheint, ist ein Stellenwert, der über den bloßen Therapieanspruch hinausgeht. Dass die Psychoanalyse nun nicht ausgedient und als Auslaufmodell den Anschluss an das zeitgenössische Denken verloren hat, darf auch als eine Leistung Lacans gesehen werden. Mit der neuen theoretischen Grundlegung der Psychoanalyse vor allem in Hinblick auf zentrale Begriffe wie dem des Unbewussten, eröffnet sich nicht nur eine Möglichkeit zur Aktualisierung und Neuinterpretation des Werkes Freuds, sondern auch eine philosophische Haltung innerhalb der Psychoanalyse. In vorliegender Arbeit soll nun der Fokus auf das Interesse der Psychoanalyse an den Psychosen gerichtet sein. Hier geht es nicht um die Entdeckung und Erforschung von "Verrücktem" und Exotischem, sondern um das Interesse an der Intimität des menschlichen Daseins. Die psychotische Struktur verdeutlicht in sehr fundamentaler Weise die Struktur des Subjekts und sein Verhältnis zur Welt überhaupt. Anhand der Sichtweise der Psychosen soll also eine Entwicklung nachgezeichnet werden, von der Lacan selber sagt, sie wäre als Rückkehr zu Freud zu lesen

Spatially resolved stress measurements in materials with polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography: image acquisition and processing aspects

We demonstrate that polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is suitable to map the stress distribution within materials in a contactless and non-destructive way. In contrast to transmission photoelasticity measurements the samples do not have to be transparent but can be of scattering nature. Denoising and analysis of fringe patterns in single PS-OCT retardation images are demonstrated to deliver the basis for a quantitative whole-field evaluation of the internal stress state of samples under investigation.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures; Copyright: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2008; The definitive version is available at: www.blackwell-synergy.co

Mixture modeling with applications in schizophrenia research

Finite mixture modeling, together with the EM algorithm, have been widely used in clustering analysis. Under such methods, the unknown group membership is usually treated as missing data. When the "complete data" (log-)likelihood function does not have an explicit solution, the simplicity of the EM algorithm breaks down. Authors, including Rai and Matthews (1993), Lange (1995a) and Titterington (1984), developed modified algorithms therefore. As motivated by research in a large neurobiological project, we propose in this paper a new variant of such modifications and show that it is self-consistent. Moreover, simulations are conducted to demonstrate that the new variant converges faster than its predecessors. Originally published Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, Vol. 53, No. 7, May 200

Estimation of health effects of prenatal methylmercury exposure using structural equation models

BACKGROUND: Observational studies in epidemiology always involve concerns regarding validity, especially measurement error, confounding, missing data, and other problems that may affect the study outcomes. Widely used standard statistical techniques, such as multiple regression analysis, may to some extent adjust for these shortcomings. However, structural equations may incorporate most of these considerations, thereby providing overall adjusted estimations of associations. This approach was used in a large epidemiological data set from a prospective study of developmental methyl-mercury toxicity. RESULTS: Structural equation models were developed for assessment of the association between biomarkers of prenatal mercury exposure and neuropsychological test scores in 7 year old children. Eleven neurobehavioral outcomes were grouped into motor function and verbally mediated function. Adjustment for local dependence and item bias was necessary for a satisfactory fit of the model, but had little impact on the estimated mercury effects. The mercury effect on the two latent neurobehavioral functions was similar to the strongest effects seen for individual test scores of motor function and verbal skills. Adjustment for contaminant exposure to poly chlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) changed the estimates only marginally, but the mercury effect could be reduced to non-significance by assuming a large measurement error for the PCB biomarker. CONCLUSIONS: The structural equation analysis allows correction for measurement error in exposure variables, incorporation of multiple outcomes and incomplete cases. This approach therefore deserves to be applied more frequently in the analysis of complex epidemiological data sets

A Nonlinear Model with Latent Process for Cognitive Evolution Using Multivariate Longitudinal Data

Cognition is not directly measurable. It is assessed using psychometric tests, which can be viewed as quantitative measures of cognition with error. The aim of this article is to propose a model to describe the evolution in continuous time of unobserved cognition in the elderly and assess the impact of covariates directly on it. The latent cognitive process is defined using a linear mixed model including a Brownian motion and time-dependent covariates. The observed psychometric tests are considered as the results of parameterized nonlinear transformations of the latent cognitive process at discrete occasions. Estimation of the parameters contained both in the transformations and in the linear mixed model is achieved by maximizing the observed likelihood and graphical methods are performed to assess the goodness of fit of the model. The method is applied to data from PAQUID, a French prospective cohort study of ageing.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66403/1/j.1541-0420.2006.00573.x.pd

Residual-Based Diagnostics for Structural Equation Models

Classical diagnostics for structural equation models are based on aggregate forms of the data and are ill suited for checking distributional or linearity assumptions. We extend recently developed goodness-of-fit tests for correlated data based on subject-specific residuals to structural equation models with latent variables. The proposed tests lend themselves to graphical displays and are designed to detect misspecified distributional or linearity assumptions. To complement graphical displays, test statistics are defined; the null distributions of the test statistics are approximated using computationally efficient simulation techniques. The properties of the proposed tests are examined via simulation studies. We illustrate the methods using data from a study of in utero lead exposure.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65983/1/j.1541-0420.2008.01022.x.pd