Prediction in several conventional contexts

We review predictive techniques from several traditional branches of statistics. Starting with prediction based on the normal model and on the empirical distribution function, we proceed to techniques for various forms of regression and classification. Then, we turn to time series, longitudinal data, and survival analysis. Our focus throughout is on the mechanics of prediction more than on the properties of predictors

The Native Title Amendment Bill 1997: A different order of uncertainty?

This paper analyses the likely contribution of the Native Title Amendment Bill 1997 to the 'certainty' of other land titles after the High Court decision in Wik Peoples v Queensland. It concludes that, while the Bill contains several 'bucketloads' of extinguishment, its main impact on native title in pastoral areas will be one of extensive and permanent suppression by expanded pastoral land uses, at significant public expense. The costs of this direct and de facto extinguishment are unknown and probably unknowable. There is a real risk that future governments will be tempted to unravel this extinguishment if the costs of compensation prove too high, with a resulting increase in uncertainty as to the location of native titles in future. The paper examines the Bill's 'validation' of mining tenements granted over coexisting native title on pastoral leasehold. This validation rewards governments which defied the 'future acts' regime of the Native Title Act 1993 (NTA), penalising the one government (Western Australia) which complied with it and miners which relied on that government for tenement grants but have not yet received them. The Bill contains many provisions unrelated to Wik. Many re-instate the pre-Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (RDA) position÷that governments, not Aborigines, control use of land and resources, particularly in remote areas, and that Crown-granted titles enjoy a position of privilege over native titles. Under the Bill, a much diminished version of the NTA 'right to negotiate' (RTN) may be available only to those people who prove their native title in the Federal Court, where their claim was made within six years of the Bill's commencement. Even for those claimants who meet the strict claims sunset clause, the RTN may be available only over land which has never been granted on another title or reserved for public use, including as a national park, and which lies outside of towns. While the Bill's reassertion of government control over 'land management', and its denial of native title holders' right to participate in that management, may appear to produce 'certainty', these factors contribute to wider political uncertainties about the future of native title law. The paper measures the Bill against the international human rights standards embodied in the RDA. It concludes that the Bill is inconsistent with these standards, and that its enactment will impliedly repeal the RDA's protection of native title, attracting negative international attention and triggering United Nations complaints. These political developments may have significant implications for Australian trade. Finally, the paper examines arguments about the Bill's unconstitutionality under the Commonwealth Parliament's 'races' power. It concludes that the High Court may require Parliament to use its 1967 referendum power to benefit Aboriginal people, not to discriminate against them. However, the definition of 'benefit' may be crucial. If 'benefit' involves only a slight improvement on the position of native title under the discriminatory common law rules of extinguishment, only some of the Bill's provisions may be unconstitutional. But if 'benefit' requires either racial non-discrimination or Indigenous consent, many other parts of the Bill will be unconstitutional. Either way, if the Bill is enacted in 1997, uncertainty over its constitutionality (and over the validity of those titles which depend on it) is unlikely to be resolved before the end of 1998

Apocalyptic sublimes and the recalibration of distance: doing art-anthropology in post-disaster Japan.

On 11 March 2011, a ‘triple disaster’ (an earthquake – the strongest since records began – a subsequent tsunami, and a nuclear accident at the Fukushima Daiichi plant) devastated the Tohoku region of north-east Japan. This singular yet predictable event has come to be called ‘3.11’, echoing the traumatic event of ‘9.11’. The disaster was predictable insofar as Japan, situated within the ‘ring of fire’ – an area approximately 40,000 km long in the basin of the Pacific Ocean, associated with frequent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions – has long experienced ecological hazards. This earthquake and tsunami left 18,000 people dead and thousands more injured. Over 340,000 people were displaced from their homes, as hundreds of thousands of buildings were destroyed. As this is a coastal and rural region, many livelihoods connected to fishing and agricultural production were obliterated overnight. A hundred and ten thousand residents in communities in and around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were officially evacuated immediately, and many more ‘voluntarily’ evacuated (without support from the government) because of concerns about the dangerous levels of radiation – a result of a nuclear ‘meltdown’ and subsequent explosions at Fukushima. To this day, only about half of the evacuees have returned home, a problem for the government since plans for recovery are based on people returning to their towns. By March 2018, the national government had ended financial support for the majority of nuclear evacuees. While decontamination projects actively removed tons of topsoil and debris, cycles of rain and wind continue to carry radiation across the region and, with it, uncertainty

Review of Natalie Loveless (ed.) "Knowings and knots: methodologies and ecologies in research-creation".

Knowings and Knots itself offers few detailed discussions of actual knots, save for Caroline Cambre's impeccable description of Inca khipu knots, which 'exist at the juncture of memory, language, visual signs, and tactile processes' and could 'be undone and re-done' (89). The titular knots are of course metaphorical, referring to Donna Haraway who writes in When Species Meet about how: 'Figures are not representations or didactic illustrations, but rather material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another' (2007:4). Natalie Loveless' Afterwords accordingly describes knots as that which 'name[s] sites of productive dissent and dissonance' and an 'invitation to join the debate' (303). A debate on research-creation is exactly what this curated collection offers. I am familiar with the metaphor of knots and knotting as a trope and find it an apposite metaphor for the sorts of work(s), performances, events, conversations and publications (making publics) that feature here. Knots, then, are employed as a 'principle of coherence' as the anthropologist Tim Ingold suggests they can be, because they can help describe how 'contrary forces of tension and friction, as in pulling tight, are generative of new forms […] one can never determine what is on the inside or on the outside. Knots don't have insides and outsides; they have interstices'. (Ingold 2016:6). This book opens up to the doing and undoing involved in the generation of research-creation, the makings of new forms of knowledge, and what it is to work at the interstices – the interstices of thinking-feeling, of bodies, human, nonhuman, entangling with places and other communities, ecologically. Doing so also means it asks urgent questions about what it means to make things, what it means to co-compose with the world (cf. Manning, 2014)

An ensemble approach to improved prediction from multitype data

We have developed a strategy for the analysis of newly available binary data to improve outcome predictions based on existing data (binary or non-binary). Our strategy involves two modeling approaches for the newly available data, one combining binary covariate selection via LASSO with logistic regression and one based on logic trees. The results of these models are then compared to the results of a model based on existing data with the objective of combining model results to achieve the most accurate predictions. The combination of model predictions is aided by the use of support vector machines to identify subspaces of the covariate space in which specific models lead to successful predictions. We demonstrate our approach in the analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data and traditional clinical risk factors for the prediction of coronary heart disease