A Conversation with Shayle R. Searle

Born in New Zealand, Shayle Robert Searle earned a bachelor's degree (1949) and a master's degree (1950) from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand. After working for an actuary, Searle went to Cambridge University where he earned a Diploma in mathematical statistics in 1953. Searle won a Fulbright travel award to Cornell University, where he earned a doctorate in animal breeding, with a strong minor in statistics in 1959, studying under Professor Charles Henderson. In 1962, Cornell invited Searle to work in the university's computing center, and he soon joined the faculty as an assistant professor of biological statistics. He was promoted to associate professor in 1965, and became a professor of biological statistics in 1970. Searle has also been a visiting professor at Texas A&M University, Florida State University, Universit\"{a}t Augsburg and the University of Auckland. He has published several statistics textbooks and has authored more than 165 papers. Searle is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Royal Statistical Society, and he is an elected member of the International Statistical Institute. He also has received the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award, is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and was recently awarded the D.Sc. Honoris Causa by his alma mater, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS259 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Trends in AFDC Participation Rates: The Implications for Welfare Reform

Congress justified the recent reform of federal welfare policy in part by citing the increase in the AFDC caseload since the late 1960s. The caseload, i.e., the number of families using AFDC, is determined by the number of families eligible to participate and by the proportion of these families who use the program. Yet the debate over reforming welfare rarely paid attention to the latter—the participation rates among female heads of families. While the number of cases changed little during the early to mid-1980s, the percentage of families with single female heads who used AFDC declined. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, both caseloads and participation rates increased. This paper documents the changes in participation rates since the mid-1980s, racial and ethnic differences in participation rates, and factors that might be associated with these changes. The only major trend that consistently parallels the changes in participation rates is the trend in unemployment. Existing data do not permit us to conclude that unemployment is the major determinant of participation rates. If unemployment drives participation rates, however, the recent changes in welfare legislation may create serious problems for many female heads of families in periods of high unemployment.

Perceptions of human attractiveness comprising face and voice cues

In human mate choice, sexually dimorphic faces and voices comprise hormone-mediated cues that purportedly develop as an indicator of mate quality or the ability to compete with same-sex rivals. If preferences for faces communicate the same biologically relevant information as do voices, then ratings of these cues should correlate. Sixty participants (30 male and 30 female) rated a series of opposite-sex faces, voices, and faces together with voices for attractiveness in a repeated measures computer-based experiment. The effects of face and voice attractiveness on face-voice compound stimuli were analyzed using a multilevel model. Faces contributed proportionally more than voices to ratings of face-voice compound attractiveness. Faces and voices positively and independently contributed to the attractiveness of male compound stimuli although there was no significant correlation between their rated attractiveness. A positive interaction and correlation between attractiveness was shown for faces and voices in relation to the attractiveness of female compound stimuli. Rather than providing a better estimate of a single characteristic, male faces and voices may instead communicate independent information that, in turn, provides a female with a better assessment of overall mate quality. Conversely, female faces and voices together provide males with a more accurate assessment of a single dimension of mate quality