Search Results

In the modern era, the methods of statistics were further abstracted from particular practical problems and the subject gained a distinct identity. In the first phase, Edgeworth and Karl Pearson worked vigorously on model-selecting induction, leading to the formulation of the famous Pearsonian chi-squared test. In the second phase, ‘Student’ started the small-sample theory for model-specific induction with his pioneering work, and Fisher, following up, developed a variety of sampling theory procedures and laid the foundations of the general theory of estimation, multivariate analysis, and the theory of design of experiments. All these areas were subsequently enriched by the contributions of a galaxy of workers. The logic of the behavioural approach to induction was consolidated by Neyman and E. S. Pearson, and was later extended and generalized by Wald. After the emergence of a rigorous theory of subjective probability, there was a revival of interest in the pro-subjective Bayesian and the purely subjective approach in the second half of the 20th century. Work on model-free induction covering large sample procedures, nonparametric methods, and the theory and practice of finite population sampling also progressed steadily during this period.

In 1986, Cicely Saunders' close friend and fellow hospice pioneer from Yale, Florence Wald, organized a colloquium to examine the spiritual component of hospice care and its relationship to more formal religious influences. At the symposium, a paper by Cicely Saunders explored this issue with a broad overview of the history of hospices since early times and went on to present the findings of a survey she had previously undertaken in England. The paper is also important in paying tribute to the important role played by the theologian Dr Olive Wyon in the development of Cicely Saunders' ideas about the religious character of St Christopher's Hospice and was to serve as an important stimulus to much subsequent thinking about the nature of ‘spiritual care’ at the end of life.

This chapter considers reasonable decision making with sample data from randomized trials. It continues discussion of reasonable patient care under uncertainty. Because of its centrality to evidence-based medicine, the chapter focuses on the use of sample trial data in treatment choice. Moreover, having already addressed identification, the chapter considers only statistical imprecision, as has been the case in the statistical literature on trials. The Wald (1950) development of statistical decision theory provides a coherent framework for use of sample data to make decisions. A body of recent research applies statistical decision theory to determine treatment choices that achieve adequate performance in all states of nature, in the sense of maximum regret. This chapter describes the basic ideas and findings, which provide an appealing practical alternative to use of hypothesis tests.

The introduction situates epidemiology as an analytical framework, and demonstrates the power of epidemiology to reorganize national, economic, and geopolitical boundaries around Western etiologies of illness. In doing so, it addresses four primary questions: (1) What does epidemiology mean in the context of literary criticism? (2) What is the relation between epidemiology and seventeenth-century New England? (3) What is an “epidemiology of narrative”? (4) What does an epidemiology of narrative teach us about Early American studies?

This chapter delves deeper into the specification, estimation, and interpretation of the multilevel model for change. Following introduction of a new data set, it presents a composite formulation of the model that combines the level-1 and level-2 submodels together into a single equation. The new composite model leads naturally to consideration of alternative methods of estimation. The chapter not only describes two new methods—generalized least squares (GLS) and iterative generalized least squares (IGLS) within each, it distinguishes further between two types of approaches, the full and the restricted. The remainder of the chapter focuses on real-world issues of data analysis.

During the war years, Curtiz interspersedhis long hours at the studio with relaxation at the Canoga Ranch.Hal Wallis and Jack Warner had their final falling-out, and Wallis left the studio in April 1944.He set up a production company at Paramount and wooed Curtiz to join him. Curtiz remained loyal to the Warners, but he began making plans for his own independent company. Feeling liberated from Wallis’s oversight, Curtiz directedRoughly Speaking.Mildred Pierce became one of Curtiz’s classic films as he teamed up with the producer Jerry Wald to resurrect Joan Crawford’s career with an Oscar-winning performance.Night and Day was a musical biopic of Cole Porter that pitted Curtiz against itsstar,Cary Grant, who attempted to manage every detail of the production. Despite Grant’s interference, the picture became a huge box-office hit and set the stage for Curtiz to establish his own production company on the Warner lot as World War II came to a triumphant end.

After purchasing various film properties that went nowhere, Curtiz decided to produce a Technicolor musical, Romance on the High Seas. Flummoxed in his attempt to cast stars, including Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Kathryn Grayson, and Betty Hutton, he gambled on a little-known band singer, Doris Day, whom he nurtured to stardom.Curtiz’s My Dream Is Yours followed Romance. Although both pictures appeared to be successful, Curtiz’s production company was sinking in a sea of red ink because of his own financial mismanagement and Jack Warner’s predatory business practices.His final production, Flamingo Road, was a box-office success that Curtiz was forced into making after a major confrontation with Warner Bros. that went public. As the studio cut back under the dual assaults of television and the antitrust divestiture of its movie theaters, Curtiz sold his company to Warner and signed an exclusive contract with the studio. After being forced to make the abysmal Lady Takes a Sailor, Curtiz directed Young Man with a Horn (1950), a critically acclaimed film whose success was tempered by Jack Warner’s obdurate insistence on a happy ending.

This chapter focuses on three prominent noir figures: Jerry Wald, Adrian Scott, and Mark Hellinger—the “pragmatist,” the “ideologue,” and the “realist,” respectively—each of whom significantly impacted the development of classic noir as a creative and commercial production cycle. What unites the work of these very different men was a shared sense that film noir was a vehicle through which to realize their ambitions and a way to engage contemporary audiences whose tastes were changing. Moreover, each saw the producer's role as pivotal, straddling the worlds of commerce and creativity, positioned to make the key decisions that shaped a film—choosing source materials, collaborating closely with writers and directors, and overseeing casting and locations.

This chapter discusses Syrian physicist, Dr. Bizri's confirmation about science mindsets for his country after he read the author's “Barriers to Thinking New about Energy” piece. It cites Professor Clark Bullard, who wrote that the “Barriers” paper is useful in teaching engineering and George Wald, a well-known Harvard biologist, who spoke of changing attitudes in science since the beginning of the twentieth century. It also refers to Asher Peres, An Israeli physicist who conflated support for solar energy policies to ancient beliefs in “sun gods” and dismissed concern over nuclear energy safety. The chapter follows the author's letter to the economics Professor Roger Noll that followed attendance at a conference on regulation during the Reagan years. It analyses the four-page letter from the Wisconsin law professor Stewart Macaulay, which was a comprehensive argument for why a wide angle was important as reviewers lacked understanding of the private government.

This chapter examines physicians’ struggles to evaluate two alchemical empirics closely connected to antidote-cure-alls. The first, Andreas Berthold, became known as the peddler of the Silesian terra sigillata, and he collected testimonial letters from respected princes attesting to poison trials on animals and condemned criminals. This evidence helped cement the Silesian terra sigillata’s reputation as an effective new antidote and plague cure. In the midst of Berthold’s efforts, a lawyer named Georg am Wald advertised a poison and plague remedy called the Terra Sigillata Amwaldina, which he called a “universal medicine” that was also good for dozens of diseases. A decade later, he claimed to have created a true cure-all called the Panacea Amwaldina. Am Wald referred derisively to the practice of using poison on “dumb animals.” Instead, he provided reams of testimonial letters from patients praising the effects of his antidotes. Learned physicians eventually rejected am Wald’s cures and his use of evidence, but their initial response was one of considerable interest, despite their general disdain of alchemists. The cases of Berthold and am Wald highlight the difficulties physicians faced in figuring out what kinds of testimony counted as valid proof.

This chapter focuses on the progressive whitening and nationalizing of Spanish stardom, and its conception of a predominantly Andalusian, Gypsified subjectivity through the death of Afro-Cuban jazz entertainer Peter Wald. Wald’s death is movingly told through Benito Perojo’s El negro que tenia el alma blanca (The black man with the white soul), which features cosmopolitan performers, objects, and scenarios that affected the national culture, potentializing the imaginations and polluting cultural purity. An analysis of the context, characterization, and registers of meaning in El negro illustrates how Spanish stars became progressively whitened, even though they went on to perform in Andalusian-based entertainment.

This book relies on maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of parameters. Asymptotic theory assumes regularity conditions hold when the ML estimator is consistent. Typically an additional third derivative condition is assumed to ensure that the ML estimator is also asymptotically normally distributed. Standard asymptotic results that then hold are summarized in this chapter; for example, the asymptotic variance of the ML estimator is then given by the Fisher information formula, and the log-likelihood ratio, the Wald and the score statistics for testing the statistical significance of parameter estimates are all asymptotically equivalent. Also, the useful profile log-likelihood then behaves exactly as a standard log-likelihood only in a parameter space of just one dimension. Further, the model can be reparametrized to make it locally orthogonal in the neighbourhood of the true parameter value. The large exponential family of models is briefly reviewed where a unified set of regular conditions can be obtained.

If it is reasonable to assume that the data are generated by a fully parametric model, then maximum-likelihood approaches to estimation and inference have many appealing properties. Maximum-likelihood estimators are obtained by identifying parameters that maximize the likelihood function, which can be done using calculus or using numerical approaches. Such estimators are consistent, and if the costs of errors in estimation are described by a squared-error loss function, then they are also efficient compared with their consistent competitors. The sampling variance of a maximum-likelihood estimate can be estimated in various ways. As always, one possibility is the bootstrap. In many models, the variance of the maximum-likelihood estimator can be derived directly once its form is known. A third approach is to rely on general properties of maximum-likelihood estimators and use the Fisher information. Similarly, there are many ways to test hypotheses about parameters estimated by maximum likelihood. This chapter discusses the Wald test, which relies on the fact that the sampling distribution of maximum-likelihood estimators is normal in large samples, and the likelihood-ratio test, which is a general approach for testing hypotheses relating nested pairs of models.

Tests of parameter instabilities are likely to have low power when changepoints occur towards the end of the sample. This chapter considers various modifications to existing tests and introduces new statistics designed to have high power in such circumstances. The properties of both Wald-type tests of a one-time shift in the parameters and locally most powerful (LMP) tests against the hypothesis of random walk coefficients are examined. Asymptotic critical values of the tests are provided and their properties are evaluated in finite samples. Empirical illustrations describe the use of the tests for detecting structural changes at the time of the “Great Recession.”

In models having a representation y=γ‎·g(β‎,x) + ɛ the standard Wald test for β‎ has systematically been the wrong size in finite samples when the identifying parameter γ‎ is small relative to its estimation error. This chapter looks at the Lagrange multiplier test based on linearization of g(.) which may be interpreted as an approximation to an exact test for a ratio of regression coefficients, or as a reduced form test which is exact when g(.) is linear. It shows that this test has nearly the correct size in nonlinear regression, ARMA, GARCH, and unobserved components models when the Wald test performs poorly.

Cary Grant and Betsy Drake’s marriage limped forward for two years after his affair with Sophia Loren. In the midst of this, Loren arrived in Hollywood and Grant began pursuing her again, asking her to marry him. He was finishing Kiss Them for Me (1957) at the time. Producer Jerry Wald had been trying to film this Second World War story for years, but it was only when Grant signed to star in it that the project got the green light. Grant enjoyed working with the film’s director, Stanley Donen, but he was ill-suited to play a soldier having weekend leave in San Francisco. The film was one of the very few flops in his later career. He then made Houseboat (1958). Drake had written the original screenplay thinking that she and Grant might star in the film together. At Grant’s request, the studio assigned other writers to rewrite it as a vehicle for Sophia Loren. The comedy, about an Italian nanny falling in love with her boss, culminates in their marriage. This was a difficult scene for the stars to film after Loren refused Grant’s own proposal. Indiscreet (1958), directed by Stanley Donen and co-starring Ingrid Bergman, was a happier production. This delightfully sophisticated romantic comedy benefits from Donen’s imaginative direction and from location shooting that captures the glamour of the London setting.

An orchestral arrangement and a pair of revealing annotations in Brahms’s library bear witness to persistent fascination with Franz Schubert’s Greisen-Gesang, D 778, and especially with a pivotal introspective moment that Schubert had assembled via judicious text-editing and sensitive manipulation of a traditional horn fifths gesture. Virtually the same words and music then reappeared at an analogous point in Brahms’s O kühler Wald, Op. 72 No. 3, whose text laments the dissolution of memory and music alike. Correspondence and other documents imply that, if perceived allusively, the borrowing would have carried particularly dark and vivid implications for the baritone Julius Stockhausen, whose friendship with the composer had become increasingly scarred by the loss of their former collaborative intimacy. Because Brahms arguably concealed his borrowing from Julius, however, his motives for including it in the first place remain more opaque than in previously examined examples—and arguably more self-critical in orientation.

As World War I began in Europe in 1914, Crystal Eastman helped lead two major peace organizations. She facilitated the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party, today the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), initiating the recruitment of a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while she formed and led the more audacious New York branch. And she served as executive secretary of the American Union Against Militarism, the only American antiwar organization ever to demonstrate that citizen diplomacy could avert war. She joined an impressive group of Progressive reformers—Addams; Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service; Oswald Garrison Villard, National Association for the Advancement of Color People financier and publisher of the Nation; and Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress. With others, they created the “new peace movement,” which allied world peacekeeping with global democracy, human rights, and economic justice.

In 1916, Crystal Eastman quietly married Walter Fuller, after becoming pregnant with their first child. At the same time, she faced one of the cruelest dilemmas of her political life. It was an election year, and Woodrow Wilson promised peace but not suffrage while his opponent, former New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, promised suffrage but not peace. She chose peace, backed Wilson, and broke with every downtown feminist and militant suffragist with whom she had stood since college. But after Election Day, Wilson’s promises for American “peace without victory” eroded with changing circumstances. Ultimately, the infamous “Zimmerman telegram,” in which Germany promised to help Mexico recover territory lost to the United States in the 1840s if they joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, turned the tide. When Eastman’s colleagues met with Wilson on February 28, 1917, they knew the United States would soon enter the world war.