Empirical Flaws Research Articles

A probabilistic model for failure design of glass plates in buildings

A model for the design of glass plates to failure is presented, which, based on the theory of plates with gross deformations for the calculation of the stress state as well as on the empirical flaws statistical distribution in the glass surface, applies fracture Mechanics criteria to establish a probabilistic prediction of failure. The validity of the model has been experimentally proved for plates with different thicknesses and geometric characteristics.

Issues and perspectives on evaluating manufacturing modernization programs

The establishment of a national system of federal-state manufacturing modernization centers to serve small- and medium-sized manufacturing systems is a major experiment in the US. The system's rapid expansion has made it impossible to begin with an experimental design that would systematically permit tests of the variables and relationships likely to effect the long-term economic effectiveness of these centers or their political and financial stability. Relatedly, many existing evaluation studies and journalistic narratives are marred by serious analytical and empirical flaws. It is not too late to attempt to improve practice in future evaluations. Several areas of expanded evaluation are described, including theories of industrial restructuring, regional technology infrastructure, public management, financing, evaluation design, evaluability assessment, firm learning, and measurement of benefits and costs. In each case, evaluation is presented as a means of simultaneously yielding information relevant to formative and summative program-level decisions and to hypothesis testing.

The Gap Between Science and Policy in The Bell Curve

In The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray sketch various social policy reforms that they take to be suggested or implied by their purported scientific findings concerning IQ, race, class, and social structure. By and large, scientists have done a fine job of drawing attention to the many empirical inadequacies and flaws in The Bell Curve. This, of course, significantly undermines the case for many of Hernnstein and Murray's social policy recommendations. Yet there is another obvious strategy for resisting many of the astonishing recommendations. One might concede, just for the sake of argument, all the major empirical assumptions that Herrnstein and Murray wish to make concerning IQ and its causal role in social behavior, then examine what policy recommendations are then entailed. By adopting this strategy, one sees that even under very generous empirical assumptions, Herrnstein and Murray are a long way from having a solid case for their social policy recommendations. In other words, there remains a substantial gap between their putative scientific findings and their proffered policy recommendations.

Agricultural productivity and European industrialization, 1890-1980

This exercise in comparative measurement and analysis surveys indicators for labour and land productivities in European agricultures between 1890 and 1980. It exposes the empirical flaws and above all the range of conceptual difficulties involved in defining agricultural outputs and inputs for purposes of international comparison. Yet the numbers do reveal how the industrialization of continental economies was constrained (and severely constrained in Mediterranean Europe) compared with that of the UK by malign historical legacies of high ratios of labour to land and an unfavourable ecological environment for the diffusion of the animal intensive technology of the first agrarian revolution.

Agricultural Productivity and European Industrialization, 1890-1980

This exercise in comparative measurement and analysis surveys indicators for labour and land productivities in European agricultures between 1890 and 1980. It exposes the empirical flaws and above all the range of conceptual difficulties involved in defining agricultural outputs and inputs for purposes of international comparison. Yet the numbers do reveal how the industrialization of continental economies was constrained (and severely constrained in Mediterranean Europe) compared with that of the UK by malign historical legacies of high ratios of labour to land and an unfavourable ecological environment for the diffusion of the animal intensive technology of the first agrarian revolution.

Rushton's racial comparisons: An ecological critique of theory and method.

Many scientists have criticized Rushton's application of a hypothesis about rand K-selection to putative human racial differences (e.g., Cain & Vanderwolf, 1990; Lynn, 1989a, 1989b; Silverman, 1990; Weizmann, Wiener, Wiesenthal, & Ziegler, 1990; Zuckerman & Brody, 1988). The criticisms of Rushton's theoretical approach by Weizmann et al. are certainly appropriate, but they were not sufficiently forceful in asserting the fact that Rushton's approach misses the point of rand K-selection: It ignores ecological processes and assumptions that are central to the concept. The r/K model is a valid context for interpreting human life history characteristics only if the investigator is prepared to study these ecological processes and assumptions in well-defined human populations. As an ecologist by training, I hope to show in this commentary what the r/K model implies ecologically, what would be necessary to apply it properly to human populations, and how Rushton's investigations are incompatible with appropriate use of the r/K model. I do not imagine that psychologists will share my degree of concern over the inappropriate use of ecological theory in this context. It would seem at first glance that my criticism of Rushton's research could be satisfied if he simply removed all attempts at evolutionary explanation from his racial comparisons. However, I will demonstrate an additional point that should still trouble psychologists: Even if this research were reworked without the claims to evolutionary legitimacy, its empirical flaws would remain unremedied. Basic methodological considerations apply to these racial comparisons irrespective of their context, whether is it biology, anthropology, psychology, or sociology.

A discourse-based approach to the assessment of readability

Assessing the readability of texts is an important task for many administrative and educational programs. However, current readability measures have serious empirical and theoretical flaws that make their use questionable. In this paper we propose two methods of assessing readability that involve analyzing the referential and cohesive structures of a text. We suggest that such measures are theoretically better motivated and, through reconsideration of some anomalous performance results from Duffy & Kabance (1982), that they promise to be more adequate in predicting actual reading performance.

Abandonments of the Council-Manager Plan: A New Institutionalist Perspective

The council-manager (CM) form of government has been on the scene for nearly 75 years. Since the first large city (Dayton, Ohio) adopted the council-manager form in 1914, it has become a well established feature of the local political landscape. Today, over 2,500 cities operate under the council-manager plan. ' Despite the spread of the council-manager form of government, the impetus behind the movement to reform local government seems to have lessened with time. During the 1960s, growth of the council-manager form began to slow down as many unreformed cities started hiring chief administrative officers (CAOs). In 1969, in recognition of this change, the International City Managers' Association changed its name to the International City Management Association.2 Also, after over seven decades of reform, the unreformed mayor-council (MC) form of government still constitutes a majority of all U.S. cities.3 Finally, every year a number of local referenda in reformed cities propose the abandonment of the council-manager plan. A survey of municipalities conducted in 1981 by the International City Management Association indicated that 3.5 percent of council-manager cities had abandoned the form of government during the previous 12 years.4 While this rate of abandonments of the councilmanager plan is roughly only one-third of that for cities abandoning the mayor-council plan, nagging questions remain. Why do elections proposing the abandonment of the council-manager plan continue to be a feature of politics in many reformed cities? To be sure, most of these elections result in retention of the plan, but why is the issue raised in the first place? And, most importantly, why do some communities choose to abandon reform? This article reconceptualizes the way in which abandonments of the council-manager plan have come to be portrayed. The first section reviews the prevailing theoretical framework used to explain abandonments. As in most contemporary theories of politics, abandonments have been depicted as a function of the exogenous political environment and social context. Empirical flaws in this contextual theory of abandonments are presented in light of both the 1981 ICMA survey data and data from a 1986 ICMA survey, supplemented by information from a 1987 survey by the author of cities that had abandoned the councilmanager plan in the previous ten years. This is followed

The Passivity Assumption of the Sensation—Perception Distinction

The sensation-perception distinction did not appear before the seventeenth century, but since then various formulations of it have gained wide acceptance. This is not an historical accident and the article suggests an explanation for its appearance. Section I describes a basic assumption underlying the sensation-perception distinction, to wit, the postulation of a pure sensory stage-viz,. sensation--devoid of active influence of the agent's cognitive, emotional, and evaluative frameworks. These frameworks are passive in that stage. I call this postulation the passivity assumption. Section 2 suggests three major reasons for the emergence of this assumption in the seventeenth century: the mental-physical gap, the causal theory of perception, and epistemological considerations regarding the status of the sensory given. In the last section a critical discussion is presented. The passivity assumption is found to have serious empirical and theoretical flaws.

On measuring the nearness of near moneys revisited

In this paper we re-examine the theoretical foundations and empirical estimation of models which incorporate a CES utility function to study the nearness of money substitutes. We show that previous studies using these models have been subject to a number of theoretical and empirical flaws. The result of these flaws has been to overestimate the degree of substitutability between money and near money assets. We show that when these errors are corrected, estimates of substitution elasticities are several times smaller than even those of the most recent studies and therefore are more in line with estimates from more traditional demand for money studies.

The irresponsibility of American social scientists

The arguments contained in books criticizing American social scientists by C. Wright Mills (The Sociological Imagination) and Bernard Crick (The Science of American Politics) are discussed, compared and criticized. It is argued that Mills’ criteria of evaluation and constructive alternatives to the tendencies he criticizes are immeasurably sounder than those found in Crick's book. An effort to supplement Mills’ argument by providing a more explicit statement of its moral underpinnings is made. Finally, it is argued that though both critiques have serious empirical flaws, the authors have undeniably demonstrated that important tendencies for irresponsible thought and action do exist within the American social sciences.