Deliberative street politics and sacralized dissent: Morocco’s 20 February movement and the Jamaa Al Adl Wal Ihsane

During a wave of protest in 2011, Morocco was home to its own uprisings, spurred on by the 20 February movement. Unlike its neighbors to the east, the Moroccan regime was never dismantled. So, what was the sociopolitical significance of the 20 February movement? This profile examines the landscape at the time of uprisings and presents brief interview data to make the case that these protests facilitated a political articulation and a new deliberative street politics.     

Unwanted sexual experiences and sexual risks in gay and bisexual men: Associations among revictimization,substance use,and psychiatric symptoms

The data set of 2,182 gay/bisexual men's month‐long sexual diaries collected by the United Kingdom Socio‐sexual Investigations of Gay Men and Aids (Project SIGMA) was used to analyse the extent to which acts of anal intercourse (AI) are distributed among gay men, using the Lorenz/Gini methodology for measuring concentration. Most individuals (60%) who engage in AI do so only once or twice a month, but there is a long tail of those who do it much more. In terms of the amount of AI acts, one tenth of the individuals are performing half of the acts of AI. The Gini coefficient of concentration is high (0.55). Factors most affecting rates and concentration of risk behaviour include relationship status, HIV sero‐status and concordant/discordant partner status.     

“Hookups”: Characteristics and correlates of college students' spontaneous and anonymous sexual experiences

This study focused on a specific risky practice common among contemporary college students: the hookup. Hookups are defined as a sexual encounter which may or may not include sexual intercourse, usually occurring on only one occasion between two people who are strangers or brief acquaintances. The aim of this study was to determine the relative importance of a variety of social and psychological predictors in understanding differences among undergraduate students who had never hooked up, those who had hooked up without sexual intercourse, and those who had hooked up with sexual intercourse. Analyses revealed that, as predicted, social, individual, and relational psychological variables helped to explain the variance among college students' varied hookup experiences. By examining the full range of sexual involvement characteristic of the casual sexual phenomenon of hooking up within a multivariate model, we were able to achieve a more differentiated understanding of college students' casual sexual experimentation.     

The Statistics of Simulating Chaos

When simulating a dynamical system, the computation is actually of a spatially discretized system, because finite machine arithmetic replaces continuum state space. For chaotic dynamical systems, the discretized simulations often have collapsing effects, to a fixed point or to short cycles. Statistical properties of these phenomena can be modelled with random mappings with an absorbing centre. The model gives results which are very much in line with computational experiments. The effects are discussed with special reference to the family of mappings f (x)=1-|1-2x|,x [0,1],1,<,,<,. Computer experiments show close agreement with predictions of the model.     

Net migration and migration effectiveness: A comparison between Australia and the United Kingdom, 1976–96

This paper explores the impact of net migration in Australia and the United Kingdom using measures of migration effectiveness computed from period-age migration data for four consecutive five-year periods. Results reported in Part 1 of this paper (Stillwellet al. 2000) suggest that while the overall effectiveness of net migration at the scale of city regions has declined over the twenty-year period in both countries, important geographical variations are evident. Part 2 considers how patterns of migration effectiveness vary by age and presents a single classification of all the city regions on the basis of age-specific effectiveness. More detailed analysis includes spatial patterns for particular age groups and net migration profiles of selected regions. Cohort effects are shown to be important for explaining changes between time periods in these regions.     

Effect of perceived cost on judgments regarding the efficacy of investment

Three experiments examined the effect of costs associated with investments on the judgments of the causal effectiveness of those investments, and on the type of information utilised when making those judgements. Using operant conditioning technology, in an experimental analogue of making economic investments, it was found that greater costs associated with an investment reduced the judgement about the effectiveness of the response (Experiment 1). Greater investment costs tended to bias the subject toward using information integrated over a longer period of time; whereas low costs tended to produce judgements made on the basis of the conditions prevailing immediately prior to the return being acquired (Experiments 1–3). The effect of cost was modulated by the subjects' own financial background. The same absolute cost being treated as “greater” by those from less wealthy backgrounds compared to those from more affluent backgrounds (Experiments 2 and 3). These results suggest that as well as the nature of the schedule relating investment to return, the perceived cost of the investment determines the manner in which it is judged with respect to its efficacy.     

Social workers in private practice: What are they really doing?

At one level, private practice may represent a fairly evolved manifestation of the expanded professional growth and sophistication of the individual social worker who embarks upon this highly individualized proprietary enterprise. However, on a larger scale, this widespread shift toward private practice may indicate a collective disenchantment with agency practice per se and represent a concerted attempt to redefine the fundamental aims and values of social work practice.