Humor and satire in politics: Introducing cultural sociology to the field

The landscape of political humor and satire is changing rapidly, and it is becoming an increasingly relevant aspect of our culture. Although scholars have been actively trying to capture this change, majority of the existing frameworks for understanding humor and satire in politics still reduce these phenomena to mere genres or rhetoric tools. In addition, they provide insufficient accounts concerning the reception of humor and satire, and neglect to interpret and explain what they communicate. In the article, a general understanding of humor and satire outside of a political context, followed by an overview of studies discussing humor and satire in politics through their applications in social movements, as leadership tools, and through their manifestations in mass media has been presented. Lastly, a cultural sociological perspective to the field has been introduced. It has been argued that approaching humor and satire in politics through a structural hermeneutic method of the Strong Program will enable us to recognize and treat political humor and satire as autonomous and complex cultural systems which carry an internal power to move people.     

Philippine NGOs and Multistakeholder Partnerships: Three Case Studies

This paper discusses an emerging role for Philippine NGOs—building and maintaining intersectoral cooperation among various sectors of society to tackle key issues like agricultural development, HIV/AIDS, and agrarian reform. The three case studies elaborated in the paper show that Philippine NGOs play important intermediary and bridging functions crucial for the success of multistakeholder partnerships. NGOs are well equipped for this because of their middle-class and professional nature and because of various characteristics like autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to mobilize resources.     

Optimal sampling for repeated binary measurements

The authors consider the optimal design of sampling schedules for binary sequence data. They propose an approach which allows a variety of goals to be reflected in the utility function by including deterministic sampling cost, a term related to prediction, and if relevant, a term related to learning about a treatment effect To this end, they use a nonparametric probability model relying on a minimal number of assumptions. They show how their assumption of partial exchangeability for the binary sequence of data allows the sampling distribution to be written as a mixture of homogeneous Markov chains of order k. The implementation follows the approach of Quintana & Müller (2004), which uses a Dirichlet process prior for the mixture.     

Work of gravediggers and health

Gravediggers have death as object of their work. Their activities are painful, physically and mental demanding, as well as unhealthy. Literature is scarce about this theme. The aim of this study is to evaluate gravediggers' work activities and health consequences. The methodological frame which guided this study was Dejours' psychic suffering and its association with the psychodynamic aspects of work. Data collection took place in April-May 2011 in one public and one private cemetery of S?o Paulo, Brazil. Four male workers, aged between 45 to 60 years old were interviewed. Their work activities were observed during a workday. Participants reported their life dreams, defense mechanisms and frustration. The discourse of gravediggers showed serious problems associated to physical and mental demands, public invisibility and/ or social devaluation of work. The most important physical symptom was body pain. In spite this is a preliminary study, it was possible to raise a number of work stressors and health outcomes of gravediggers, an "invisible" worker of our society.     

Comparing two types of navigational interfaces for Virtual Reality

Previous studies suggest significant differences between navigating virtual environments in a life-like walking manner (i.e., using treadmills or walk-in-place techniques) and virtual navigation (i.e., flying while really standing). The latter option, which usually involves hand-centric devices (e.g., joysticks), is the most common in Virtual Reality-based studies, mostly due to low costs, less space and technology demands. However, recently, new interaction devices, originally conceived for videogames have become available offering interesting potentialities for research. This study aimed to explore the potentialities of the Nintendo Wii Balance Board as a navigation interface in a Virtual Environment presented in an immersive Virtual Reality system. Comparing participants' performance while engaged in a simulated emergency egress allows determining the adequacy of such alternative navigation interface on the basis of empirical results. Forty university students participated in this study. Results show that participants were more efficient when performing navigation tasks using the Joystick than with the Balance Board. However there were no significantly differences in the behavioral compliance with exit signs. Therefore, this study suggests that, at least for tasks similar to the studied, the Balance Board have good potentiality to be used as a navigation interface for Virtual Reality systems.     

A Bayesian model for multiple change point to extremes,with application to environmental and financial data

Abrupt changes often occur for environmental and financial time series. Most often, these changes are due to human intervention. Change point analysis is a statistical tool used to analyze sudden changes in observations along the time series. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian model for extreme values for environmental and economic datasets that present a typical change point behavior. The model proposed in this paper addresses the situation in which more than one change point can occur in a time series. By analyzing maxima, the distribution of each regime is a generalized extreme value distribution. In this model, the change points are unknown and considered parameters to be estimated. Simulations of extremes with two change points showed that the proposed algorithm can recover the true values of the parameters, in addition to detecting the true change points in different configurations. Also, the number of change points was a problem to be considered, and the Bayesian estimation can correctly identify the correct number of change points for each application. Environmental and financial data were analyzed and results showed the importance of considering the change point in the data and revealed that this change of regime brought about an increase in the return levels, increasing the number of floods in cities around the rivers. Stock market levels showed the necessity of a model with three different regimes.     

Socioeconomic System of the Oil Boom and Rural Community Development in Western North Dakota

An oil boom is a complex social and economic phenomenon. The socioeconomic system presented in this article represents a novel effort to explicate boom impacts and changes, within a systems framework, at the community level to enhance community planning and development efforts. Most boomtown studies focus on longitudinal changes of a boom‐bust‐recovery cycle or social‐disruption‐based approaches. This article is an effort to demonstrate that longitudinal changes or social disruptions of a boom manifest through the interactions and interrelationships between social entities and stakeholders acting within the boom conditions and surrounding conditions. The socioeconomic system approach in this article analyzes the boom as a system, which provides a useful lens for many other rural communities currently experiencing unconventional oil and gas development in the United States. The socioeconomic system highlights five main challenges or factors that need to be addressed through community development strategies: develop affordable housing, invest in community infrastructure, expand public services, attract new businesses to the area, and develop better community integration strategies to build trust and unity within the community. This article is qualitative and exploratory in nature. As a result, it explicates the functions, structure, and relationships between system entities to provide a broader understanding of coherence, conflicts, and synergies within a system.     

Learning Life Skills Through Challenging and Negative Experiences

Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal - Youth who are socially vulnerable are disproportionately confronted with culminating risk factors that impact their everyday lives. Within positive youth...     

Farmers' Contribution to Agricultural Social Capital: Evidence from Southern Spain

Social capital is the whole set of shared norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs that promote cooperation among individuals within the community and that has proved to be a key factor in explaining development processes. This article aims to provide an analytically reliable notion of social capital within the farming sector and a methodological tool for empirically measuring how social capital is accumulated at the farmer level. The theoretical framework proposed is based on the multidimensionality of the complex concept of social capital. Thus, to develop a comprehensive index for social capital, we identify three dimensions of the concept, structural, relational, and cognitive social capital, each one also comprising several subdimensions. This integrative approach permits creation of a composite indicator of the agricultural social capital accumulated at the farmer level, further identifying socioeconomic factors that influence its accumulation at that level. We empirically apply this methodological approach to farmers in Andalusia in southern Spain as a case study. This research provides an interesting starting point for informing policymakers about social capital and helping them implement the necessary programs to facilitate sustainable development in the agricultural sector.     

What Survey Data Reveal about Price and Wage Rigidity in Portugal

This paper exploits the information collected from a survey conducted on a sample of Portuguese firms to study the patterns of firms’ price and wage adjustments and the extent of nominal price and wage rigidities. The evidence shows that the frequency of price changes varies substantially across sectors and depends on the intensity of competition, the share of labor costs and firms’ price reviewing behavior. The results also suggest that the constraint imposed by the presence of downward nominal wage rigidity is less important in firms where the fraction of permanent and high‐skilled workers is lower and the share of flexible pay components is higher.