Linking gender,class and race in Brazil1

This article examines the socio‐historical effects of the intersection of representations of gender, race, and the nation which determine black Brazilian women's subaltern social position and inform their self‐representations. This intersection is presented from two perspectives: analysis of quantitative data and a case study. Through the examination of socio‐economic data on black women participation in the labour market, it show that, when compared with white women and black men, black women are unequally concentrated in certain low paid jobs in the service industry, such as for instance domestic work. Through a brief case study, basically interviews with women from different colours and social classes — i.e. domestic workers and their employers — it shows how the particularities of domestic work inform black women's race and gender self‐definitions.     

Reviews

The Jewish Anti‐Fascist Committee Revisited. Alexander M. Borschtschagowski, Orden für einen Mord: Die Judenverfolgung unter Stalin. Berlin: Propyläen, 1997. Notes. Ind. Glossary. 472pp. ISBN 3–549–05605–2 (hbk)

Arno Lustiger, Rotbuch: Stalin und die Juden. Die tragische Geschichte des Jüdischen Antifaschistischen Komitees und der sowjetischen Juden. With a foreword by Efim Etkind. Berlin: Aufbau‐Verlag, 1998. Bibl. Notes. Ind. Photographs. 429pp. ISBN 3–351–02478–9 (hbk)

A Chicken‐and‐Egg Situation. Charles King and Neil J. Melvin (eds.), Nations Abroad: Diaspora Politics and International Relations in the Former Soviet Union. Boulder, CO/Oxford: Westview Press, 1998. 240 pp. Index. ISBN 0–8133–9015‐X

A Greek Tragedy. Gennady Estraikh, Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. x + 217pp. Bibliography. Index. £40. ISBN: 0–19818479–0

Freeze‐Frame Picture. Susanne Marten‐Finnis and Heather Valencia. Sprachinseln. Jiddische Publizistik in London, Wilna und Berlin 1880–1930. Cologne/Weimar/Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999. 144pp. Illustrations. Bibliography. ISBN: 3–412–02998‐X     

Optimal Method for Realizing Two-Sided Inferences About a Linear Combination of Two Proportions

In order to reach the inference about a linear combination of two independent binomial proportions, various procedures exist (Wald's classic method, the exact, approximate, or maximized score methods, and the Newcombe-Zou method). This article defines and evaluates 25 different methods of inference, and selects the ones with the best behavior. In general terms, the optimal method is the classic Wald method applied to the data to which z ² _α/2/4 successes and z ² _α/2/4 failures are added (≈1 if α = 5%) if no sample proportion has a value of 0 or 1 (otherwise the added increase may be different).

Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Communications in Statistics - Simulation and Computation to view the free supplemental file.     

Risk Perception Among Smokers: A Qualitative Study

The aim of this qualitative study is to identify the dimensions people used to assess the risk of smoking and then compare them with those used by health professionals in primary healthcare. Five discussion groups were conducted. The field work was carried out in Barcelona (Spain), from February 2005 to January 2006. Data were analyzed following a semantic‐thematic categorical content analysis (ACC‐ts). Results showed that people tend to employ stereotypical discourses when evaluating the risk of smoking. Similarly, they reassess the risk in the context of their life experience and incorporate new nuances to the arguments sustaining their behavior. Once this reassessment takes place, the decision to continue smoking emerges, and smokers come up with additional arguments justifying their habit (i.e., age, benefits related to costs). Professionals are aware of this process and its multidimensional nature. Nevertheless, their discourse loses this multidimensional feature when discussing the strategies they use at smoking cessation interventions. This qualitative study increases the understanding of various meanings that people attribute to their life experience. These assumptions may be useful for developing health practices that are closer to people. As a practical utility of these results, it would be interesting to apply a preliminary assessment of the different meanings that people attribute to smoking from their life context in risk communication.     

Non-parametric detection of meaningless distances in high dimensional data

Distance concentration is the phenomenon that, in certain conditions, the contrast between the nearest and the farthest neighbouring points vanishes as the data dimensionality increases. It affects high dimensional data processing, analysis, retrieval, and indexing, which all rely on some notion of distance or dissimilarity. Previous work has characterised this phenomenon in the limit of infinite dimensions. However, real data is finite dimensional, and hence the infinite-dimensional characterisation is insufficient. Here we quantify the phenomenon more precisely, for the possibly high but finite dimensional case in a distribution-free manner, by bounding the tails of the probability that distances become meaningless. As an application, we show how this can be used to assess the concentration of a given distance function in some unknown data distribution solely on the basis of an available data sample from it. This can be used to test and detect problematic cases more rigorously than it is currently possible, and we demonstrate the working of this approach on both synthetic data and ten real-world data sets from different domains.     

DIFFERENCES IN CITATION PATTERNS ACROSS JOURNAL TIERS: THE CASE OF ECONOMICS

We study how citation patterns differ between journal tiers in economics by analyzing citations patterns of more than 6,000 research articles published in top five, second tier, and top field economics journals. We find that top five journals' articles receive more citations and that the life cycles of those citations are longer. However, their influence (in term of citations) is overestimated: in its first twenty years since publication, the median top five article accumulates 4.25 as many citations when compared to non-top five median articles. This ratio is strongly associated with the field of economics research and with articles' impact. (JEL A14)     

The healthcare supply network: current state of the literature and research opportunities

Abstract

This literature review maps recent studies addressing supply chain management (SCM) in the healthcare sector through a systematic approach that synthesises 74 empirical studies (2006–2016). Our approach adopts a network lens to map the literature and offers key contributions to the field. First, we show that there is a lack of network level studies. Second, there is an imbalance of research attention regarding the various types of supply, namely health services, medicines, medical supplies and blood supply. Third, we underline the advantages of the network lens, indicating network actors and flows between those actors that need further research. Fourth, we show an alarming lack of theoretical lens in healthcare SCM studies and draw attention to the fact that even when explicitly adopting a theory, some studies show inconsistencies between theoretical lens and level of analysis. Ultimately, we offer a map of future research for healthcare SCM through a network lens in order to improve the understanding the complexities of the healthcare sector.     

Replacement of semi-natural cover with artificial substrates in urban parks causes a decline of house sparrows Passer domesticus in Mediterranean towns

Urban Ecosystems - Many European towns and cities have undergone reurbanisation processes in recent decades. However, their effects on urban biodiversity have been poorly studied. Currently...     

More Than Help? Volunteerism in US Latino Culture

Volunteerism makes critical contributions to individual lives and society as a whole. However, to date, few studies have investigated volunteerism within Latino communities, a large and growing US population. The aim of this study was to understand how non-metropolitan US Latinos perceive volunteerism, as well as to determine what motivates and what deters their participation in volunteer programs. Our research team conducted six focus groups with 36 Latina women living in the State of Illinois. The focus groups covered topics such as the definition of volunteerism, participation motives and barriers, personal volunteer experience, and Latino culture, community, and organizations. We also assessed demographic information. Results from this study indicate that Latinas have a unique understanding of the concept of volunteerism. Participants associated everyday “helping” with volunteerism, establishing commonplace forms of aid as perhaps a “Latino way of volunteering.” We found time-consuming activities such as family responsibilities and work to be deterrents to Latinas participating in more formal volunteer activities.