Internet Technology in Service of Personal Health Care Management: Patient Perspective

Internet technology has become an informational resource for most health care consumers. Online information, discussion, and support groups, in the form of message boards, listservs, and chat rooms are emerging as parts of virtual self-health-care network. This paper examines the extent to which participation in online health discussion groups was reported to be helpful in increasing medical knowledge and in enhancing the participatory patient role of health care consumers in interaction with health care service professionals. Data for this study was collected from 350 patients who participated in Internet discussion groups for cancer patients. The findings of the study indicated the important impact of Internet health discussion groups on health care management practices as perceived by health care consumers, including empowerment through knowledge and proactive participation in cancer care management. This research contributes to understanding the patient perspective and assesses the perceived importance of Internet groups by health care consumers.     

Optimization problems with color-induced budget constraints

In 1984, Gabow and Tarjan provided a very elegant and fast algorithm for the following problem: given a matroid defined on a red and blue colored ground set, determine a basis of minimum cost among those with k red elements, or decide that no such basis exists. In this paper, we investigate extensions of this problem from ordinary matroids to the more general notion of poset matroids which take precedence constraints on the ground set into account. We show that the problem on general poset matroids becomes -hard, already if the underlying partially ordered set (poset) consists of binary trees of height two. On the positive side, we present two algorithms: a pseudopolynomial one for integer polymatroids, i.e., the case where the poset consists of disjoint chains, and a polynomial algorithm for the problem to determine a minimum cost ideal of size l with k red elements, i.e., the uniform rank-l poset matroid, on series-parallel posets.     

Effects of a Mindfulness Task on Women’s Sexual Response

Mindfulness-based interventions are effective at improving symptoms of sexual dysfunction in women. The mechanisms by which mindfulness improves sexual function are less clear. The main objective of our study was to investigate the impact of a mindfulness task on sexual response in women. Forty-one women (mean age = 27.2, SD = 5.6) participated in two laboratory sessions that each included two erotic films and one attention task that were presented in counterbalanced order. Both attention tasks consisted of a six-minute audio recording of either a modified body scan, focusing on genital arousal sensations (mindfulness condition), or a visualization exercise. Subjective and genital sexual arousal were measured continuously during stimulus presentation. The mindfulness task led to greater subjective and lower genital arousal. The agreement of subjective and genital sexual arousal (i.e., concordance) was greater in the mindfulness condition. Trait mindfulness was related to lower sexual arousal but also greater sexual concordance in women. Mindfulness-based interventions that encourage women to focus on physical arousal sensations in the here and now may be associated with women’s improved sexual function by enhancing feelings of sexual arousal during sexual activity and by increasing concordance between subjective and genital sexual arousal.     

Die Finanzialisierung von Unternehmen

Since the 1990s the financialization of the enterprise is an increasingly important aspect of capitalist development also in Germany. However, more recently a growing number of scholars point at a problematic conceptual stretching of financialization. The term has been defined too differently and ambiguously and has not been distinguished sufficiently from seemingly similar concepts. Financialization has been prematurely identified with a set of fixed effects often condensed to stagist concepts of capitalist development. When analyzing effects financialization has been regarded in isolation without considering interaction effects with other structurations of fields and hence the multi-referentiality of the enterprise. In order to overcome these shortcomings the article proposes a concept for the analysis of firm level financialization which draws on a more general sociological concept of field structuration and dynamics in which the “multi-referential enterprise” operates. Based on this concept the article analyses episodes of financialization in Germany showing its dynamics and limits. Financialization of enterprises proves to be structurally limited, institutionally contested, and unfolds its effects in deferent actor constellations at firm level due to its multiple and contradictory embeddedness.     

Negotiating Symbolic Boundaries in Conflict Resolution: Religion and Ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish Conflict

This article is an inquiry into understanding why supranational religious identity often fails to act as a conflict resolution tool in religiously homogenous ethnic conflicts. Narrowing its focus down to the role of religious elites as potential peacemakers in such conflict zones, it proposes the divergence in their conceptualizations of religious and ethnic identities as an explanatory factor. Building on 62 in-depth interviews conducted in Turkey with Sunni Muslim Kurdish and Turkish religious elites, it identifies a three-fold typology of religious and ethnic identities, as conceptualized by these elites: 1) religio-ethnic; 2) ethno-religious; 3) religious. After exemplifying each category with interview data it demonstrates the role these distinctions play in preventing the successful implementation of “Muslim fraternity” as a solution to the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. With these findings, the article contributes to both the literature on religion in conflict resolution and that on identity formation and boundary making. While it invites the former to turn its gaze from macro-level structural factors to meso- and micro-level cultural factors in analyzing religious elite involvement in conflict resolution, it invites the latter to stop employing “ethnicity” as an all-encompassing term (that covers a vast array of identity markers including religion) and focus, instead, on the gradations between religion and ethnicity as sources of identity.     

Social time preference revisited

The article reconsiders the implications of the choice of pure social time preference for intergenerational equity in the presence of a time-consistent utilitarian social welfare criterion. The analytic framework is a setting with overlapping generations, lifetime uncertainty, population growth and technical progress. The analysis identifies upper and lower bounds for the feasible range of social discount rates and draws a corresponding distinction between “gerontocratic” and “Stalinist” optimal plans. The paper corrects a number of inaccurate propositions in a related earlier contribution by Marini and Scaramozzino (2000) to this journal.

Economic Adversity and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Turkish Parliamentary Elections

Social Indicators Research - This paper investigates the relationship between economic adversity and voter participation in Turkish parliamentary elections. We employ a dynamic model of voter...     

Kairos economies in the post-Soviet transition period of Central Asia

There are times when entire populations of certain countries have had to readjust their lives and economic strategies as all of society is under transition. Post-Soviet Central Asia underwent this period after 1991. During times of transition, there are always people that tend to be able to make use of the new uncertainties, even at the risk of entering legal grey areas. Here new social groups emerge, ethnic origin becomes relevant and new kinship ties are made. These transformation periods are often short and provide limited opportunities for analysing the strategies of those pioneers that I call Kairos economists. They often act only in cooperation with residents of the border and with duty customs and security personnel. This article analyses this special economy with the help of case studies that have been observed during the transformation period from the Soviet to an independent Central Asia.     

(Sub) Optimality and (non) optimal satisficing in risky decision experiments

We implement a risky choice experiment based on one-dimensional choice variables and risk neutrality induced via binary lottery incentives. Each participant confronts many parameter constellations with varying optimal payoffs. We assess (sub)optimality, as well as (non)optimal satisficing by eliciting aspirations in addition to choices. Treatments differ in the probability that a binary random event, which are payoff—but not optimal choice—relevant is experimentally induced and whether participants choose portfolios directly or via satisficing, i.e., by forming aspirations and checking for satisficing before making their choice. By incentivizing aspiration formation, we can test satisficing, and in cases of satisficing, determine whether it is optimal.     

Complexity: Some Remarks about a Classical Aesthetic Concept

The connection between autonomous art and complexity has been extensively and deeply studied in literary theories in the 20th century. The rise of aesthetic autonomy implies the complexity of literary work as the concept of a sealed container arises from the relationship between the parts that make it up. In this model, the interpretation subject works to directly face literary texts. Instead of pursuing the author’s intention, it aims to reproduce the richness and subtlety of the aesthetic state, and consider the richness and subtlety revealed in the maximum amount of text details in literary works, even if procedurally deviating from the way of mainstream understanding. There is increasing skepticism about the consequences of the autonomous aesthetics, which has been coerced by the development of contemporary capitalism, and it is necessary to develop new forms of aesthetics to reflect the changing social situation.