Couch Revisited: A Theoretical Treatment of The Information‐Technological Media of Imgur,Reddit, and Twitter

In this paper, I argue that unique locations of digital interactions constitute distinct information‐technological media. I first apply a close reading of Couch's ( 1995a ) work to digital sociology, and then analyze three popular social media networks: www.Imgur.com , www.Reddit.com , and www.Twitter.com . I close with a theoretical application of Couch's paradigm for analyzing the qualities of information technologies.     

Sociality enhances birds’ capacity to deal with anthropogenic ecosystems

Urban species often adjust their behavior to survive in urban environments, characterized by the proximity of humans, habitat fragmentation and heterogeneous, fluctuating ecological resources. Several hypotheses have been put forth to explain how species manage living in heterogeneous and complex anthropogenic habitats. The ability of individuals or species to beneficially modify their behaviors in response to changes in the environment has indeed been alternatively explained based on phylogenetic, adaptive, and ontogenic arguments. In this study we investigated the role of sociality as a driver of behavioural flexibility in urban birds. Sociality can be defined as the tendency to associate with conspecifics or form a group and may influence a species’ ability to survive in an urban ecosystem to the extent that it represents advantages to species or individuals in terms of resource exploitation, fitness, and predation risk-avoidance. Given the potential benefits of sociality we hypothesized that sociality is a further characteristic that may explain how species have successfully expanded their range into urbanized areas. Based on this hypothesis, we predicted that pigeons (Columba livia) will show higher behavioural flexibility when in larger groups, whatever their genetic background and living-circumstances. Using pigeons as a model system, we compared 27 groups in France and Italy composed of four different genetic strains and varying living-conditions: free-living feral pigeons in urban areas, free-living domestic pigeons at the property of a local breeder captive, feral pigeons in a French ecological field station, captive domestic pigeons in an Italian ecological station. We tested two standardized behavioral measures of behavioural flexibility: thresholds for fear or neophobia and rates of problem solving. We found that group number affects neophobia and to a lesser extent problem-solving, suggesting that sociality is a factor enhancing birds’ faculties to establish in and cope with heterogeneous urban environments. We consider this hypothesis here as compatible and complementary to existing hypotheses on species’ adaptation to urban ecosystems.     

Conservative Apostles of Objectivity and the Myth of a “Liberal Bias” in Science

An article recently published in The American Sociologist argued that social scientists are biased because of their liberal views, and that this social activism might in turn explain the growing distrust of conservatives in the scientific community observed in the General Social Survey. Although I do agree that social scientists in the United States are mostly liberal, which is hard to contest given the accumulated evidence, this does not necessarily mean that liberal scientists are biased. It is one thing to adopt liberal views, but it is quite another to let these views distort scientific productions to the point that they are not scientific anymore. Since no systematic evidence currently exists to support this claim, the “liberal bias” remains a myth. Moreover, the authors do not report any statistical correlation between the purported increase in social scientists’ activism and conservatives’ growing distrust in science, let alone a causal relationship. I hypothesize that the authors, as conservatives, are more concerned with liberalism than with the politicization of science per se, and that their critics are aimed at challenging liberals’ domination within academia by depicting liberal scholars as pseudo-scientists.     

Analysing domestic activity to reduce household energy consumption

This paper presents our reflections on the issue of behavioral change according to energy conservation constraints and on the status of sustainability in the design of ambient interactive systems at home. We point out how ergonomics contributes to the study of human factors underlying energy consumption. Relating to situated cognition and human computer interaction, our approach relies both on the ergonomic evaluation of feedback consumption displays and on the modeling of domestic activities in order to identify household concerns in real settings. We present empirical results to illustrate this global approach. The results of those studies allow the design of interactive systems: informative and pedagogical systems as well as pervasive and adaptive ambient systems. In our approach, sustainability is taken into account as a design criterion, as security could be, whereas the main design purpose is to aid households in their daily life in order to build a "sustainable situation".     

Developmental Change in Infants' Detection of Visual Faces that Match Auditory Vowels

Infants demonstrate robust audiovisual (AV) perception, detecting, for example, which visual face matches auditory speech in many paradigms. For simple phonetic segments, like vowels, previous work has assumed developmental stability in AV matching. This study shows dramatic differences in matching performance for different vowels across the first year of life: 3‐, 6‐, and 9‐month‐olds were familiarized for 40 sec with a visual face articulating a vowel in synchrony with auditory presentations of that vowel, but crucially, the mouth of the face was occluded. At test, infants were shown two still photos of the same face without occlusion for 1 min in silence. One face had a static articulatory configuration matching the previously heard vowel, while the other face had a static configuration matching a different vowel. Three auditory vowels were used: /a/, /i/, and /u/. Results suggest that AV matching performance varies according to age and to the familiarized vowel. Interestingly, results are not linked to the frequency of vowels in auditory input, but may instead be related to infants' ability to produce the target vowel. A speculative hypothesis is that vowel production in infancy modulates AV vowel matching.     

The relation between children’s task‐specific competence and mothers’ controlling practices

In the guided learning domain of socialization, studies examining the antecedents of controlling parenting suggest that children’s lack of competence in a task could trigger controlling practices in that task. However, a stringent test of this relation remains to be conducted. This study examined this relation using a sample of 101 children (M_age = 10.21 years) and their mothers, a standardized measure of children’s competence in a task that was unfamiliar to the participants, and multi‐informant observational measures of maternal controlling practices during a mother–child interaction involving that task (rated by an independent coder and the children). Path analyses showed that children’s initial lack of competence in a task was related to higher levels of coded maternal controlling practices during a subsequent mother–child interaction involving that task, which in turn were positively linked to children’s perceptions of their mothers’ practices as controlling. A bootstrap analysis also confirmed that the indirect link from children’s competence to perceived maternal controlling practices through coded maternal controlling practices was significant. These effects were observed while controlling for mothers’ self‐reported controlling parenting style and perceptions of their children’s academic skills. Implications of these findings for the promotion of optimal parenting and future research directions are discussed.     

Stories from the circle: Leadership lessons learned from aboriginal leaders

While much has been written about leadership, very little research has examined North American Aboriginal leadership. Drawing upon a qualitative methodology, our findings suggest several differences in how Aboriginal leaders view leadership; compared to non-Aboriginals or mainstream approaches to leadership. We found that Aboriginals view leadership as a spiritual endeavor that is holistic and egalitarian in nature. Aboriginal leaders use a more indirect style of communication that frequently invokes traditional imagery, story-telling and animal-based metaphors. Aboriginal leaders also draw from the Medicine Wheel as a guide. In conclusion, we discuss several challenges shared by Aboriginal leaders including the tall poppy syndrome and walking in two worlds and accordingly, offer managerial implications of our findings.     

Mexican American birthweight and child overweight: unraveling a possible early life course health transition

Mexican American children have a weight distribution that categorizes them as relatively healthy at birth but relatively unhealthy by age 3. This early life course transition in health based on weight raises the question of whether Mexican American children "outgrow" the epidemiologic paradox of favorable birth outcomes despite social disadvantage or whether their birthweight distribution places them on trajectory for overweight in childhood. We address this question using newly available 9-year follow-up data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing birth cohort study linked to pre-natal medical records. We systematically investigate the roles of birthweight, pre-natal factors, and childhood factors in explaining racial/ethnic differences in childhood overweight. Our main finding is that Mexican American children do outgrow the paradox: Their rates of childhood overweight are higher than expected given their birthweight distribution. Observed pre-natal and childhood factors do not explain the elevated rates of overweight among Mexican American children.     

Sequential design of computer experiments for the estimation of a probability of failure

This paper deals with the problem of estimating the volume of the excursion set of a function f:ℝ ^d →ℝ above a given threshold, under a probability measure on ℝ ^d that is assumed to be known. In the industrial world, this corresponds to the problem of estimating a probability of failure of a system. When only an expensive-to-simulate model of the system is available, the budget for simulations is usually severely limited and therefore classical Monte Carlo methods ought to be avoided. One of the main contributions of this article is to derive SUR (stepwise uncertainty reduction) strategies from a Bayesian formulation of the problem of estimating a probability of failure. These sequential strategies use a Gaussian process model of f and aim at performing evaluations of f as efficiently as possible to infer the value of the probability of failure. We compare these strategies to other strategies also based on a Gaussian process model for estimating a probability of failure.