Characterizing the landscape compositions of urban wildlife encounters: the case of the stone marten (Martes foina), the red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and the hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus) in the Greater Paris area

Urban Ecosystems - As urbanization continues to expand worldwide, more and more urban areas become home to wild animals able to adapt to city life, generating a growing need for information. In the...     

Combinatorial algorithms for the maximum k-plex problem

The maximum clique problem provides a classic framework for detecting cohesive subgraphs. However, this approach can fail to detect much of the cohesive structure in a graph. To address this issue, Seidman and Foster introduced k-plexes as a degree-based clique relaxation. More recently, Balasundaram et al. formulated the maximum k-plex problem as an integer program and designed a branch-and-cut algorithm. This paper derives a new upper bound on the cardinality of k-plexes and adapts combinatorial clique algorithms to find maximum k-plexes.     

Relationship Risks in Context: A Cumulative Risk Approach to Understanding Relationship Satisfaction

Risks associated with less satisfying intimate relationships often co‐occur within individuals, raising questions about approaches that consider only their independent impact. Utilizing the cumulative risk model, which acknowledges the natural covariation of risk factors, this study examined individuals in intimate relationships using the Florida Family Formation Survey (n = 2,876) and a replication sample (n = 1,048). Analyses confirmed that not only was relationship satisfaction lower among those with more risks, but the cumulative risk score was predictive above and beyond the individual risk factors. Furthermore, experiencing multiple risks exacerbated the negative associations between individual risks and relationship satisfaction, suggesting that the operation of a risk factor in a relationship is moderated by the presence or absence of other risks.     

Living Stigma: The Impact of Labeling, Stereotyping, Separation, Status Loss, and Discrimination in the Lives of Individuals with Disabilities and Their Families

In this study, we examine the direct and vicarious impact of the social processes of felt and enacted stigma and their impact on the lives of individuals with disabilities and their families. Specifically, findings of interactive interviews with eight adults with disabilities and seven mothers of children with disabilities were analyzed for themes related to components of stigma described by Link and Phelan (2001) : labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination within the context of power differential. Findings suggest that while these social processes can have important negative psychosocial consequences for individuals living with disabilities, the severity of the consequences varies among the components. Findings also indicate that these individuals find varied and creative ways to resist and actively counter the negative effects of stigma in their lives. Findings support the complexity of the experience of stigma and the importance of the socio/cultural context to the lived experience of disability.     

Retour sur le « secteur informel ». L'économie du Katanga (Congo-Zaïre) face à la falsification de la loi

In the social sciences, the idea of an informal sector has been criticized more for the classification of economic activities in two separate sectors than for the labeling of them as “formal” or “informal”. In the Congo (formerly Zaire), the use of such labels is ambiguous. Labeling has to be understood in the context of corruption, i.e., in a transaction involving the personal networks and social identities of the parties to it. An analysis is made of how such transactions with civil servants shape the local market in the case of the import trade in Katanga. Compared with the formal/informal cleavage, this approach enables us both to see the labeling of economic activities as a social and political process and to draw attention to the plurality of such practices in relations with authorities.     

Testing the Model Minority Stereotype: Youth Behaviors across Racial and Ethnic Groups

Using data from a large nationally representative sample of adolescents attending school, this study tests the stereotype that youth of Asian Pacific Islander ethnicity (API) are the model minority. The results suggest that, except for substance use, API American youth do not report fewer delinquent behaviors than white youth; in fact, API American youth report slightly higher numbers of aggressive offenses than white youth, and female API American youth report greater numbers of nonaggressive offenses than white female youth. Also, API American youth report higher rates of nonaggressive offenses and substance use than do black youth. The mental health and social service needs of API American youth are thus at least as great as those of white youth. The need for such services increases with the length of residency in the United States.     

Individuals' Estimates of the Risks of Death: Part I—A Reassessment of the Previous Evidence

It is widely argued that individuals have biased perceptions of health and safety risks. A reconsideration of the best-known evidence suggests that this view is the erroneous result of a failure to consider the implications of scarce information. Our findings imply that the hypothesis that people make unbiased estimates of hazard rates fails to be rejected by the very data that were initially used to reject it. Thus, we are able to reconcile the alleged existence of widespread bias in risk perception with other findings that such bias is less apparent in the case of job-related hazards. The seeming bias in estimating population-average death rates and the lack of such bias in assessing job risks are two manifestations of the same behavior, which is the optimal acquisition of costly information.     

Silenced Reality: Power Relations between Marital Blueprints in Israeli Marriages

In this study we examined the effect of job insecurity on couples' relationships in the context of recent macro‐level economic changes in Israel. Based on Hajer's discourse interaction approach, we conceptualized marital relationships and particularly the marital conversation as contested terrain reflecting power relations between social forces and their related discourses. We interviewed seventeen couples in which at least one of the partners suffered from job insecurity in order to trace forms of emotion work and silence in their marital interaction. We found that couples experienced a decreased ability to speak with each other. In their accounts of this experience, gendered “story lines” that we interpreted as “new” to the relationship emerged. Women's emotion work was indicative and halted change‐directed marital negotiation. The possibility that authoritative gendered relationships are reinforced in Israeli marriages during times of job insecurity is thus supported.     

Between the Procedural and the Substantial: Democratic Deliberation and the Interaction Order in “Occupy Middletown General Assembly”

This article analyzes interaction from an intentional, self‐reflexive democratic meeting of ordinary citizens—a “General Assembly” from the 2011 Occupy Movement—to explore two competing theories of democracy: Habermas's democratic deliberation and Mouffe's agonistic pluralism. The group's rational ideals and procedures for democratic deliberation approximate those of Habermas's “ideal speech situation,” but appear limited in their capacity to ensure Habermasian understanding or consensus. Intertwined with these rational procedures are practices best explained in terms of what Goffman called “face‐work”—the ways in which participants maintain a working consensus of mutual acceptance and respect in conversation. These face‐work procedures—rather than sincere, rational intentions—help constitute the civility necessary for rational deliberation and participation. Such symbolic valuing of self and other provide interactional grounds for the liberty and equality of agonistic democratic conversation as conceived by Mouffe.     

An equivalence test for comparing DNA sequences

The practice of sequence alignment is constantly oscillating between the risk of overlooking important structure and that of discovering any arbitrarily defined kind of structure anywhere. On the other hand, the use of a condensed consensus sequence may lead to a substantial loss in valuable information. While adopting a Mahalanobis‐type index we allow for a certain degree of uncertainty in the measurements. This uncertainty may be caused by inaccurate measurements or ambiguity. In this paper, we test the similarity between DNA sequences within the framework of equivalence testing, accounting for both variances and covariances between frequencies of nucleotides. Statistical methods for testing equivalence were first developed in the context of pharmacokinetics and later extended to the field of clinical trials. Nowadays, (bio)equivalence tests seem to be less frequently used outside the drug testing field, including statistical genetics. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.