Post‐adolescence as a new phase in the family cycle?

This article investigates the phenomenon of post‐adolescence and its implications for the persons affected—both the young people and their parents—as well as for social policy. The emergence of an extended ‘moratorium’ phase for young people still in the educational system, living alone yet financially dependent on their parents is related to changes in the value systems of modern societies, the rising economic prosperity for a greater proportion of the population, the earlier age of achievement of physical maturity as well as to structural transformations at the level of the labour market.     

Das Geschäft mit der Gewalt

The business with acts of violence. Why the ?disarmament in TV“ does not advance?Media politics and media industry form a fatal alliance by preventing that there are serious limits to presentations of acts of violence in the media. The media lobby is up to now successful in preventing that real conclusions are drawn from the scientific findings of independent researchers on the effects of media violence. The profit of the media industry is more important than the mental health of children and adolescents. The author delineates the consequences for politics, pedagogics and the media industry with some uncomfortable, but effective recommendations.     

Games and Mechanism Design in Machine Scheduling—An Introduction

We survey different models, techniques, and some recent results to tackle machine scheduling problems within a distributed setting. In traditional optimization, a central authority is asked to solve a (computationally hard) optimization problem. In contrast, in distributed settings there are several agents, possibly equipped with private information that is not publicly known, and these agents must interact to derive a solution to the problem. Usually the agents have their individual preferences, which induces them to behave strategically to manipulate the resulting solution. Nevertheless, one is often interested in the global performance of such systems. The analysis of such distributed settings requires techniques from classical optimization, game theory, and economic theory. The paper therefore briefly introduces the most important of the underlying concepts and gives a selection of typical research questions and recent results, focusing on applications to machine scheduling problems. This includes the study of the so‐called price of anarchy for settings where the agents do not possess private information, as well as the design and analysis of (truthful) mechanisms in settings where the agents do possess private information.     

Fair division of indivisible items between two players: design parameters for Contested Pile methods

Contested Pile methods are two-phase procedures for the fair allocation of indivisible items to two players. In the Generation Phase, items over which the players’ preferences differ widely enough are allocated. “Contested” items are placed in the Contested Pile, which is then allocated in the Splitting Phase. Each phase can be carried out using several different techniques; we perform a comprehensive analysis of the resulting design variants using a computational model. The properties of fairness and efficiency, generally achieved in the Generation Phase, must be traded off against robustness to manipulation. We find that the recently developed Undercut procedure for the Splitting Phase outperforms alternative methods in both fairness and efficiency. In general, procedures that keep the Contested Pile relatively small and incorporate the Undercut procedure score well in both fairness and efficiency, but are prone to manipulation.     

Share the Burden or Pass it on?

There are numerous explanations for why Tanzania withdrew from the CRRF (Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework). Being aware that the decision was the sum of multiple coinciding factors the article argues that the decisive features were, firstly, a failed dialogue about the basis and the goals of CRRF between the Tanzanian government and the UN (United Nations); secondly, a disillusion on the Tanzanian side related to the history of international cooperation on refugee issues; and thirdly, a perceived contradiction between the goals of the CRRF and domestic policies, specifically in relation to the agenda of national sovereignty propagated by the incumbent Tanzanian government. Numerous publications on the New York declaration, the CRRF, and the GCR (Global Compact on Refugees) have portrayed the evolution of ideas, principles, and political compromises in question. Yet few analyses highlight which core messages were received on the ground or what impact they had on the very people concerned. This article, therefore will touch only briefly on declarations and statements of the UN and instead focus on a bottom‐up perspective.     

Attitudes Toward Aging and Retirement Homes Before and After Entry Into a Retirement Home

The change of one's habitual living conditions in favor of institutionalized living in a retirement home can be a stressful event. Therefore, the question arises: How does entry into a retirement home affect attitudes toward one's life and aging and toward retirement homes? In order to answer this question, we used longitudinal data from 53 older individuals who were surveyed before and after entry into a retirement home. The data revealed that attitudes toward one's life and aging changed negatively and attitudes toward retirement homes changed positively; however, there are gains and losses in both attitudes.     

Improved auxiliary mixture sampling for hierarchical models of non-Gaussian data

The article considers Bayesian analysis of hierarchical models for count, binomial and multinomial data using efficient MCMC sampling procedures. To this end, an improved method of auxiliary mixture sampling is proposed. In contrast to previously proposed samplers the method uses a bounded number of latent variables per observation, independent of the intensity of the underlying Poisson process in the case of count data, or of the number of experiments in the case of binomial and multinomial data. The bounded number of latent variables results in a more general error distribution, which is a negative log-Gamma distribution with arbitrary integer shape parameter. The required approximations of these distributions by Gaussian mixtures have been computed. Overall, the improvement leads to a substantial increase in efficiency of auxiliary mixture sampling for highly structured models. The method is illustrated for finite mixtures of generalized linear models and an epidemiological case study.