Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

Functional analysis of high-content high-throughput imaging data

High-content automated imaging platforms allow the multiplexing of several targets simultaneously to generate multi-parametric single-cell data sets over extended periods of time. Typically, standard simple measures such as mean value of all cells at every time point are calculated to summarize the temporal process, resulting in loss of time dynamics of the single cells. Multiple experiments are performed but observation time points are not necessarily identical, leading to difficulties when integrating summary measures from different experiments. We used functional data analysis to analyze continuous curve data, where the temporal process of a response variable for each single cell can be described using a smooth curve. This allows analyses to be performed on continuous functions, rather than on original discrete data points. Functional regression models were applied to determine common temporal characteristics of a set of single cell curves and random effects were employed in the models to explain variation between experiments. The aim of the multiplexing approach is to simultaneously analyze the effect of a large number of compounds in comparison to control to discriminate between their mode of action. Functional principal component analysis based on T-statistic curves for pairwise comparison to control was used to study time-dependent compound effects.     

Of bodies captured: the visual representation of the Paarl march and Poqo in apartheid South Africa

This article examines the visual representation of the violent march on the Western Cape town of Paarl in November 1962, and the place of photographs as employed by the media, a state-appointed commission of inquiry, and a series of judicial trials in the making of this event and its subjects. It is particularly concerned with a file of photographs of men accused of participating in the march, as a means to potentially enabling more complex and nuanced readings of the uprising than those provided by the textual archive surrounding the event. It considers the ways in which these photographs were used and why, while seemingly meant to give a face to a united Poqo organisation they never take on an altogether-public life. Clearly photographic occasions which were not as rigidly controlled as one would expect from police photographs, these photographs reference a multiplicity of genres. Yet at the same time, as the products of police surveillance, they remain deeply complicit in discourses of power and subjectification.     

Bullying and Victimization Among Young Elementary School Children: The Role of Child Ethnicity and Ethnic School Composition

School-aged children with an ethnic minority background are relatively often involved in bullying and victimization, but the role of ethnic composition of schools in this context remains unclear. This study examined the relation between ethnic minority background, ethnic school composition, and bullying behaviour around primary school entry in the Netherlands. The study was based on a 2008/2009 school survey in Rotterdam, a Dutch city where about 50 % of children have a non-Dutch background. For 8523 children, teacher reports of bullying behaviour at age 5–6 years were available. Children with a non-Dutch background had higher odds of being a victim (adjusted OR 1.41, 95 % CI 1.11, 1.80), bully (OR 1.38, 95 % CI 1.20, 1.58) or bully-victim (OR 1.38, 95 % CI 1.19, 1.62) than children of Dutch national origin. Ethnic diversity in schools increased children’s risk of bullying behaviour (e.g. OR_victim per 0.1 increase in 0–1 diversity range = 1.06, 95 % CI 1.00, 1.13), with children of both Dutch and non-Dutch national origin relatively more often involved in bullying in ethnically diverse schools. The proportion of same-ethnic peers in school reduced the risk of bullying among children of Dutch national origin (e.g. OR_victim per 10 % more same-ethnic children = 0.90, 95 % CI 0.83, 0.98), but not among non-Dutch children. In conclusion, ethnic minority background and ethnic diversity within schools are risk factors for bullying among 5–6 year olds. Plausibly, reductions in absolute numbers of bullying events may be obtained with tailor-made interventions in ethnically diverse schools. Such interventions should preferably be offered early in the school curriculum.     

A framework for the comparison of maximum pseudo-likelihood and maximum likelihood estimation of exponential family random graph models

The statistical modeling of social network data is difficult due to the complex dependence structure of the tie variables. Statistical exponential families of distributions provide a flexible way to model such dependence. They enable the statistical characteristics of the network to be encapsulated within an exponential family random graph (ERG) model. For a long time, however, likelihood-based estimation was only feasible for ERG models assuming dyad independence. For more realistic and complex models inference has been based on the pseudo-likelihood. Recent advances in computational methods have made likelihood-based inference practical, and comparison of the different estimators possible.     

Ethnic segregation in context: Social discrimination among native Dutch pupils and their ethnic minority classmates

Social discrimination, defined as the relative preference for intra-ethnic over inter-ethnic relationships, was studied in pupils’ networks in Dutch secondary school classes. While native Dutch pupils (ethnic majority members) mainly named fellow majority members, ethnic minority members reported ties with as many majority as minority members. Considering the ethnic composition of the classroom, however, majority members discriminated less than minorities. No strong effect of classroom ethnic composition on social discrimination was found, whereas neighborhood composition was shown to clearly influence social discrimination: ethnic minority members were more, and majority members less inclined to discriminate in neighborhoods with more ethnic presence.     

The effects of direct experience on consumer product evaluation

The effects of different sales strategies on consumer product evaluation were investigated. It was expected that direct product experience could decrease economic product valuation. Experiments 1 and 2 studied the effects of product trials and money-back guarantees on consumer willingness to pay (WTP). It appeared that WTP was significantly lower after a product trial than with a money-back guarantee or normal sale. In Experiment 3 a structural equation model showed that product trials had a positive effect on attitude toward the product. Also, a negative effect on WTP was found when the effect was measured directly, but a positive effect when the effect was measured indirectly (through attitude).     

The multinational transfer of competency-based foster parent assessment, selection, and training: a nine-country case study.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child mandates (Articles 19 and 20) that alternative care be available to protect children from maltreatment by parents and caregivers. Increasingly, countries around the world have recognized the benefits to child well-being of family-based care as an alternative to institutional care. The special if not extraordinary needs of children separated from parents because of abuse, neglect, and maltreatment and placed with foster families requires a commensurate effort to develop foster families who have special if not extraordinary skills. Methods that are effective and replicable across countries offer significant advantages, reducing investments in policies and practices that otherwise would have to be developed independently, country by country. This case study describes the factors that contributed to the transfer of knowledge in the assessment, selection, and training of foster parents and the impact to date.     

Ethical uneasiness and the need for open-ended reflexivity: the case of research into older people with a wish to die

This article focuses on research ethics in highly intimate research with possible impact on life and death. In order to stimulate an open-ended dialogue about research ethics, we reflect on four ethical challenges that came up during our research into older people with a wish to die. Drawing on our experiences, we discuss (1) the possibly confirming influence of our research on the death wish (moral experience of whether or not to disregard responsibility); (2) the suggested duty to intervene (moral experience of whether or not to compromise the person’s autonomy); (3) the researcher’s authority and power over the data (moral experience of threatening a person’s self-narrative) and (4) the dilemma of intimacy (moral experience of encountering the tragic). For guidance in addressing these challenges, we draw upon work on research ethics from phenomenological and care ethics scholars, as well as from those writing about relational ethics in health research. We suggest that being open about ethical uneasiness is important, because in most cases of a grey area, there are only open-ended answers needing an enquiring mind, rather than clear and fixed guidelines. Acknowledgement of ethical uneasiness and open-ended reflexivity are indispensable to constitute a morally good research practice.     

Urban and agricultural soils: conflicts and trade-offs in the optimization of ecosystem services

On-going human population growth and changing patterns of resource consumption are increasing global demand for ecosystem services, many of which are provided by soils. Some of these ecosystem services are linearly related to the surface area of pervious soil, whereas others show non-linear relationships, making ecosystem service optimization a complex task. As limited land availability creates conflicting demands among various types of land use, a central challenge is how to weigh these conflicting interests and how to achieve the best solutions possible from a perspective of sustainable societal development. These conflicting interests become most apparent in soils that are the most heavily used by humans for specific purposes: urban soils used for green spaces, housing, and other infrastructure and agricultural soils for producing food, fibres and biofuels. We argue that, despite their seemingly divergent uses of land, agricultural and urban soils share common features with regards to interactions between ecosystem services, and that the trade-offs associated with decision-making, while scale- and context-dependent, can be surprisingly similar between the two systems. We propose that the trade-offs within land use types and their soil-related ecosystems services are often disproportional, and quantifying these will enable ecologists and soil scientists to help policy makers optimizing management decisions when confronted with demands for multiple services under limited land availability.