Restoring sanity through comic relief: Parody television viewers and political outlook

Parody news programs regale viewers with satirical, witty, and humorous exposés of the political world and news coverage, but they have also been criticized for creating cynicism and political disengagement. This study found that parody news viewers are self-efficacious and more politically active than viewers of CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or broadcast television news. Moreover, reliance on parody news shows does not lead to political polarization or government distrust.     

Split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo

We show how the Hamiltonian Monte Carlo algorithm can sometimes be speeded up by “splitting” the Hamiltonian in a way that allows much of the movement around the state space to be done at low computational cost. One context where this is possible is when the log density of the distribution of interest (the potential energy function) can be written as the log of a Gaussian density, which is a quadratic function, plus a slowly-varying function. Hamiltonian dynamics for quadratic energy functions can be analytically solved. With the splitting technique, only the slowly-varying part of the energy needs to be handled numerically, and this can be done with a larger stepsize (and hence fewer steps) than would be necessary with a direct simulation of the dynamics. Another context where splitting helps is when the most important terms of the potential energy function and its gradient can be evaluated quickly, with only a slowly-varying part requiring costly computations. With splitting, the quick portion can be handled with a small stepsize, while the costly portion uses a larger stepsize. We show that both of these splitting approaches can reduce the computational cost of sampling from the posterior distribution for a logistic regression model, using either a Gaussian approximation centered on the posterior mode, or a Hamiltonian split into a term that depends on only a small number of critical cases, and another term that involves the larger number of cases whose influence on the posterior distribution is small.     

Leadership of highly creative people in highly creative fields: A historiometric study of scientific leaders

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the study of the influence of leadership on creativity, and the effects of this relationship on organizational performance. While a number of explanations have been broached with regard to the positive effects of leadership on creativity, many of these studies propose different, and often contradictory, methods for leaders to achieve these positive effects on creativity within their organizations and work groups. Additionally, little work has been done examining the effects of leadership on highly creative people in fields requiring creativity. The purpose of this study is to examine two existing leadership theories with regard to their viability as models to explain creative performance of eminent scientists. Eminent scientists represent a population of leaders of highly creative individuals in a field that values the production of innovative ideas and products as a marker of performance. Ninety-three excerpts from the biographies of scientists were content coded for leader behaviors and performance criteria. The results of this analysis indicate that a model based on strategic planning and product championing may serve to explain the positive effects of leadership on creativity in a highly creative population.     

Funding Civil Society? Bilateral Government Support for Development NGOs

Research on the determinants of foreign aid tends to focus on the relationship between donor country priorities and recipient state characteristics, but donors also make decisions about which organizations and programs within countries will receive assistance. Although NGOs increasingly have been recipients of foreign aid, few data are available to investigate which organizations within a given country receive that funding. Donors may prioritize structural characteristics of NGOs or their local ties—or they may seek a combination that blends concern about efficiency and accountability with an interest in developing national civil society. We use original data from Cambodia to explore whether aid is likely to go to managerial organizations (professionalized NGOs and NGOs that utilize modern management tools) or to organizations that are embedded in the domestic context. We argue that managerialism provides legitimacy for NGOs by signaling capacity and accountability to donors, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We argue that local embeddedness also confers legitimacy by aligning community ties and networks to rights-based development, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We find general support for the managerialism argument, but donor agencies do not prioritize direct funding for “indigenous” NGOs—not even among those with high levels of managerialism.     

The Read Feed: Reviews

Abstract

Michelle DeMars reviews Academic Libraries for Commuter Students: Research-Based Strategies. Hayley Moreno reviews Coding with XML for Efficiencies in Cataloging and Metadata: Practical Applications of XSD, XSLT, and XQuery.     

Sociology and the European Court of Human Rights

This article offers a sociological analysis of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Adopting a sociological jurisprudence approach, the article aims to demonstrate the unique and valuable contribution that sociology can make to understanding key aspects of international human rights law. Whilst the article seeks to develop an agenda for critical sociological research on human rights law, it also aims to persuade those charged with the supervision of human rights of the value of sociological analysis. To achieve this, the article focuses on three separate but inter‐related aspects of ECtHR jurisprudence: first, it considers the ECtHR's approach to consensus in its adjudication of human rights complaints; second, it examines the social control implications of the ECtHR's decisions and judgments; and third, it assesses how conceptualizations of social identity are often foundational to the ECtHR's reasoning.     

Measuring Sharedness of Team-Related Knowledge: Design and Validation of a Shared Mental Model Instrument

Many researchers have explored how people share and construct similar mental models in teams. They have claimed that successful team performance depends on a shared mental model of team members about task, team, equipment and situation. Most of the literature has illustrated simplified relationships between a team's mental model and their performance without a valid instrument addressing the confined and relevant constructs of a shared mental model. This paper describes the instrument development steps and the conceptual framework for factors associated with shared mental models. After development and refinement, the instrument was finalized for use to measure team-related knowledge. The final instrument consists of 42 items that are linked to the five emergent factors of shared mental models including general task and team knowledge, general task and communication skills, attitude toward teammates and task, team dynamics and interactions, and team resources and working environment.     

The Detection of Influential Observations for Allocation,Separation, and the Determination of Probabilities in a Bayesian Framework

Normal theory separation and allocation problems are discussed from a predictive point of view. Influence statistics are defined and employed to ascertain the impact that particular observations will have on the inferential goals—allocation of future observations, separation between populations, and the determination of probabilities for future cases. Methods are illustrated on a collection of financial data taken from Johnson and Wichern (1982).