Networked intimacy. Intimacy and friendship among Italian Facebook users

In this paper, we describe the results of a qualitative study conducted with 120 Italian Facebook users to investigate how Facebook enables people to achieve a mutually constitutive intimacy with their own friendship network: a negotiation of intimacy in public through self-disclosure, where the affordances of the platform are useful to elicit significant reactions, validations and demonstrations of affection from others. We observed that, in order to achieve various levels of intimacy on Facebook, people engage in various strategies: Showing rather than telling, Sharing implicit content, Tagging, Expectation of mutual understanding and Liking. These strategies produce a collaborative disclosure that relies on others’ cooperation to maintain the boundaries between private and public space. Based on these premises, we developed a framework of collaborative strategies for managing public intimacy that both systematizes and extends the findings identified in previous studies of intimacy on Facebook. We describe this framework as networked intimacy and we discuss the consequences of it in the light of already existing research on online self-disclosure.     

A Different Pier: Re-Writing Homosexuality into Pier Vittorio Tondelli

The author reviews and challenges the critical construction of the gay Italian writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli. His critical approach to Tondelli rewrites homosexuality back into his books; even though with different agendas, both Catholic and gay critics have silenced this important part of Tondelli's oeuvre. Upon a close reading of several passages of Tondelli's last novel Separate Rooms (P. V. Tondelli, 1989/1992), the author shows how the book functions as a powerful exposure of the heterosexist claim of being the only natural sexuality, a claim that, the novel argues, is supported by official religion.     

Practitioner research for the professionalization of human resources practice: empirical data from the Netherlands

Despite the growing interest in and literature regarding practitioner research in human resources (HR), not much is known about the factors that play a role in the actual practice by HR practitioners. This article describes an explorative study to gain empirical insight into the use and quality of practitioner research in HR practice. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 Dutch HR practitioners from diverse backgrounds, posing questions about (1) their definitions of practitioner research, (2) the characteristics of the research they perform, (3) the quality and usability of the research projects in which they have taken part, and (4) the forces that drive or hinder practitioner research. We constructed theory-based coding schemes to analyse the data. To assess the quality and usability of the research performed by participants, we constructed a quality framework. Our findings show that all participants were more or less involved in HR-related practitioner research, but the quality and usability of that research could be improved. We report several causes and influencing factors. Our findings complement previous research on evidence-based HR and other practitioner research approaches and provide new insights. Based on our findings, we discuss implications for further research and practice.     

A geometric approach to transdimensional markov chain monte carlo

The authors present theoretical results that show how one can simulate a mixture distribution whose components live in subspaces of different dimension by reformulating the problem in such a way that observations may be drawn from an auxiliary continuous distribution on the largest subspace and then transformed in an appropriate fashion. Motivated by the importance of enlarging the set of available Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques, the authors show how their results can be fruitfully employed in problems such as model selection (or averaging) of nested models, or regeneration of Markov chains for evaluating standard deviations of estimated expectations derived from MCMC simulations.     

Graphics for studying logistic regression models

In this article we focus on logistic regression models for binary responses. An existing result shows that the log-odds can be modelled depending on the log of the ratio between the conditional densities of the predictors given the response variable. This suggests that relevant statistical information could be extracted investigating the inverse problem. Thus, we present different methods for studying the log-density ratio through graphs, which allow us to select which predictors are needed, and how they should be included in a logistic regression model. We also discuss data analysis examples based on real datasets available in literature in order to provide further insights into the methodology proposed.     

Weighted likelihood mixture modeling and model-based clustering

Statistics and Computing - A weighted likelihood approach for robust fitting of a mixture of multivariate Gaussian components is developed in this work. Two approaches have been proposed that are...     

Ein Ansatz zur Förderung von Reflexionskompetenz: Fallarbeit in 7 Schritten

This article describes a didactical model for higher education purposes focusing on the development of theory driven and self driven ‘case reflection competence’. We (Telse Iwers-Stelljes and Renate Luca) have developed this procedure in the last 6 years and formative evaluated it in different investigations. Starting point of this project were the actual results on studies of antinomical conditions of professional teachers and students in the classroom environment and the intention to find a humanistic psychologically-oriented access to handle them. In the following, we are going to describe 1) the theoretical foundations of our researches to explain the context of our model, 2) its methodical implementation and 3) a case reconstruction based on an example reflected by one of our students.     

Sustainable storage assignment and dwell-point policies for automated storage and retrieval systems

Picking time reduction has been the traditional perspective for warehouse optimisation. When sustainability is considered, optimisation of warehouse operations should be read in terms of energy efficiency other than response time. Each location in the rack of an automated storage and retrieval system is associated with the value of energy consumed by the crane to reach it. Since picking performance strictly depends on storage location assignments, the time-based full turnover strategy is compared to the energy-based one. Three models of energy consumption are considered for traditional and new-generation cranes. Assignments are then compared in terms of dedicated zone shapes, time and energy performances within a given time horizon. Different shapes of the rack and product ABC curves are analysed. Dwell-point policies are also analysed from the new sustainable perspective, adding energy-saving performance to the traditional picking time reduction.