The nature of AIDS and babies

The rapidly growing menace to young children, Pediatric AIDS, is generally unrecognized, under-reported and too often misunderstood. This paper discusses the nature of AIDS with particular emphasis on, the symptoms, modes of transmission and the various treatment issues.     

Because I'm Worth It? Understanding Inequality in a Performance‐Based Pay System*

How do workers understand pay inequality? Every organizational field has a taken‐for‐granted compensation system that shapes understandings of rewards. Using data from 76 Wall Street professionals, I analyze how individuals interpret, understand, and justify inequality in a performance‐based reward system where pay is supposed to be based on merit. A majority of securities workers believed that the performance‐based pay system produced equitable rewards. But a substantial minority challenged the procedural and/or distributive justice of this pay system, producing counterinstitutional accounts. These accounts took three general forms: accounts of arbitrariness, accounts of misinformation, and accounts of discrimination. All of these counterinstitutional accounts pointed to nonmerit influences on bonuses. I argue that these challenges might undermine the legitimacy of the pay system, but most men and women who challenged the system exited their firms or the industry, so that their challenges did little to destabilize Wall Street's pay practices. Wall Street appears to maintain its legitimacy in part through the self‐selection of dissenters out of the system.     

Youth,slang, and pragmatic expressions: Examples from Brazilian Portuguese1

This article draws on an ethnographic study of the stigmatized speech style of poor black male youth in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These youth are said to speak gíria (‘slang’), and their speech is often described as incomprehensible to the Brazilian middle class. Speakers and listeners point to a wide range of pragmatic expressions as some of the most salient linguistic features associated with this speech style. This article presents examples from Brazilian Portuguese slang, in which youth draw on sound words, obscenities, address forms, and addressee‐oriented tags to create new pragmatic markers and forms of indefinite reference. It is argued that these pragmatic expressions offer multiple opportunities for speakers to convey stance, novelty, and style, social goals long associated with slang. This data suggests that we broaden the purview of slang beyond the lexicon to investigate the ways in which speakers actively innovate within the area of pragmatics.     

Reframing Tri Hita Karana: From ‘Balinese Culture’ to Politics

This article takes issue with the uncritical way in which claims of ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ or ‘local knowledge’ are used in science and policymaking around the Balinese irrigators' association (subak). The growing problems of Balinese irrigated agriculture are increasingly framed in ‘cultural’ ways that are not neutral: such accounts of irrigated agriculture in relation to Balinese culture deeply influence the world of policymaking. In this article we discuss the emergence of Tri Hita Karana (THK; ‘the three causes of well-being’) as an ideology, scientific concept and policy concept in irrigated agriculture and the subak domain. We argue that this ideological concept is not simply ‘local wisdom’, ‘tradition’ or ‘culture’ but requires critical scientific scrutiny as part of wider processes of socio-political change. How is it mobilised? What does its growing popularity mean for our knowledge of Balinese irrigated agriculture, of policy processes directed at the subak and of the workings of policies in real-life contexts?     

Infants' Visual Recognition of Pincer Grip Emerges Between 9 and 12 Months of Age

The development of the ability to recognize the whole human body shape has long been investigated in infants, while less is known about their ability to recognize the shape of single body parts, and in particular their biomechanical constraints. This study aimed to explore whether 9‐ and 12‐month‐old infants have knowledge of a hand‐grasping movement (i.e., pincer grip), being able to recognize violations of the hand's anatomical constraints during the observation of that movement. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we showed that 12‐month‐olds discriminate between biomechanically possible and impossible pincer grips, preferring the former over the latter (Experiment 1). This capacity begins to emerge by 9 months of age, modulated by infants' own sensorimotor experience with pincer grip (Experiment 2). Our findings indicate that the ability to visually discriminate between pincer grasps differing in their biomechanical properties develops between 9 and 12 months of age, and that experience with self‐produced hand movements might help infants in building a representation of the hand that encompasses knowledge of the physical constraints of this body part.     

Reducing bias through indirect social contact: assessing the impact of student involvement with faculty-led research on unauthorized immigration

This paper explores how working on a faculty-led research project influenced the views of Master of Social Work students concerning unauthorized immigrants. Five graduate assistants worked for one year with two faculty members and one doctoral student to code data from interviews with social workers at immigrant-serving organizations in South Carolina. The master’s students then reflected on what they learned from participating in data analysis tasks, indicating that the experience had further sensitized them to the social justice concerns confronting unauthorized immigrants. Drawing on social contact theory, we argue that student participation in faculty-led research can provide a form of indirect social exposure to other groups, which reduce bias, and suggest that such experiences be included in how educators conceptualize the implicit curriculum in schools of social work.     

Random alliance networks

The morphological properties of kinship and marriage alliance networks, such as circuits, are typically considered as indicators of sociological phenomena — yet, they may also be partly coincidental. To assert the contribution of chance to these morphological features, we develop a standardized method where empirical alliance networks are compared with a random baseline. We apply our framework to a variety of empirical cases and show that some corpuses are remarkably well reconstructed by our random model, while others still feature significant divergencies which may be partly connected to field-based experience. On the whole, our approach may be used to scrutinize the matrimonial role of social groups as asserted by native or ethnological theory.     

Rule learning transfer across linguistic and visual modalities in 7-month-old infants

Rule learning (RL) refers to infants’ ability to extract high-order, repetition-based rules from a sequence of elements and to generalize them to new items. RL has been demonstrated in both the auditory and the visual modality, but no studies have investigated infants’ transfer of learning across these two modalities, a process that is fundamental for the development of many complex cognitive skills. Using a visual habituation procedure within a cross-modal RL task, we tested 7-month-old infants’ transfer of learning both from speech to vision (auditory-visual—AV—condition) and from vision to speech (visual-auditory—VA—condition). Results showed a transfer of learning in the AV condition, but only for those infants who were able to efficiently extract the rule during the learning (habituation) phase. In contrast, in the VA condition infants provided no evidence of RL. Overall, this study indicates that 7-month-old infants can transfers high-order rules across modalities with an advantage for transferring from speech to vision, and that this ability is constrained by infants’ individual differences in the way they process the to-be-learned rules.