Tinder and humanitarian hook-ups: the erotics of social media racism

In March 2014, at the height of the popularity of the hook-up application Tinder, The Guardian published the “Seven Shades of Cliché” of user profiles claiming that Humanitarians of Tinder are the “creepiest ticket yet to laidsville.” Humanitarians of Tinder are Tinder users (a hook-up application) who have selected to present images of themselves in humanitarian or volunteer settings outside of the West (or Global North, developed world). With a Tumblr devoted to this subgroup of Tinder users, and mainstream media outlets including The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, and the feminist blog Jezebel following this story, Humanitarians of Tinder evoke dialogue about the intersections of sexiness and racialized benevolence. This article takes seriously Humanitarians of Tinder to think through the connections between social media hook-ups, racial affect, feminist studies humanitarianism, and racisms in development. It asks: why do people use humanitarian photos to generate hook-ups on social media? How does holding an African baby make someone “hot”?     

Data-dependent probability matching priors of the second order

In this paper, we consider the preliminary test approach for the estimation of the regression parameter in a multiple regression model under a multicollinearity situation. The preliminary test two-parameter estimators based on the Wald (W), likelihood ratio, and Lagrangian multiplier tests are given, when it is suspected that the regression parameter may be restricted to a subspace and the regression error is distributed with multivariate Student's t distribution. The bias and mean square error of the proposed estimators are derived and compared. The conditions of superiority of the proposed estimators are obtained. Finally, we conclude that the optimum choice of the level of significance becomes the traditional choice by using the Wald test.     

Power of the First Hour

Abstract

In 2012, the NGO Save the Children launched its No Child Born to Die campaign with the tagline, “Breastfeeding Saves Lives.” The press release explains that in the first hours and days after a baby is born, their mother produces colostrum, a substance known to improve immunity, which must be delivered to infants in the first sixty minutes of life; this is referred to as “the power of the first hour.” Invoking a sense of urgency and a crisis of infant mortality, which breastfeeding is positioned to resolve, the campaign cites staggering medical statistics of infant deaths in the campaign targets of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and also Northern Indigenous and Inuit reserves in Canada. More than misrepresenting racialized women in the developed world as uneducated on infant health, childcare and child rearing and as lacking agency and empowerment, the campaign mobilizes the erroneous conflation of medical science, morality, capitalism and public health – a linkage typically mobilized by the development industry to the detriment of globally marginalized women. In order to understand how this conflation is mobilized to manufacture crisis at the expense of examining the root causes of infant mortality globally, we collect theories of crisis temporalities to develop a “feminist politics of crisis.”     

Cigarette Smoking in Same-Sex and Different-Sex Unions: The Role of Socioeconomic and Psychological Factors

Cigarette smoking has long been a target of public health intervention because it substantially contributes to morbidity and mortality. Individuals in different-sex marriages have lower smoking risk (i.e., prevalence and frequency) than different-sex cohabiters. However, little is known about the smoking risk of individuals in same-sex cohabiting unions. We compare the smoking risk of individuals in different-sex marriages, same-sex cohabiting unions, and different-sex cohabiting unions using pooled cross-sectional data from the 1997–2010 National Health Interview Surveys (N = 168,514). We further examine the role of socioeconomic status (SES) and psychological distress in the relationship between union status and smoking. Estimates from multinomial logistic regression models reveal that same-sex and different-sex cohabiters experience similar smoking risk when compared to one another, and higher smoking risk when compared to the different-sex married. Results suggest that SES and psychological distress factors cannot fully explain smoking differences between the different-sex married and same-sex and different-sex cohabiting groups. Moreover, without same-sex cohabiter’s education advantage, same-sex cohabiters would experience even greater smoking risk relative to the different-sex married. Policy recommendations to reduce smoking disparities among same-sex and different-sex cohabiters are discussed.     

Self-enhancement of Peer Acceptance: Implications for Children's Self-worth and Interpersonal Functioning

Changes in feelings of self‐worth and peer acceptance associated with self‐enhancing perceptions of their peer acceptance were examined for a normative sample and for a group of peer‐rejected children. Whether the correlates of self‐enhancement differed as a function of the way in which perceptions were assessed (i.e., general versus specific measures of self‐enhancement) or by the degree of enhancement were also studied. Using a longitudinal design, 670 students in grades 3 through 5 were assessed across an academic year. For the normative sample, general self‐enhancement of peer acceptance was associated with positive outcomes; specific self‐enhancement of peer acceptance was unrelated to changes in outcomes. Both general and specific self‐enhancement scores were associated with gains in one or more outcome measures in the rejected group. No support was found for the hypothesis that mild to moderate self‐enhancement is predictive of adjustment whereas extreme self‐enhancement is related to maladjustment.     

Probability matching priors for two-sided tolerance intervals in balanced one-way and two-way nested random effects models

We consider two-sided Bayesian tolerance intervals, with approximate frequentist validity, for a future observation in balanced one-way and two-way nested random effects models. Probability matching conditions, specific to this problem, are derived in either case via a technique that involves inversion of approximate posterior characteristic functions. In addition to yielding probability matching priors for the present problem, these conditions are useful in evaluating certain other priors that have received attention in the literature.     

Establishing self and meaning in low back pain narratives

Pain narratives encounter the problem of verbalising private and internalised experiences. Words appear to fall short of giving meaning to the feelings and impact of pain. In this paper we report on how people describe their low back pain and the way in which they claim to present this to clinicians. In the research interviews they need to establish themselves as believable narrators and provide accounts of how they legitimise their pain in clinical encounters. As a result, the interviews provide complex and layered narratives of pain and its representation.     

A Lagrangian Non Central Negative Binomial Distribution of the First Kind

A Lagrangian probability distribution of the first kind is proposed. Its probability mass function is expressed in terms of generalized Laguerre polynomials or, equivalently, a generalized hypergeometric function. The distribution may also be formulated as a Charlier series distribution generalized by the generalizing Consul distribution and a non central negative binomial distribution generalized by the generalizing Geeta distribution. This article studies formulation and properties of the distribution such as mixture, dispersion, recursive formulas, conditional distribution and the relationship with queuing theory. Two illustrative examples of application to fitting are given.     

Parameter estimation by minimizing a probability generating function-based power divergence

Abstract

Generating function-based statistical inference is an attractive approach if the probability (density) function is complicated when compared with the generating function. Here, we propose a parameter estimation method that minimizes a probability generating function (pgf)-based power divergence with a tuning parameter to mitigate the impact of data contamination. The proposed estimator is linked to the M-estimators and hence possesses the properties of consistency and asymptotic normality. In terms of parameter biases and mean squared errors from simulations, the proposed estimation method performs better for smaller value of the tuning parameter as data contamination percentage increases.