Household experience of gambling-related harm by socio-economic deprivation in New Zealand: increases in inequality between 2008 and 2012

Although problem gamblers make up a small proportion of the New Zealand population, those who are living in more deprived areas at higher risk of harm from their own or someone else's gambling. The global financial crisis in 2008 has been linked with changes in gambling behaviour and with increases in inequality between areas of relative deprivation. Nationally representative datasets from in-home face-to-face health surveys in 2008, 2010 and 2012 were analysed to investigate changes in gambling behaviour, experiences of household-level harm related to gambling, and the association with economic deprivation. Although overall gambling participation had dropped, the experience of gambling harm at the household level was significantly higher in 2012 compared with 2008 and 2010. The increase in harm was experienced disproportionately by those in more deprived areas, who were 4.5 times as likely to experience gambling-related arguments or money problems. We consider possible explanations including more harmful gambling behaviour as a response to financial stresses, decreasing household resilience to financial stresses, and the concentration of more harmful forms of gambling product in more deprived areas. Causes of gambling harm in deprived communities, and the vulnerability of households in these communities, should be addressed if inequalities are to be reduced.     

Editorial

This introductory article provides an overview and theoretical anchor for the following contributions in this special issue. The article discusses, first, the necessity for introducing a new research paradigm – ‘visual competence’ – in the social sciences (anthropology, communication science, media and social psychology, political science, sociology), arguing that the actual transformations of reality triggered by processes of globalisation and digitisation require a closer scrutiny of the visual. In a second step, the new paradigm ‘visual competence’ is introduced, focusing on four dimensions: visual production, perception, interpretation and reception competencies. A new model, the visual competence cycle, is suggested. The article concludes with a specific application example for studying visual interpretation competence in a case study of the humanising and de‐humanising effects of portraiture.     

Composable models for online Bayesian analysis of streaming data

Data is rapidly increasing in volume and velocity and the Internet of Things (IoT) is one important source of this data. The IoT is a collection of connected devices (things) which are constantly recording data from their surroundings using on-board sensors. These devices can record and stream data to the cloud at a very high rate, leading to high storage and analysis costs. In order to ameliorate these costs, the data is modelled as a stream and analysed online to learn about the underlying process, perform interpolation and smoothing and make forecasts and predictions. Conventional state space modelling tools assume the observations occur on a fixed regular time grid. However, many sensors change their sampling frequency, sometimes adaptively, or get interrupted and re-started out of sync with the previous sampling grid, or just generate event data at irregular times. It is therefore desirable to model the system as a partially and irregularly observed Markov process which evolves in continuous time. Both the process and the observation model are potentially non-linear. Particle filters therefore represent the simplest approach to online analysis. A functional Scala library of composable continuous time Markov process models has been developed in order to model the wide variety of data captured in the IoT.     

The Termination of State-Run International Trade Programs in California: Perspectives on Contributing Factors and Future Policy Options

The paper examines developments that led to the termination of California’s major state-run international trade programs managed by the now defunct Technology, Trade and Commerce Agency and provides perspectives on future policy options. Study findings indicate that what the academic literature refers to as “theory failure” and “implementation failure,” along with deficiencies in leadership and organizational culture, must be seen as the major reasons for the programs’ elimination.     

Max Weber's ethics and the peace movement today

Conclusion The decisive change since Weber spoke of our responsibility before history has not been the demise of the German nation state after only seventy-five years but the sudden dawn of the nuclear age. Now the survival of populations, not of nation-states is at stake - a situation not anticipated by Weber and his contemporaries. It is quite possible that many millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, will die because of rational strategic decisions by political and military leaders, but it is no longer possible to legitimate a great war as a matter of honor, as Churchill and Weber did, or as an enterprise to make the world safe for democracy, as Wilson and Roosevelt did. If there can be no more victors, it also becomes impossible to load the responsibility before history on their shoulders, as Weber did in Politics as a Vocation.Today a new concept of responsibility is appropriate, which has a general and a specifically German aspect. The latter involves the German responsibility for the World Wars. Weber had vehemently rejected the Allied charge that Imperial Germany was primarily responsible for the war, even though he was very worried about what might be buried in the German archives. Today it can no longer be denied that Imperial Germany was largely guilty as charged. After the second war, it was impossible to deny the German responsibility. During his tenure as chancellor Helmut Schmidt pointed time and again to the Federal Republic's moral obligation to assure the Soviet Union that it would never again be attacked. Since the German nation does no longer exist, the foreign minister under Schmidt and Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, now speaks of a German-German community of responsibility (Verantwortungsgemeinschaft), in contrast to the community of fate shared with the Western allies. At the same time the peace movement has used the German responsibility for the Second World War and for organized genocide as a moral argument for a special German duty to help prevent another war.Before the First World War pacifism was propagated by only a handful of intellectuals. Afterwards the Nie wieder Krieg (Never again war) movement was supported by masses of people who had experienced the horrors of the Great War. Today the peace movement is no longer what it was for Weber, a cause for a few pacifist Utopians or of a generation that suffered through a world war. The danger of a nuclear holocaust has given the movement a novel historical significance. If the new kind of pacifism is not merely a matter of humanitarian commitment, which aims at a world without war, but a movement that struggles to help humanity survive, then it is equally a matter of good intentions and of responsibility - and Weber's distinction collapses.Weber could take it for granted that there would be generational succession and hence history in the future. We cannot do so any more. This has created a special kind of responsibility not before our descendants but for the very possibility that new generations will be able to live - a totally new ethical situation. Saving whole populations and even having to ensure the continuance of life has become a new ultimate value, transcending the salvation concerns of religious virtuosi and the political Utopias of revolutionaries as well as the traditional interests of the leaders of nation-states. Before this situation Weber's distinction between the two ethics loses its political applicability. Finally, the new ethical situation forces us to look beyond politics as a vocation as a matter merely of political leadership. Today the peace movement is an endeavor to make politics everybody's vocation in the face of perplexed governments who surrender the people to the rationality of military technology. During the Second World War the atom bomb was constructed in total secrecy. For many years afterwards its further development lay in the hands of a tiny number of political leaders and scientists, who withheld as much information as possible from the public. The tendency toward secrecy has remained strong, but a large part of the public is now fighting for disclosure. If Clemenceau believed that war was too important to be left to generals, the new wisdom has it that the dangers of a nuclear war are too great to leave the armaments race and military strategy to elected politicians without effective public participation.In contrast to Weber's polar concepts, his battle-cry our responsibility before history has not remained part of public memory. Perhaps it should be resurrected today with a changed emphasis as a peaceable call to take responsibility for history. This might help both sides in the current struggles over nuclear defense policies in western Europe and the United States to remember their human commonality in spite of highly emotional confrontations.

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Landcare as a politically relevant new social movement?

This paper explores the political relevance of the Landcare movement in Australia in an attempt to understand the capacity of rural people to develop political outcomes through social action in civil society. We relate Claus Offe's notion of a politically relevant new social movement to movement development in Landcare and discuss the implications of this in terms of movement stability, relationships with the state and neo-liberal governance in Australia.Landcare has many of the characteristics attributed to new social movements. People involved in Landcare typically express a commitment to participatory forms of action and coordination, believe in a ‘win-win’ approach to conflict and are opposed to government ‘telling them what to do’. Forms of limited protest and conflict with government occur when core values of autonomy and participation are perceived to be under threat and these values are perceived to be universal rather than just applying to movement participants. However, in contrast to the attributes associated with new social movements, Landcare does not have an outwardly ‘oppositional’ character and a high proportion of movement members in Landcare are farmers and close to the imperatives of agricultural commodity production. Further, the state has had a central role in the initiation and ongoing support of the ‘movement’.These two latter points of difference, however, confer the most ‘political relevance’ to the movement. The role of the state in catalysing Landcare and promoting the ‘program’ in terms of its participatory values, confers significant legitimacy on the outcomes of participatory Landcare fora. Further, the increased transparency and learning of the environment through Landcare activities by farmers can lead to a questioning of the current economic orthodoxy that underpins rural policy.     

A Bayesian approach on the two-piece scale mixtures of normal homoscedastic nonlinear regression models

In this application note paper, we propose and examine the performance of a Bayesian approach for a homoscedastic nonlinear regression (NLR) model assuming errors with two-piece scale mixtures of normal (TP-SMN) distributions. The TP-SMN is a large family of distributions, covering both symmetrical/ asymmetrical distributions as well as light/heavy tailed distributions, and provides an alternative to another well-known family of distributions, called scale mixtures of skew-normal distributions. The proposed family and Bayesian approach provides considerable flexibility and advantages for NLR modelling in different practical settings. We examine the performance of the approach using simulated and real data.KEYWORDS: Gibbs sampling, MCMC method, nonlinear regression model, scale mixtures of normal family, two-piece distributions     

Urbanization alters fear behavior in black-capped chickadees

Urban landscapes contain a multitude of novel sensory stimuli, and urban dwelling animals, such as songbirds living near human dwellings, must quickly learn how to respond to these unfamiliar cues. When exposure reveals that a stimulus is associated with a cost, fearful behavior should increase. Conversely, neophobic fear should decrease when negative outcomes do not regularly follow the stimulus. Because exposure to anthropogenic stimuli is more common in birds that inhabit urbanized landscapes, their fear response patterns should more accurately reflect the risks associated with these stimuli. We conducted a series of feeder and playback experiments to explore whether urbanization altered black-capped chickadees’ (Poecile atricapillus) fear responses to model cats, humans, a novel object, and anthropogenic noise. We predicted that fearful responses to cat models would increase in birds as urbanization increased because negative interactions with cats are more common in the city. However, we expected urban birds to be less fearful of our other stimuli because fitness costs are absent or less severe. As predicted, the fear of cats increased with urbanization, but the fear of noise decreased - as indicated by willingness to visit a feeding station. Other stimuli were not associated with urbanization, which may be related to the use of county and city parks where human presence is relatively common. Nonetheless, our results suggest that plastic fear responses to novel stimuli may facilitate urban success in the black-capped chickadee. More generally, behavioral plasticity may indicate the ability of a species to thrive in the urban environment.     

Hearing the voice of remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander training stakeholders using research methodologies and theoretical frames of reference

Abstract

Researchers in remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contexts within Australia are frequently faced with the challenges of working in an intercultural space where channels of communication are garbled with interference created by the complexities of misunderstood worldviews, languages, values and expectations. A concern of many researchers in these contexts is to ensure that the voices of research participants in remote communities are not only accurately represented, but are allowed to transcend the noise of dominant paradigms, policies and practices. This article brings together the experiences of four non-indigenous researchers in the space of remote vocational education and training. The authors present two vignettes from research in the context of health, employment and education. These vignettes highlight some of the conundrums for researchers as they attempt to harmonize the aims of research with the expectations of organizations involved. The purpose of the article is to explore the utility of Critical Race Theory (CRT), Indigenist methodologies, culturally responsive methodologies and those positioned at the ‘cultural interface’ (Nakata 2007). In so doing this article makes some assessments about the fit of CRT methodologies for such contexts.