Activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning of dogs and medium-sized wild mammals in urban parks of Xalapa,Mexico

Urban Ecosystems - Free-ranging domestic dogs are the world most common exotic carnivore species that could negatively interact with the native wildlife as predators, competitors, and disease...     

Mastery,Homeownership, and Adult Roles During the Transition to Adulthood

We investigate the relationship between homeownership and personal sense of mastery in the transition to adulthood and examine whether three important adult transitions (employment, marriage/cohabitation, and parenthood) moderate the impact of homeownership on mastery. Utilizing the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—Young Adult Sample (N = 1,609), we estimate change models to assess the direct effects of homeownership on mastery as well as whether this impact is modified by the transition to adult roles. Homeownership increases the sense of mastery among young adults. Homeowners who are unemployed paradoxically receive a boost to mastery not experienced by those who are employed, and homeowners who are parents experience increased mastery, compared to those who do not have children. Owning a home has a positive influence on young adults' sense of mastery during a period when their mastery is in flux and they are accumulating new roles.     

Estimation for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations via the empirical characteristic function method

Seasonal fractional ARIMA (ARFISMA) model with infinite variance innovations is used in the analysis of seasonal long-memory time series with large fluctuations (heavy-tailed distributions). Two methods, which are the empirical characteristic function (ECF) procedure developed by Knight and Yu [The empirical characteristic function in time series estimation. Econometric Theory. 2002;18:691–721] and the Two-Step method (TSM) are proposed to estimate the parameters of stable ARFISMA model. The ECF method estimates simultaneously all the parameters, while the TSM considers in the first step the Markov Chains Monte Carlo–Whittle approach introduced by Ndongo et al. [Estimation of long-memory parameters for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations. Stat Methodol. 2010;7:141–151], combined with the maximum likelihood estimation method developed by Alvarez and Olivares [Méthodes d'estimation pour des lois stables avec des applications en finance. Journal de la Société Française de Statistique. 2005;1(4):23–54] in the second step. Monte Carlo simulations are also used to evaluate the finite sample performance of these estimation techniques.     

COWORDS: a probabilistic model for multiple word clouds

Word clouds constitute one of the most popular statistical tools for the visual analysis of text documents because they provide users with a quick and intuitive understanding of the content. Despite their popularity for visualizing single documents, word clouds are not appropriate to compare different text documents. Independently generating word clouds for each document leads to configurations where the same word is typically located in widely different positions. This makes it very difficult to compare two or more word clouds. This paper introduces COWORDS, a new stochastic algorithm to create multiple word clouds, including one for each document. The shared words in multiple documents are placed in the same position in all clouds. Similar documents produce similar and compact clouds, making it easier to simultaneously compare and interpret several word clouds. The algorithm is based on a probability distribution in which the most probable configurations are those with a desirable visual aspect, such as a low value for the total distance between the words in all clouds. The algorithm output is a set of word clouds that are randomly selected from this probability distribution. The selection procedure uses a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation method. We present several examples that illustrate the performance and visual results that can be obtained by our algorithm.     

Social mobility and demand for redistribution in Europe: a comparative analysis

The literature on preferences for redistribution has paid little attention to the effect of social mobility on the demand for redistribution and no systematic test of the hypotheses connecting social mobility and preferences for redistribution has yet been done to date. We use the diagonal reference model to estimate the effect of origin and destination classes on preferences for redistribution in a large sample of European countries using data from the European Social Survey. Our findings are consistent with the logic of acculturation in the sense that newcomers tend to adapt their views to those of the destination class at early stages and that upward and downward mobility do not have distinctive effects on the formation of political preferences. However, even though social origins seem to have a limited impact on preferences for redistribution, the evidence does not support the hypothesis that mobile and non‐mobile individuals are alike. We also find that the effect of social origin on preferences varies largely across countries. The empirical evidence leads to the conclusion that the effect of social origin on preferences for redistribution increases in contexts of strong familism.     

An update on ‘a comparative study of tests for homogeneity of variance’

Tests for equality of variances using independent samples are widely used in data analysis. Conover et al. [A comparative study of tests for homogeneity of variance, with applications to the outer continental shelf bidding data. Technometrics. 1981;23:351–361], won the Youden Prize by comparing 56 variations of popular tests for variance on the basis of robustness and power in 60 different scenarios. None of the tests they compared were robust and powerful for the skewed distributions they considered. This study looks at 12 variations they did not consider, and shows that 10 are robust for the skewed distributions they considered plus the lognormal distribution, which they did not study. Three of these 12 have clearly superior power for skewed distributions, and are competitive in terms of robustness and power for all of the distributions considered. They are recommended for general use based on robustness, power, and ease of application.     

Social Entrepreneur: Same or Different from the Rest?

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - A social business responds to social problems usually ignored by institutions, mobilizing resources and generating...     

Corporate social responsibility and governance

Journal of Management and Governance -     

Is there a global super-bourgeoisie?

In recent decades, accelerating processes of globalization and an increase in economic inequality in most of the world's countries have raised the question of the emergence of a new bourgeoisie integrated at the global level, sometimes described as a global super-bourgeoisie. This group would be distinguished by its unequaled level of wealth and global interconnectedness, its transnational ubiquity and concentration in the planet's major global cities, its specific culture, consumption habits, sites of sociability and shared references, and even by class consciousness and capacity to act collectively. This article successively discusses how the social sciences have examined these various dimensions of the question and begun to provide systematic empirical answers.