One does not simply meme about organizations: Exploring the content creation strategies of user-generated memes on Imgur

This study explores how online publics are engaging with organizations by creating and sharing brand-related content online, outside corporate-controlled communication environments. This research employs a quantitative content analysis of memes shared on the social networking site Imgur to reveal how user-generated content conveys meaning about organizations. The analysis reveals brand-centric memes are generally classified as orphan memes, or memes that have distinct textual and visual characteristics separating them from established or emerging meme families. Memes about organizations are neither an overwhelming reflection of biting criticism or support, but rather a reflection of online public engagement with organizations that primarily use humor and textual brand features (or quiddities) to convey their commitment and satisfaction with the organization and unite meme families.     

‘This is Not Just About History…’ Addressing the Disconnect in Historic (Non‐Recent) Child Abuse Investigations

• Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors.
• Such investigations include those undertaken by the police and by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
• Victim and survivor accounts need to be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly in order for victims/survivors not to feel let down by, and disconnected from, criminal justice and IICSA processes.

‘Historic (non‐recent) child abuse investigations need to consider the effects of investigative processes on victims and survivors’

In response to the then chancellor George Osborne's announcement in 2014 that the UK government would set up an independent inquiry into the handling of historic child abuse cases, then shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper made a statement that highlighted:

‘This is not just about history, this is about the need for proper strong systems of child protection for the future, so that we get both justice for victims in the past but also a system that is strong enough to protect young people going forward.’ (The Guardian, 2014 )

The government held good to its promise and set up the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) ( https://www.iicsa.org.uk ) in 2014, announced by then home secretary Theresa May. Its objectives would not only be to investigate claims of a cover‐up of an alleged paedophile ring said to have operated in Westminster in the 1980s, but also to investigate broader institutional failures. Today, the IICSA aims to ‘examine the extent to which institutions and organisations in England and Wales have taken seriously their responsibility to protect children’, and to examine allegations of child sexual abuse involving ‘well known people’, that is, those in the media, politics and other areas of public life (see https:// www.iicsa.org.uk ). Its remit also includes collating testimonies from child abuse victims and survivors through its Truth Project (via private interviews and in writing) (IICSA, 2017 ). But for the victims/survivors of abuse, it is at this intersection – between holding to account both public and private institutions over child abuse, and listening to and believing victims – where a disconnect occurs, that is, between past and present; between the abuse itself and the reporting process; and between expectation and outcomes of the investigative process.

‘For the victims/survivors of abuse… a disconnect occurs… between the abuse itself and the reporting process’

This short report considers progress to date on the IICSA drawing on evidence from the inquiry itself, from press reports and from the author's personal experience of reporting historic abuse to the police and to the IICSA's Truth Project.

‘Considers progress to date on the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA)’

A ‘Legacy’ of Failures

In August 2016, after Theresa May launched the ‘new‐look’ inquiry in 2015 with new statutory powers, its chair, Dame Lowell Goddard, resigned. In her resignation statement, Goddard cited family reasons for going but perhaps more tellingly, the fact that the inquiry was ‘not an easy task, let alone one of the magnitude of this’, she added, ‘Compounding the many difficulties was its legacy of failure which has been very hard to shake off’ (BBC News, 2016a ). And it is some legacy. In its first year, the IICSA saw two of its chairs, Baroness Butler‐Sloss and Dame Fiona Woolf, step down over questions about their links to key establishment figures prominent in the 1980s. Since 2014, a number of lawyers supporting the inquiry have also either resigned or been dismissed. Historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate since allegations against TV presenter and DJ Jimmy Savile emerged in 2011. This led to the setting up of Operation Yewtree in 2012 (and, down the line, to the IICSA), now just one of many separate similar operations currently being run by police forces across the country. Indeed, such is the scale of the problem that there is now a central hub – Operation Hydrant – to oversee all of these separate police investigations.

‘[Since Savile] historic or non‐recent child abuse has been at the centre of public, political and media debate’

Without a doubt, some of these have been successful in bringing to justice well known figures and ‘celebrities’ such as Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Paul Gadd (Gary Glitter). But other investigations have failed to establish the extent of child abuse allegations said to have been committed and subsequently covered up at Westminster, at Dolphin Square in Pimlico (Operation Midland), Elm Guest House in London (Operation Athabasca) and others, some of which have closed and others still being investigated by the police, a number of them linked to prominent public and political figures. At the same time, the police themselves are also under scrutiny as part of the IICSA and the Independent Police Complaints Commission is currently investigating 187 claims of police and establishment cover‐ups involving 18 forces (The Independent, 2016 ).     

自我与他者的纠缠:90年代以来文学的身份认同问题

20世纪90年代以来,伴随着消费主义文化思潮的勃兴,尤其是全球化语境的迅速弥漫,身份认同问题较以往越发凸显,并由此引发了一系列的认同焦虑与危机.在文学上,从人文精神讨论、<废都>论争到世纪末的"断裂"事件及网络文学的崛起等,莫不与身份认同的危机和重新定位息息相关.身份认同的危机包含自我认同、性别认同、代际认同、民族认同、政治认同等既有联系又有区别的不同层面.     

浅议新形势下教育工会的职能作用

工会组织的职能作用与“三个代表”的思想是完全一致的。在新形势下 ,教育工会要以“三个代表”为指导 ,充分发挥教育工会的建设职能、维权职能和教育职能     

Neoliberalism as a real utopia? Karl Polanyi and the theoretical practice of F. A. Hayek

ABSTRACT

This article interprets Hayek’s theoretical practice with the help of Polanyi’s framework. Hayek aimed at renewing liberalism after the interwar period, thus helping transforming it into neoliberalism, a real utopia instrumentally concerned with the political and moral economies underpinning markets. The distance between neoliberal theory and practice is less pronounced than it is sometimes assumed. The strength of neoliberalism partially stems from a capacity to articulate an effort to think about real-world mechanisms with an effort to demolish, reconfigure or transform existing structures. Despite his failure to anticipate neoliberalism, Polanyi gives ample intellectual resources to critically interpret the tasks that neoliberals would collectively have to face at the theoretical level, in an epoch of ideological marginality, before their triumphal political deployment at the global level.     

(Sub) Optimality and (non) optimal satisficing in risky decision experiments

We implement a risky choice experiment based on one-dimensional choice variables and risk neutrality induced via binary lottery incentives. Each participant confronts many parameter constellations with varying optimal payoffs. We assess (sub)optimality, as well as (non)optimal satisficing by eliciting aspirations in addition to choices. Treatments differ in the probability that a binary random event, which are payoff—but not optimal choice—relevant is experimentally induced and whether participants choose portfolios directly or via satisficing, i.e., by forming aspirations and checking for satisficing before making their choice. By incentivizing aspiration formation, we can test satisficing, and in cases of satisficing, determine whether it is optimal.     

Testing homogeneity in semiparametric mixture case–control models

Parametric and semiparametric mixture models have been widely used in applications from many areas, and it is often of interest to test the homogeneity in these models. However, hypothesis testing is non standard due to the fact that several regularity conditions do not hold under the null hypothesis. We consider a semiparametric mixture case–control model, in the sense that the density ratio of two distributions is assumed to be of an exponential form, while the baseline density is unspecified. This model was first considered by Qin and Liang (2011 Qin, J., Liang, K.Y. (2011). Hypothesis testing in a mixture case–control model. Biometrics 67(1):182–198.[Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], biometrics), and they proposed a modified score statistic for testing homogeneity. In this article, we consider alternative testing procedures based on supremum statistics, which could improve power against certain types of alternatives. We demonstrate the connection and comparison among the proposed and existing approaches. In addition, we provide a unified theoretical justification of the supremum test and other existing test statistics from an empirical likelihood perspective. The finite-sample performance of the supremum test statistics was evaluated in simulation studies.     

损失模拟模型的模拟与检验

为帮助精算师在不同的数据环境下选择最优的准备金评估方法,美国非寿险精算师协会组织开发了一个产生模拟索赔数据的开源软件系统——损失模拟模型,然而损失模拟模型是否能够按指定参数要求产生模拟数据需要进行检验.文章采用不同的参数估计方法和拟合优度检验方法对模拟索赔次数的分布、索赔额的趋势以及不同险种索赔次数之间的相关结构进行了统计检验,结果表明损失模拟模型对索赔次数的分布、索赔额的趋势能够产生一致的模拟,而对索赔次数数据之间相关结构的模拟存在不稳定性.