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...     

Sexual Beliefs and Sexual Functioning: The Mediating Role of Cognitive Distraction

Dysfunctional sexual beliefs are vulnerability factors for sexual dysfunction. This cross-sectional study aimed to test the mediating role of cognitive distraction on the relationship between dysfunctional sexual beliefs about sexual functioning shared by men and women and sexual function. The authors used a sample of 421 cisgender heterosexual participants involved in a monogamous relationship. The hypothesized mediation model was tested using a bootstrapped cross product of coefficients approach. Results showed a significant negative, indirect effect between dysfunctional sexual beliefs and women's sexual function through cognitive distraction. The discussion of this study highlights the importance of cognitive factors in sexual functioning.     

Testing for Serial Independence: Beyond the Portmanteau Approach

Portmanteau tests are typically used to test serial independence even if, by construction, they are generally powerful only in presence of pairwise dependence between lagged variables. In this article, we present a simple statistic defining a new serial independence test, which is able to detect more general forms of dependence. In particular, differently from the Portmanteau tests, the resulting test is powerful also under a dependent process characterized by pairwise independence. A diagram, based on p-values from the proposed test, is introduced to investigate serial dependence. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated in a simulation study and with an application on financial data. Both show that the new test, used in synergy with the existing ones, helps in the identification of the true data-generating process. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.     

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.     

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...     

The racialized patterns of police violence: The critical importance of research as praxis

The tragic killing of George Floyd at the hands of the police resulted in hundreds of thousands of protestors marching in the streets demanding change. The call for change criticized the killing of Blacks by law enforcement and challenged White supremacy as an institution of social control and racial violence. A key component of the marches and protests was a message to the residents of the United States: “Black Lives Matter.” As society grapples with a reckoning, researchers studying police violence for the past 6 decades have been empirically and theoretically debating the reasons why use of force by law enforcement continues to have a higher proportion of Black and Brown victims compared to Whites. Although the research on fatal police killings was studied by only a small number of individuals prior to 2014, after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the research in different areas of the country increased rapidly as did the forms of analysis and research disciplines making their own contributions. The Washington Post and Guardian news agencies established that deaths at the hands of the police were occurring for at least 900 to 1100 individual deaths per year for which firearms resulted in the greatest cause of death. As US government agencies failed to produce a national data source on police involved killings, the media took a leading role in providing greater national understanding. The authors examine what role academic researchers contribute to the discussion for solutions, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. As protestors march, lawyers sue and defend, and politicians create new forms of legislation, researchers need to play a more important role initiating critical studies, making sense of the data, and providing a theoretical framework for which police violence can be understood. This article will provide an overview of the literature on racialized police violence, point out key patterns involving racial and ethnic disparities, and emphasize how researchers can play a more important role in advocating for change.     

Protective factors and risk factors of being a victim of couple violence in women and men / Factores de riesgo y protección de ser víctima de violencia en la pareja en mujeres y hombres

The aim of this study is to determine the risk factors and protective factors of being a victim of couple violence, considering cultural conventions, coping, social support, external attribution and violence in childhood. A non-probabilistic sample of 223 women and 177 men was used. The risk factors in the sample as a whole were being male, the coping strategy of accommodation, violence in childhood and external attribution, while the protective factors were partner support and an active coping style. The study concludes with suggestions for interventions and research.