Analyzing Web pages visual scanpaths: between and within tasks variability

In this paper, we propose a new method for comparing scanpaths in a bottom-up approach, and a test of the scanpath theory. To do so, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which 113 participants were invited to accomplish a set of tasks on two different websites. For each site, they had to perform two tasks that had to be repeated ounce. The data were analyzed using a procedure similar to the one used by Duchowski et al. [8]. The first step was to automatically identify, then label, AOIs with the mean-shift clustering procedure [19]. Then, scanpaths were compared two by two with a modified version of the string-edit method, which take into account the order of AOIs visualizations [2]. Our results show that scanpaths variability between tasks but within participants seems to be lower than the variability within task for a given participant. In other words participants seem to be more coherent when they perform different tasks, than when they repeat the same tasks. In addition, participants view more of the same AOI when they perform a different task on the same Web page than when they repeated the same task. These results are quite different from what predicts the scanpath theory.     

Indigenous Religion,Christianity and the State: Mobility and Nomadic Metaphysics in Siberut,Western Indonesia

Recent studies in the anthropology of mobility tend to privilege the cultural imaginaries in which human movements are embedded rather than the actual, physical movements of people through space. This article offers an ethnographic case study in which ‘imagined mobility’ is limited to people who are not mobile, who are immobile or sedentary and thus reflects a ‘sedentarist metaphysics’. The case comes from the island of Siberut, the largest of the Mentawai Islands off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, where government modernisation programs in the second half of the twentieth century focused on relocating clans from their ancestral lands to model, multi-clan villages and on converting people from the indigenous religion to Christianity. Recent changes in the national, regional and local political contexts have led many of the Christians in the villages to reclaim the indigenous religion by invoking the figure of the shaman, whose special skill is the mobility that village dwellers do not have—a mobility that produces and reproduces a spatial, social and cosmological continuity between home and forest. Many people who live on their ancestral land and practice only the indigenous religion argue that the Christians’ hybrid religious practice is not culturally ‘authentic’ because the indigenous religion requires a mobility that is not possible in the government villages. In this view, the shaman is a surrogate, and his ‘substitute mobility’ arises from a sedentarist metaphysics.     

(Un)becoming Dayak: Intermarriage and the Dynamics of Identity and Belonging in East Kalimantan

Much of the ethnographic literature on East Kalimantan has assumed relatively stable group identities. Intermarriage between different Dayak groups has been frequent, but is usually perceived as leading to swift cultural assimilation of the in-marrying party. Similarly, Dayak-Malay intermarriages have been understood in terms of socio-religious assimilation (masuk Islam). This article suggests that a number of socio-historical developments, including Christian mission work, the spread of formal education and recent advances in regional political autonomy, have resulted in high cultural adaptability among East Kalimantan's ‘Dayaks’, leading to hybrid identity formation. Simultaneously, people of mixed ancestry are confronted with ethno-nationalist revitalisation and often face a problematic lack of belonging, challenging them to become—or un-become—‘Dayak’. This article explores the marital histories and social networks of two extended families in the urban and semi-urban centres of the province. It suggests that children of mixed parentage have cultivated various modes of adaptation to the expectations of Dayak indigenism, often involving the strategic invocation of essentialised ethnic labels (suku).     

Web of resistance: Deleuzian digital space and hacktivism

This article argues that the Internet possesses the potential to challenge corporate and Statist domination of digital space. Mapping Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concepts of the rhizome, smooth/striated space, and the nomad onto the idea of digital connectivity, I show how hacktivism can initiate change both online and off. In the first section, I argue that the Internet is characteristic of a rhizome. As a rhizome, the Internet’s structure affords it a flexible, morphological, and ultimately a vibrantly powerful configuration. As a result of its connective and generative power, corporate and State entities seek to control digital space. These controlling institutions stratify, segment, and claim ownership over the flat, smooth space. The second section, then, shows how the Internet becomes striated through corporate and State interests. As a remedy, the third section advocates for hacktivism as a form of nomadic action. In this section, I focus on the Distributed Denial of Service attack as a form of deterritorialization that redistributes the flow of information. Acting as a digital machine de guerre engaging in online direct action, and against the legal apparatus of the State, hacktivists create a rupture in the rhizomatic structure and form smooth spaces within a striated network. In the final section, I advocate for sustained smooth digital spaces that allow for new modes of association that radiate outward from the digital to the physical world.     

The Conceptual Incoherence of “Culture” in American Sociology

The meaning of the concept “culture” as used in American sociology is incoherent. Despite the advances and maturing of cultural sociology, the central idea of “culture” itself remains conceptually muddled. This article demonstrates this critical point by analyzing the definitions, meanings, and uses of the word “culture” in the field of cultural sociology’s most significant, recent edited volumes, handbooks, readers, companions, annual review chapters, and award-winning books and journal articles. Arguing for the scholarly importance of conceptual coherence, this article calls for more disciplined and cooperative theoretical work to clarify and move toward a more standardized meaning of “culture” in American sociology.     

Characterizations of the cycle-complete and folk solutions for minimum cost spanning tree problems

Minimum cost spanning tree problems connect agents efficiently to a source when agents are located at different points and the cost of using an edge is fixed. The folk and cycle-complete cost sharing solutions always offer core allocations. We provide similar characterizations for both. A new property is based on the following observation: when all agents have the same cost to connect to the source, we can connect one of them to the source then connect all other agents to him, as if he was the source. Cost sharing should also be done in these two steps. We also use some common properties: core selection, piecewise linearity and an independence property. The solutions are differentiated by properties that apply when the cheapest edge to the source gets cheaper. Either the savings are equally distributed among all agents (folk) or the agent on that edge gets all of the savings (cycle-complete).     

Shapley–Shubik methods in cost sharing problems with technological cooperation

In the discrete cost sharing model with technological cooperation (Bahel and Trudeau in Int J Game Theory 42:439–460, 2013a), we study the implications of a number of properties that strengthen the well-known dummy axiom. Our main axiom, which requires that costless units of demands do not affect the cost shares, is used to characterize two classes of rules. Combined with anonymity and a specific stability property, this requirement picks up sharing methods that allow the full compensation of at most one technological contribution. If instead we strengthen the well-known dummy property to include agents whose technological contribution is offset by the cost of their demand, we are left with an adaptation of the Shapley–Shubik method that treats technologies as private and rewards their contributions. Our results provide two interesting axiomatizations for the adaptations of the Shapley–Shubik rule to our framework.     

Remittances for Financial Access: Lessons from Latin American Microfinance

The potential of migrant remittances to foster access to financial services for low‐income households has been largely unexplored. Comparing three Latin American countries – the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Mexico – this inter‐disciplinary study links research on remittances and microfinance with multi‐actor governance approaches. While the context of high remittance‐dependence provides similar challenges in all cases, it finds remarkable variety both in the structure of the remittances market and the actors involved in microfinance and in the role governments play. It explains the diverging success of MFIs in remittance markets by pointing to the interplay of for‐profit, non‐profit and state actors embedded within the specific market structures of each country.     

Why are some more peer than others? Evidence from a longitudinal study of social networks and individual academic performance

Studies of peer effects in educational settings confront two main problems. The first is the presence of endogenous sorting which confounds the effects of social influence and social selection on individual attainment. The second is how to account for the local network dependencies through which peer effects influence individual behavior. We empirically address these problems using longitudinal data on academic performance, friendship, and advice seeking relations among students in a full-time graduate academic program. We specify stochastic agent-based models that permit estimation of the interdependent contribution of social selection and social influence to individual performance. We report evidence of peer effects. Students tend to assimilate the average performance of their friends and of their advisors. At the same time, students attaining similar levels of academic performance are more likely to develop friendship and advice ties. Together, these results imply that processes of social influence and social selection are sub-components of a more general a co-evolutionary process linking network structure and individual behavior. We discuss possible points of contact between our findings and current research in the economics and sociology of education.