The Last Rogue of History: Picaresque Elements in Sasha Sokolov’s Palisandriia

This article takes a detailed look at the way in which the Habsburg Monarchy’s policy towards Serbia subtly shifted between 1881, when the Monarchy forced a secret treaty of alliance on the Serbian government, and the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian War of November 1885. Gustav von Kálnoky, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, inherited a policy largely shaped by his Hungarian predecessor, Count Gyula Andrássy, which relied on controlling Serbia through the person of its ruler, the wayward Milan Obrenovi?. The Austrophile and highly unpopular Milan, however, was a disastrous instrument of Austro-Hungarian control, and by the end of the Serbo-Bulgarian conflict, by which point Milan was pleading to be allowed to abdicate, Kálnoky had come to the conclusion that this “personal policy” was a failure, and that the Monarchy was better off relying on the outright coercion of Serbia. The article reconsiders some of the key stages in this development, in particular Andrássy’s memorandum of 24 November 1885, and Kálnoky’s reassessment of the value of the secret treaty of 1881, which depended solely on the guarantee of the Serbian monarch and, as a result, threatened to become worthless without his presence on the throne.     

Higher-order Bayesian Approximations for Pseudo-posterior Distributions

The theory of higher-order asymptotics provides accurate approximations to posterior distributions for a scalar parameter of interest, and to the corresponding tail area, for practical use in Bayesian analysis. The aim of this article is to extend these approximations to pseudo-posterior distributions, e.g., posterior distributions based on a pseudo-likelihood function and a suitable prior, which are proved to be particularly useful when the full likelihood is analytically or computationally infeasible. In particular, from a theoretical point of view, we derive the Laplace approximation for a pseudo-posterior distribution, and for the corresponding tail area, for a scalar parameter of interest, also in the presence of nuisance parameters. From a computational point of view, starting from these higher-order approximations, we discuss the higher-order tail area (HOTA) algorithm useful to approximate marginal posterior distributions, and related quantities. Compared to standard Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, the main advantage of the HOTA algorithm is that it gives independent samples at a negligible computational cost. The relevant computations are illustrated by two examples.     

A New Approach to Social Assistance: Latin America's Experience with Conditional Cash Transfer Programmes

Conditional cash transfers are a departure from more traditional approaches to social assistance that represents an innovative and increasingly popular channel for the delivery of social services. Conditional cash transfers provide money to poor families contingent upon certain behaviour, usually investments in human capital such as sending children to school or bringing them to health centres on a regular basis. They seek both to address traditional short-term income support objectives and promote the longer-term accumulation of human capital by serving as a demand-side complement to the supply of health and education services. Evaluation results reveal that this innovative design has been quite successful in addressing many of the failures in delivering social assistance such as poor poverty targeting, disincentive effects and limited welfare impacts. There is clear evidence of success from the first generation of programmes in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Nicaragua in increasing enrolment rates, improving preventive healthcare and raising household consumption. Despite this promising evidence, many questions remain unanswered about conditional cash transfer programmes, including the replicability of their success under different     

Error catastrophe in mutant mitochondria

The error catastrophe theory of aging, proposed by Orgel in 1963, predicted a decrease in the fidelity of information transfer that accelerated as aging progressed, until properly functioning macromolecules could no longer be reliably made. The theory was extensively tested by comparing DNA polymerases, transfer RNAs, and proteins derived from aging versus young animals, but it did not prove to have general applicability to the process of aging. Recently, the heritable eye disorder progressive external ophthalmoplegia has been found to result from mutation of the gene encoding DNA polymerase gamma, which replicates mitochondrial DNA. The mutant form of the polymerase replicates DNA less accurately than the wild-type enzyme, providing an explanation for the accumulation of mutations in the mitochondrial DNA of patients with this disorder. The affected mitochondria appear to exhibit an age-dependent error catastrophe. It is possible that other genetic diseases might result in error catastrophes in mitochondria as well.     

Measuring Social Return on Investment

Strategic decision making and evaluation in philanthropic giving and social investment requires good‐quality information about the social impacts of that investment. One way to meet this need is by calculating a social return on investment (SROI) measure, akin to the return on investment (ROI) approach used in business analysis. Despite much buzz in the field, SROI measurements are rarely used, in part because of the complexity of the calculations but also because of a number of thorny and often expensive organizational challenges associated with implementing an SROI process. This article explores these implementation challenges by comparing four social venture organizations in the health care field—two in the Netherlands and two in the United States—that have utilized some sort of SROI measurement. We summarize the SROI process and identify the specific organizational challenges in each case. Lessons learned from this analysis include the value of process versus product and the importance of fitting the type of measurement to the organizational context. We conclude with a summary of best practices for organizations and social investors who might try to make effective use of SROI measures.     

Sorokin as Lifelong Russian Intellectual: The Enactment of an Historically Rooted Sensibility

Prior to his 1922 emigration to Europe and thence to the United States, Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin had an exceptional intellectual and political career in Russia and the Soviet Union (Sorokin 1924, 1963a; Johnston 1995; Krotov 2005). Indeed, he was among the early founders of the science of sociology in his native land, where, according to a relatively recent bibliography (Sorokin 2000), he produced 162 Russian-language publications between the ages of 21 and 33. This listing includes not only book reviews and journal articles, but also substantial monographs and a two-volume theoretical treatise. While still a relatively young man, Sorokin had thus gained widespread recognition as a scholar of the first rank. He was also the initial chairperson (from 1919 to 1922) of a fledgling department of sociology at the University of Petrograd (St. Petersburg), an elected member of the national Constituent Assembly and an appointed staff member of the 1917 Provisional Government, the first democratic regime in Russia. This much would have sufficed for an entry in a sociological encyclopedia, and Sorokin’s political career has few parallels in the history of the field, other than the involvement of Emile Durkheim in French educational policy and the participation of Max Weber in creating the Weimar Republic in Germany. Nevertheless sociologists in the United States and most western historians of the field have not yet appreciated the full influence of the formative period, especially from 1905 to 1922. Lacking familiarity with Russian culture of that era and knowing little about the larger Russian socio-historical milieu, its intellectual discourse and collective memory, they have not been able to comprehend Sorokin’s outlook, behavior and professional output in the United States in relation to these earlier contextual factors. This is arguably a fundamental reason why many U.S. sociologists have tended to see Sorokin, especially since 1937, as a marginal figure and to regard his works largely as deviations from accepted social scientific practice. This paper will argue that a more adequate appreciation of Sorokin’s background and early adult life illumines both stylistic features of his works in America and also places into proper perspective several of his substantive foci that did not accord with contemporary “normal science” (Kuhn 1962). In short, despite his overall assimilation into American society and higher education, including his appointment at Harvard University and his election as president of the American Sociological Association, Sorokin should be understood in large measure as a life-long Russian intellectual. His was a Russian-born sensibility and consciousness—indeed a “Russian soul”—so deeply ingrained that it stamped his entire professional career in the United States, including his published researches, his popular sociology and his university teaching.     

Home study methods for evaluating prospective resource families: history, current challenges, and promising approaches

Every state requires a home study before the placement of foster children for adoption. This article examines the history of home studies, presents results from expert interviews on the changing processes and purposes of home studies, and explores current challenges for the field. The article also introduces the Structured Analysis Family Evaluation (SAFE), a uniform home study format that encourages consistent family evaluations across workers, agencies, and jurisdictions. The article clarifies how SAFE may address challenges facing foster care and adoption practice.     

“How Big is Big Enough?”

This article examines the representation of masculinity in Sex and the City through an analysis of the characters Big and Steve. Although the show is unique in that it presents female characters as the primary subjects of identification and presumes a female audience, it participates in the patriarchal project of measuring men, especially Big and Steve, against each other. At first, Big represents classic old-style phallic male character, the hero of both fairy tale and Hollywood romantic comedy. Steve, on the other hand, represents the new man, a flawed hero of modern relationship myths. However, throughout the course of the series, the illnesses of these two characters shift these representations. The series ultimately opens space for new representations of masculinity.