Agenda-Building role of state-owned media around the world: 2014 Hong Kong protest case

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to advance theoretical and practical knowledge of political public relations and mediated public diplomacy through analyzing the agenda-building relationships between state-owned media and foreign news coverage in 16 countries during the 2014 Hong Kong protest. The results indicated significant correlations of issues and stakeholders between the Chinese state-owned media and the English language media outlets of 16 foreign countries, thereby supporting the international agenda-building role of Chinese state-owned media. An exploratory analysis was conducted to test the role of intercultural or international relations variables in the agenda-building process.     

Hope and subjective well‐being among parents of children with special needs

The current study examined subjective well‐being (SWB) in parents who raise children with special needs. Previous studies that focused on parenting children with special needs stressed increased risk of depression. This study examined parental level of hope, the significance of being involved in a partner relationship and parental perception of the seriousness of their child's disability, each a factor that may influence parental SWB. A random sample of 92 parents raising children with special needs in Israel participated in the study. They completed three questionnaires, examining parent's perception of the severity of their child's disability, parental SWB and parents' level of hope. Results revealed that a high level of hope, being in a partnered relationship, and perception of the child's disability as having some positive influence on central aspects of the parents' life, are all significant contributors to raising parental SWB. Study findings show that ‘agency’, a component of the concept of ‘hope’, is a significant factor in predicting SWB in parents of a child with special needs. Perhaps awareness of how they can improve their SWB by using certain aspects of their lifestyle to their advantage can help improve quality of life for parents of children with special needs.     

Inequality and the time structure of earnings: evidence from Germany

This paper studies the relationships between annual and subannual inequality and mobility during the course of the year. We apply an exact decomposition framework as outlined in Wodon and Yitzhaki (Econ Bull 4:1–8, 2003), and in Yitzhaki and Wodon (Research on Economic Inequality 12:179–199, 2004). Earnings records of pension insurants in Germany serve as the database. The long time horizon of our database allows us to investigate the stability and robustness of the parameters of the decomposition over time. Specifically, we show that the mobility component of the decomposition, as measured by Gini correlation coefficients, changes over the observation period. This makes it difficult to predict the impact of the income accounting period on inequality in a more general context. Thus, it is of paramount importance to use income data from a uniform accounting period in distributional analyses.     

The impact of Oportunidades on human capital and income distribution in Mexico: A top-down/bottom-up approach

To analyze the effects of the Mexican Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program on school attendance and household income distribution, this paper links a microeconometric simulation model and a general equilibrium model in a bidirectional way, so to explicitly take spillover effects of the program into account. Our results suggest that partial equilibrium analysis alone underestimates the distributional effects of the program. Extending the coverage of the program to the poor increases school attendance, reduces child labor supply, and increases the equilibrium wages of children who remain at work. With a relatively low fiscal cost, Mexican social policy could further reduce income inequality and poverty.     

The Transsexual’s Turn: Uncanniness at Wellesley College

A controversy over the admission of transmen into an all-women’s college featured in a recent article in The New York Times, “When Women Become Men at Wellesley” (Padawer, 2014), captures the ways in which transsexuality orients discussions of identity, sociality, at-homeness, and modes of gender self-fashioning. The presence of transmen in an all-women’s college also incites debates over the history of the school’s identity and the challenges of colleges in transition.

Rather than entering the debate of whether transmen should or should not be allowed into the college, my articlearticle addresses the terms of this debate through its arguments over the conceptualization of gender. Whereas transmen at Wellesley College bring to the fore social implications, my discussion approaches conflictive orientations to gender through a psychoanalytic lens with special attention to the fantasy structure of gender. Working with Freud’s (1919) idea of the uncanny, the essay explores the question, How may the presence of transmen in an all-women’s college be thought of as opening an emotional experience and as signifying for the college a transitional time between adolescence and adulthood? Is there something about a segregated community that is desirable for transitioning? In the case of an all-women’s school that carries a historical legacy involving a number of transformations regarding how we approach questions of race, gender, desegregation, and the recognition of the struggle of lesbians, the article argues that the transmen’s request to belong at the college is the college’s historical legacy. The article concludes with the old question that Freud asked about women: What does the transman want?     

Government Social Responsibility in Public Diplomacy: Russia's strategic use of advertorials

The current study analyzes Russia's use of the advertorial as a tool of direct communication with readers of the Washington Post and The Times of India. The study introduces the concept of government social responsibility (GSR) and discusses its role in government to foreign citizen public diplomacy.     

The Stackelberg minimum spanning tree game on planar and bounded-treewidth graphs

The Stackelberg Minimum Spanning Tree Game is a two-level combinatorial pricing problem played on a graph representing a network. Its edges are colored either red or blue, and the red edges have a given fixed cost, representing the competitor’s prices. The first player chooses an assignment of prices to the blue edges, and the second player then buys the cheapest spanning tree, using any combination of red and blue edges. The goal of the first player is to maximize the total price of purchased blue edges. We study this problem in the cases of planar and bounded-treewidth graphs. We show that the problem is NP-hard on planar graphs but can be solved in polynomial time on graphs of bounded treewidth.     

Between Abnormal “Otherness” to Groundbreaking “Uniqueness”: The Family-Construction Process of the GLBT Family

ABSTRACT

The GLBT family is a new postmodern phenomenon demonstrating the accomplishments of marginal groups seeking acceptance within mainstream society. The article is based on a qualitative phenomenological study conducted in Israel during 2012, providing a theoretical model combining a vast number of GLBT parenting options ranging from surrogacy, sperm donation, adoption, and co-parenting. The research consisted of 50 personal interviews that concentrated on the family experiences of couples of gay men and lesbian woman who opted to bring a child into their families. Analysis of the data points to a process of empowerment where societal norms in respect to gender, parenting, and family are deconstructed and then reconstructed. The theoretical model conceptualizes three parenting challenges that highlight the respondent’s family experience: “Otherness,” belonging, and self-actualization. Research shows that every period of family life addresses a different segment, where one of the three challenges becomes the dominant experience.