‘Your momma is day-glow white’: questioning the politics of racial identity,loyalty and obligation

This article utilizes discourse analysis and an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the impact of US racial and ethnic categorization on the experiences of an individual marked as ‘mixed-race’ in terms of individual identity and familial/cultural group loyalty and obligation(s). This essay focuses on an incidence of public policing through the popular social networking platform Facebook, centring on the invocation of racial obligation by white friends and family members. I analyse how racial loyalty is articulated by friends and family members in their posts on my personal Facebook page and how this ‘loyalty’ is used as means of regulating my mixed-race identity performance. This essay aims to understand several things, namely how identity is mediated through the invocation of racial obligation and how tension around identity plays out in the multiracial family.     

Nest design in a changing world: Great tit <Emphasis Type="Italic">Parus major</Emphasis> nests from a Mediterranean city environment as a case study

Investigations of urbanization effects on birds have focused mainly on breeding traits expressed after the nest-building stage (e.g. first-egg date, clutch size, breeding success, and offspring characteristics). Urban studies largely ignored how and why the aspects of nest building might be associated with the degree of urbanization. As urban environments are expected to present novel environmental changes relative to rural environments, it is important to evaluate how nest-building behavior is impacted by vegetation modifications associated with urbanization. To examine nest design in a Mediterranean city environment, we allowed urban great tits (Parus major) to breed in nest boxes in areas that differed in local vegetation cover. We found that different measures of nest size or mass were not associated with vegetation cover. In particular, nests located adjacent to streets with lower vegetation cover were not smaller or lighter than nests in parks with higher vegetation cover. Nests adjacent to streets contained more pine needles than nests in parks. In addition, in nests adjacent to streets, nests from boxes attached to pine trees contained more pine needles than nests from boxes attached to other trees. We suggest that urban-related alterations in vegetation cover do not directly impose physical limits on nest size in species that are opportunistic in the selection of nesting material. However, nest composition as reflected in the use of pine needles was clearly affected by habitat type and the planted tree species present, which implies that rapid habitat change impacts nest composition. We do not exclude that urbanization might impact other aspects of nest building behaviour not covered in our study (e.g. costs of searching for nest material), and that the strengths of the associations between urbanization and nest structures might differ among study populations or species.     

Research ethics review for the use of anonymized samples and data: A systematic review of normative documents

While the anonymization of biological samples and data may help protect participant privacy, there is still debate over whether this alone is a sufficient safeguard to ensure the ethical conduct of research. The purpose of this systematic review is to examine whether the review of an ethics committee is necessary in the context of anonymized research, and what the considerations in said ethics review would be. The review of normative documents issued by both national and international level organizations reveals a growing concern over the ability of anonymization procedures to prevent against reidentification. This is particularly true in the context of genomic research where genetic material’s uniquely identifying nature along with advances in technology have complicated previous standards of identifiability. Even where individual identities may not be identifiable, there is the risk of group harm that may not be protected by anonymization alone. We conclude that the majority of normative documents support that the review of an ethics committee is necessary to address the concerns associated with the use of anonymized samples and data for research.     

The social contract revisited: a re-examination of the influence individualistic and collectivistic value systems have on the psychological wellbeing of young people

ABSTRACT

The prevalence of psychological health problems experienced by young people living in Western societies is increasing. Evidence suggests the cultural dynamism of individualism may play a role in this, but this evidence is conflicting. Here, we focus on both the concepts of individualism and collectivism, distinguishing between their horizontal and vertical dimensions. We examine the influence of these dimensions on the psychological wellbeing of a sample of 507 Australian emerging adults (aged 18–25). We found that orientations towards vertical (but not horizontal) individualism predicted lower levels of psychological wellbeing, while orientations towards horizontal (but not vertical) collectivism predicted higher psychological wellbeing. These findings add clarity to the way in which key Western social values play an understated role in the increasing prevalence of psychological health problems experienced by young people today. They also provide an understanding of how various traits embedded within these concepts relate to psychological wellbeing.     

Product Launches and Buying Frenzies: A Dynamic Perspective

Buying frenzies caused by a firm's intentional undersupplying of a new product are frequently evident in several industries including electronics (cell phones, video games), luxury automobiles, and fashion goods. We develop a dynamic model of buying frenzies that incorporates the firm's manufacturing and sale of a product over time and characterizes the conditions under which inducing such frenzies is an optimal strategy. We find that buying frenzies occur when customers are sufficiently uncertain about their valuations of the product and when they discount the future sufficiently but not excessively. We propose measures of “customer desperation” and of the extent of scarcity to measure the depth and breadth of buying frenzies, respectively. We also demonstrate that such frenzies can have a significantly positive effect on firm profits and partially recover the loss due to non‐commitment to future prices. This study provides managerial insights on how firms can influence market response to a new product through production, pricing, and inventory decisions to induce profitable frenzies.     

Envisioning upland futures: Stakeholder responses to scenarios for Europe's mountain landscapes

In a period of agricultural decline in the uplands of Europe, agriculture is ceasing to provide the primary rationale for the organisation, utilisation and functioning of rural space. Policy reform, market trends and changes to the way citizens and consumers think about the countryside all suggest a need for thinking strategically about the future development of these areas. However, without a broad involvement of stakeholders, land use conflicts, and social and cultural conflicts in general, may increase. Involving stakeholders in upland areas can be facilitated by using scenario technique and by discussing alternative futures in local stakeholder panels. In this paper we present four scenarios of land-use change for the year 2030, and their assessments by stakeholder panels in Scotland, France, Norway, Switzerland, Slovakia and Greece. The aim of the paper is to explore the ways in which stakeholders in these locations advocate and assess these scenarios. We also explore how stakeholders in different countries weight the visual landscape impacts, the livelihood and biodiversity aspects of the scenarios in their assessment, and the reasons for their prioritising. The cross-country analysis shows that stakeholders across the study areas are united in their overall rejection of agricultural liberalisation, advocating a production-oriented, but multifunctional and environmentally-friendly agriculture that maintains landscapes and biodiversity.     

Solving the minimum M-dominating set problem by a continuous optimization approach based on DC programming and DCA

We propose a new optimization approach based on DC (Difference of Convex functions) programming and DCA (DC Algorithm) to the so-called Minimum M-Dominating Set problem in graphs. This problem is beforehand re-casted as a polyhedral DC program with the help of exact penalty in DC programming. The related DCA is original and computer efficient because it consists of solving a few linear programs and converges after a finite number of iterations to an integer solution while working in a continuous domain. Numerical simulations show the efficiency and robustness of DCA and its superiority with respect to standard methods.     

Jembe Hero: West African Drummers,Global Mobility and Cosmopolitanism as Status

In Guinea, West Africa, the status attributed to the musicians who play the wooden, goat-skinned jembe drum has historically been very low. But, over the last 60 years, the jembe has progressively ‘gone global’, and today some master drummers earn a living by teaching jembe workshops to amateur aficionados everywhere. In Asia one week, Europe the next and North America the following, these masters build global social networks, opening and plying the trade routes for the commodification of their roots. In this paper, I describe how the modern fetish for African drumming has created an alternative economy of status for jembe musicians. I examine how, against significantly increasing barriers, young musicians in Guinea are leveraging this economy to follow their elders into global mobility, attempting to achieve a cosmopolitanism through which they, too, can inscribe themselves into West African imaginaries of heroism. And I show how their life paths in turn can allow us to reconsider the notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, in a very unequal world.     

Selection of regressors in econometrics: parametric and nonparametric methods selection of regressors in econometrics

The present paper addresses the selection-of-regressors issue into a general discrimination framework. We show how this framework is useful in unifying various procedures for selecting regressors and helpful in understanding the different strategies underlying these procedures. We review selection of regressors in linear, nonlinear and nonparametric regression models. In each case we successively consider model selection criteria and hypothesis testing procedures.