Risky bodies in risky spaces: disabled people’s pursuit of outdoor leisure

Risk is used to deny disabled people access to many parts of mainstream life. Using qualitative data we explore disabled people’s views and experiences of outdoor recreation, bringing together ideas from two areas of sociology – disability studies and risk using the concepts of edgework and psycho-emotional disablism. Many people felt that the outdoors represented a risky environment. For some, risk was one of the main drivers for going out into the countryside; whilst for others, risk was a major cause of their reluctance to venture into the countryside. Engaging in risk both can disable and can challenge disablist views.     

Validity of Person Matching in Vocational Interest Inventories

Research for more than 60 years has shown that entry into occupations can be predicted from scores on interest inventories at a rate better than chance (Donnay, 1997 ). The psychometric scoring methodologies used today by a majority of vocational interest inventories were developed in the 1920s and 1960s. Researchers are challenged with improving the theory and science behind vocational interest inventories to align them with current vocational constructions. In this study, validity comparisons were made between person matching and standard scoring based on 5,143 medical students who had taken a vocational interest inventory and had entered their medical residency. Person matching was found to improve differentiation between occupational groups and increase the amount of information offered in the scoring report; in addition, it could potentially increase occupational group assignment to advance vocational interest inventory validity.     

Perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam among European Muslims before and after ISIS: the important roles of residential segregation and education

Perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam is one of the indicating features of Islamic fundamentalism and, in some cases, is serving as a pull to join extremist groups. In this paper, using data from two waves of a cross‐national survey, we investigate what affects European Muslims’ opinions about Western governments. We find that residential segregation is associated with perceived hostility of Western governments to Islam. Further, we find that Muslims living in segregated neighbourhoods and enclaves have a higher probability of believing that Western governments are hostile to Islam. National origins of Muslim immigrants have a significant impact, with people from African countries measuring less perceived hostility than others. We also find that education is associated with perceived hostility of Western governments to Islam in a non‐linear way. People with the highest and lowest levels of education tend to be less likely to believe that Western governments are hostile to Islam, relative to people with mid‐level education. This non‐linear effect is best explained by education’s differential effects on perceptions of key world events. During the time between 2011 – before ISIS’s announcement of its Caliphate in Iraq and Syria – and 2013, subsequent to that announcement, we see a sharp decrease in perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam, particularly among more educated European Muslims. We make the case that this decrease can be attributed, in some ways, to the emergence of ISIS. We discuss our findings in terms of theoretical and policy implications.     

Tolerance of Homosexuality in 88 Countries: Education,Political Freedom,and Liberalism

Researchers have repeatedly found a positive correlation between education and tolerance. However, they may be victims of an unrepresentative sample containing only rich Western liberal democracies, where political agendas have a liberalizing effect on curricula. In this paper, we specify the relationship between education and liberal attitudes by analyzing data on educational attainment and tolerance of homosexuality (one dimension of liberalism) drawn from a heterogeneous sample of 88 countries over the period 1981–2014. We argue that nonliberal political agendas in some countries undermine the supposed universality of the positive relationship between educational attainment and tolerance of homosexuality. In relatively free countries, education is indeed associated with greater tolerance. However, in relatively unfree countries, education has no effect on tolerance and in some cases encourages intolerance. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that education is associated with tolerance of homosexuality only when regimes energetically promote liberal‐democratic values. The larger theoretical point is that the agendas of political regimes shape civic values partly via education systems. Especially in an era when democracy is at risk in many countries, it is important to recognize that education is not always a benign force.     

Criticizing the Critic: Comments on Jahoda's (2012) Critique of Discursive Social Psychology

Jahoda (2012) criticizes discursive social psychology (DSP) on several different grounds; specifically, he argues that DSP has opaque methodological procedures, is of questionable scientific merit, involves over‐interpretation of its data, and implicitly claims its findings to be universal rather than contextually specific. We challenge these criticisms by arguing that observational studies of the kind typical within DSP research have a perfectly valid place within a scientific social psychology, that the interpretations made by DSP researchers should be seen in the context of a temporally extended research process in which they are subject to criticism and potential replication, and that Jahoda is himself guilty of over‐interpretation by inferring claims of universality when such an inference is not warranted by the data (i.e. the qualitative content of the sample of research papers considered by Jahoda).     

Canadian Biotechnology Start-Ups, 1991–1997: The Role of Incumbents' Patents and Strategic Alliances in Controlling Competition

Fligstein (1996) contends that organizations act to exploit the institutional context in which they are embedded so as to stabilize the competition they face. Drawing on Fligstein's theoretical analysis, we conceptualize incumbent biotechnology firms' patenting and alliance-building activities as attempts to stabilize and control potential competition and analyze how these activities shape rates of founding in the Canadian biotechnology industry. We find that increases in the level and concentration of incumbents' patenting discourage founding, particularly in human application sectors of the industry where development and approval processes are more costly and time consuming. Incumbents' horizontal alliances depress start-ups; vertical alliances stimulate start-ups. Our findings highlight how technology appropriation and strategic alliances structure the competitive dynamics and evolution of high-technology, knowledge-intensive industries.     

Scale-space theory: a basic tool for analyzing structures at different scales

An inherent property of objects in the world is that they only exist as meaningful entities over certain ranges of scale. If one aims to describe the structure of unknown real-world signals, then a multi-scale representation of data is of crucial importance. This paper gives a tutorial review of a special type of multi-scale representation—linear scale-space representation—which has been developed by the computer vision community to handle image structures at different scales in a consistent manner. The basic idea is to embed the original signal into a one-parameter family of gradually smoothed signals in which the fine-scale details are successively suppressed. Under rather general conditions on the type of computations that are to be performed at the first stages of visual processing, in what can be termed 'the visual front-end', it can be shown that the Gaussian kernel and its derivatives are singled out as the only possible smoothing kernels. The conditions that specify the Gaussian kernel are, basically, linearity and shift invariance, combined with different ways of formalizing the notion that structures at coarse scales should correspond to simplifications of corresponding structures at fine scales-they should not be accidental phenomena created by the smoothing method. Notably, several different ways of choosing scale-space axioms give rise to the same conclusion. The output from the scale-space representation can be used for a variety of early visual tasks; operations such as feature detection, feature classification and shape computation can be expressed directly in terms of (possibly non-linear) combinations of Gaussian derivatives at multiple scales. In this sense the scale-space representation canserve as a basis for early vision. During the last few decades, a number of other approaches to multiscale representations have been developed, which are more or less related to scale-space theory, notably the theories of pyramids, wavelets and multi grid methods.Despite their qualitative differences, the increasing propularity of each of these approaches indicates that the crucial notion of scale is increasingly appreciated by the computer.vision community and by researchers in other related fields. An interesting similarity to biological vision is that the scale-space operators closely resemble receptive field profiles registered in neurophysiological studies of the mam- malian retina and visual cortex.     

REPRESENTING GANGS IN THE NEWS: MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS OF CRIMINAL GANGS

This research, based on a content analysis of 4,445 newspaper articles, examines the images that emerge from stories of criminal gangs and societys responses to them. Eight recurrent themes were identifed. It was discovered that articles devoted to the coverage of gang crimes were outnumbered by stories dealing with various community responses. Articles reporting the results of scientifc research on gangs constituted the smallest category. The results are discussed in light of their importance in the construction of social problems discourse and the maintenance of symbolic power and social control.     

Academic Support Services and Career Decision‐Making Self‐Efficacy in Student Athletes

This study examined the relationship between evaluations of academic support services and student athletes’ career decision‐making self‐efficacy. One hundred and fifty‐eight NCAA athletes (68% male) from 11 Division I teams completed measures of satisfaction with their academic support services, career decision‐making self‐efficacy, general self‐efficacy, and locus of control. Results indicated that evaluations of academic support services were positively related to levels of career decision‐making self‐efficacy. In addition, this relationship was moderated such that student athletes with lower levels of general self‐efficacy and internal locus of control benefited more from positive experiences with academic support services. Limitations and implications are discussed.