Impact of physical activity and sedentary behaviour on fall risks in older people: a systematic review and meta-analysis of observational studies

The objective of this work was to summarise and evaluate the evidence showing that physical activity is a protector factor as regards falls in older people. Relevant studies were identified through a systematic search in the MEDLINE and Cochrane Library, under the keywords of accidental fall/numerical data and risk factors, and with the bibliographies of retrieved papers. The combined odds ratio (OR) [95% confidence interval] for physical activity was 0.75 [0.64, 0.88] with moderate heterogeneity (I ²?=?33%). For fall injury, it was 0.59 [0.47, 0.74] and, for falls in general, it rose to 0.94 [0.76, 1.17] with nil heterogeneity. The combined OR for sedentary factors was 1.14 [1.10, 1.82] with moderate heterogeneity (I ²?=?36%). Regular physical activity in daily life yields significant reduction in falls in older people, especially falls with injuries.     

Maternal union instability and childhood mortality risk in the Global South, 2010–14

Efforts to improve child survival in lower-income countries typically focus on fundamental factors such as economic resources and infrastructure provision, even though research from post-industrial countries confirms that family instability has important health consequences. We tested the association between maternal union instability and children’s mortality risk in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia using children’s actual experience of mortality (discrete-time probit hazard models) as well as their experience of untreated morbidity (probit regression). Children of divorced/separated mothers experience compromised survival chances, but children of mothers who have never been in a union generally do not. Among children of partnered women, those whose mothers have experienced prior union transitions have a higher mortality risk. Targeting children of mothers who have experienced union instability—regardless of current union status—may augment ongoing efforts to reduce childhood mortality, especially in Africa and Latin America where union transitions are common.     

Effects of the social dominance orientation on environmental attitudes of Chilean university students / Efectos de la orientación a la dominancia social sobre las actitudes ambientales de universitarios chilenos

By adopting a multidimensional approach to environmental attitudes (apathy, anthropocentrism, connectedness and emotional affinity with nature), this study explores the relationships between these dimensions, social dominance orientation (SDO) and political orientation. Two hundred and sixty-two Chilean university students filled out an ad hoc online questionnaire. Two confirmatory factorial analyses showed the four typologies of environmental attitudes and the two factors for SDO, which are labelled group dominance and opposition to equality. Through hierarchical regressions, group dominance showed higher explanatory power of environmental attitudes than political orientation. Furthermore, using the bootstrap procedure we showed that group dominance mediated between political orientation and attitudes of apathy, anthropocentrism and connectedness, while opposition to equality mediated between apathy and emotional affinity. We conclude that SDO is an important variable for measuring political ideology while also providing new nuances when analysing the relationships with environmental attitudes.     

Estimation and diagnostic analysis in skew-generalized-normal regression models

The skew-generalized-normal distribution [Arellano-Valle, RB, Gómez, HW, Quintana, FA. A new class of skew-normal distributions. Comm Statist Theory Methods 2004;33(7):1465–1480] is a class of asymmetric normal distributions, which contains the normal and skew-normal distributions as special cases. The main virtues of this distribution is that it is easy to simulate from and it also supplies a genuine expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm for maximum likelihood estimation. In this paper, we extend the EM algorithm for linear regression models assuming skew-generalized-normal random errors and we develop a diagnostics analyses via local influence and generalized leverage, following Zhu and Lee's approach. This is because Cook's well-known approach would be more complicated to use to obtain measures of local influence. Finally, results obtained for a real data set are reported, illustrating the usefulness of the proposed method.     

Public intellectuals,political satire and the birth of activist public relations: The case of Attic Comedy

The purpose of this article is to explore the origins of dissent public relations and to establish its emergence in the context of the ancient Greek comedy represented by Aristophanes. Indeed, Attic Comedy (also known as Old Comedy) was the first great example of today’s mass communication, in which political satire was used to dissent and protest against political and social circumstances in fifth-century BC Athens. This situation was conditioned by the Peloponnesian War and its political, economic and social consequences. From this perspective, this article also constitutes an investigation into the intellectual history of public relations, of which Aristophanes can be considered to be one of the first practitioners.     

Job-Related Well-Being of Immigrants

Social Indicators Research - Considerable literature exists on the acculturation and adaptation of immigrants. For the most part, studies looked at their psychological and social adaptation to the...     

Activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning of dogs and medium-sized wild mammals in urban parks of Xalapa,Mexico

Urban Ecosystems - Free-ranging domestic dogs are the world most common exotic carnivore species that could negatively interact with the native wildlife as predators, competitors, and disease...     

Funding Civil Society? Bilateral Government Support for Development NGOs

Research on the determinants of foreign aid tends to focus on the relationship between donor country priorities and recipient state characteristics, but donors also make decisions about which organizations and programs within countries will receive assistance. Although NGOs increasingly have been recipients of foreign aid, few data are available to investigate which organizations within a given country receive that funding. Donors may prioritize structural characteristics of NGOs or their local ties—or they may seek a combination that blends concern about efficiency and accountability with an interest in developing national civil society. We use original data from Cambodia to explore whether aid is likely to go to managerial organizations (professionalized NGOs and NGOs that utilize modern management tools) or to organizations that are embedded in the domestic context. We argue that managerialism provides legitimacy for NGOs by signaling capacity and accountability to donors, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We argue that local embeddedness also confers legitimacy by aligning community ties and networks to rights-based development, increasing the likelihood of government funding. We find general support for the managerialism argument, but donor agencies do not prioritize direct funding for “indigenous” NGOs—not even among those with high levels of managerialism.     

Estimation for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations via the empirical characteristic function method

Seasonal fractional ARIMA (ARFISMA) model with infinite variance innovations is used in the analysis of seasonal long-memory time series with large fluctuations (heavy-tailed distributions). Two methods, which are the empirical characteristic function (ECF) procedure developed by Knight and Yu [The empirical characteristic function in time series estimation. Econometric Theory. 2002;18:691–721] and the Two-Step method (TSM) are proposed to estimate the parameters of stable ARFISMA model. The ECF method estimates simultaneously all the parameters, while the TSM considers in the first step the Markov Chains Monte Carlo–Whittle approach introduced by Ndongo et al. [Estimation of long-memory parameters for seasonal fractional ARIMA with stable innovations. Stat Methodol. 2010;7:141–151], combined with the maximum likelihood estimation method developed by Alvarez and Olivares [Méthodes d'estimation pour des lois stables avec des applications en finance. Journal de la Société Française de Statistique. 2005;1(4):23–54] in the second step. Monte Carlo simulations are also used to evaluate the finite sample performance of these estimation techniques.     

Portrayals of the internal God among Ashkenazi Jewish Orthodox lesbians in Israel

Abstract

Most of the existing literature on Ashkenazi Orthodox Jewish lesbians focuses on sociological aspects, mainly the negative attitudes held by religious communities towards their sexual identity and the various problems that arise from these. Less attention has been paid to lesbians’ psychological coping mechanisms with the tensions between their two central identities: the religious and the sexual. Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians find themselves in a complicated situation where they remain on the margins of both their “natural” communities: the religious one and the homosexual one. As a result, they feel rejected, isolated, and even punished by society. As believers, God is their ultimate refuge. But there are different conceptions of God, ranging from benevolent to persecutory, accepting or highly judgmental and punishing. This variance has not been considered in regard to the dual identity of Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians. This article focuses on this neglected issue, examining Ashkenazi Orthodox lesbians’ conception of God and its relation to their managing the conflict between their apparently conflicting identities.