Reconsidering the philanthropic foundation minimum payout policy under a “new normal”

With the increasing salience of foundations in many policy fields, and recent changes in market conditions, policies towards foundations designed decades ago seem outdated. In this article we suggest reassessing foundation payout minimums. To examine the impact of payout rates on grantmaking foundations lifespan and performance under “new normal” economics, we simulate multiple foundations lifecycles using Monte Carlo methods in diverse capital market conditions, with varied investment and payout strategies.We find that while under past market regime perpetuity seems to be a given, under more probable future scenarios, foundations might face increasingly early mortality and endowment depletion, limiting their potential impact. Furthermore, lower payout rates allow for higher lifetime grantmaking, higher mean annual grantmaking, and lower giving volatility. Accordingly, we suggest a tiered payout policy, in line with foundations’ missions and proper financial planning.     

How much is too much: Does the size of income support transfers affect labor supply?

Cash transfer programs pursue mainly protective objectives, but can also impact rural livelihoods by inducing investments in productive activities and changing household labor allocation. We adopt a continuous treatment approach to quantify how households’ labor supply responds to transfer size. We find a shift from paid labor to own farm labor and find that the transfer size is well within a level that would have disincentive effects on time spent on own farm activities. The switch from paid to own farm labor occurs at lower levels of transfers for labor-constrained households, and at higher levels for non-labor constrained households.     

A critical approach to wage devaluation: The case of Spanish economic recovery

In line with the orientation of EU economic policy, the Spanish government has favoured a strategy of internal devaluation as a way of adjusting price levels within the currency union. The results of empirical studies indicate that the internal devaluation applied in Spain does not seem to have attained the desired goals in terms of reducing the relative prices of exports and consolidating a model of growth based on external demand. Indeed, the estimates drawn up show that tailwinds – the depreciation of the euro and the fall in risk premium as results of the measures taken by the ECB, greater economic activity by trading partners and the fall in the price of oil – exercised a decisive influence in the trends followed by the prices of exports and the balance of trade during the period of crisis management in Spain.     

浅谈张学良的军队教育理念

张学良的政治生涯始终与军人紧密地联系在一起.纵观张学良的戎马军旅生涯,他对提高军队战斗力、改善军队素质、造就军事人才有着独特的教育理念和实践.在军事技术教育方面,张学良强调要训练精兵强将;在军队政治思想教育方面,张学良强调要为民族争生存;在军纪风纪教育方面,张学良强调要造就文明之军人;在军队文化教育方面,张学良强调要培养有文化的士兵.张学良的军队教育理念是其爱国主义思想的重要组成部分,深刻地诠释着他抵御外侮、强国富民、抗日救亡、复兴民族的爱国主义思想.     

Feminism and science in Masters of Sex

This article examines the fictional characterization of the real-life sex researchers and scientists William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson in the Showtime television program Masters of Sex (2013–2016). The historical Johnson had a complicated relationship with second-wave feminism: she disdained the movement and was interested primarily in improving heterosexual marriages and the sex lives of married couples. The Johnson character speaks in a language of postfeminism with minimal interest in collective action and broader social change. However, second-wave feminists later used her and Masters’ research in order to support their own beliefs about sexual autonomy and freedom, within and beyond marriage and heterosexuality. The television program demonstrates Johnson’s importance to both phases of her and Masters’ research—in the first phase, when they are based in a hospital and university environment, and in the second, when they establish their own research institute and raise funds directly from the clients that they serve. Johnson exemplifies postfeminist depictions of ambitious women in prestige television, her aim to have a successful career and marriage conflict, and while she is willing to compromise scientific values to serve her own goals, her male colleagues temper that ambition in service of “objective” science.     

Letting Students Control Their Own Learning: Using Games,Role-Plays,and Simulations in Middle School U.S. History Classrooms

The purpose of this article is to synthesize research on the benefits and use of games, role-plays, and simulations, whilst providing examples practicing teachers may wish to use in their classroom. Therefore, the article presents a discussion of key previous research on the use of games, role-plays, and simulations in secondary history classrooms. It also presents a discussion of the benefits games, role-plays, and simulations can have on student learning. This includes discussion of how such student-centered teaching and learning opportunities can improve students' critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaborative skills. Finally, it presents examples of these types of student-centered, inquiry-based, hands-on learning experiences, drawn from the author's previous 16 years of secondary classroom experiences.     

Influencing behaviour: The mindspace way

The ability to influence behaviour is central to many of the key policy challenges in areas such as health, finance and climate change. The usual route to behaviour change in economics and psychology has been to attempt to ‘change minds’ by influencing the way people think through information and incentives. There is, however, increasing evidence to suggest that ‘changing contexts’ by influencing the environments within which people act (in largely automatic ways) can have important effects on behaviour. We present a mnemonic, MINDSPACE, which gathers up the nine most robust effects that influence our behaviour in mostly automatic (rather than deliberate) ways. This framework is being used by policymakers as an accessible summary of the academic literature. To motivate further research and academic scrutiny, we provide some evidence of the effects in action and highlight some of the significant gaps in our knowledge.     

Sex, self-interest and health care priorities

In this questionnaire study, individuals were asked to prioritise publicly provided preventive health care services, one of which would be unavailable to them by virtue of their sex. The aim was to establish whether men and women would exhibit different degrees of self-interest when making a constrained choice. Around 1800 subjects from east-central England prioritised three different types of cancer screening. Most also provided written explanations for their rankings and these were classified into explanatory themes. Logistic regressions using socio-demographic and attitude data predicted the type of screening chosen as first priority. The analysis revealed that many men and women did indeed assign similar priorities to the different types of screening and, even when the priorities differed, these were often justified by similar arguments relating to technical aspects of the interventions and to self-interest. However, women were far more likely than men to prioritise a type of screening from which they themselves would benefit directly and the variations in preferences and explanations between the sexes occurred primarily because of differences in other-regarding attitudes. The bias towards screening of females was driven by women's greater worries about the disease in question and by men's “benevolent sexism” with respect to women's wellbeing.     

Rape culture,misogyny, and urban anxiety in NH10 and Pink

One of the most pervasive aspects of Delhi’s post-liberalization psychopathology has been everyday violence against women. The city’s rape culture was given an exceptionally sharp global focus after the horrific gang rape of Jyoti Singh on December 16, 2012. Recent Hindi cinema has begun to engage with some aspects of the capital’s misogynist urban ethos. In this paper, I look at how the Delhi subgenre of the “multiplex film” has engaged with rape culture, misogyny, and urban anxiety through a close textual and discursive analysis of two recent films—NH10 (Navdeep Singh, 2015) and Pink (Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury, 2016). Specifically, I identify how the December 16 “trigger event” and Delhi’s notorious misogyny are finding newer modes of representation through the interplay of genre and exhibition space. In what ways do these films position and imagine the “multiplex viewer”? New engagements with the figure of the consuming middle-class woman and the public discourses that surround her sexual safety and navigation of space have taken a central position in understanding the present urban psychosis of the capital. I suggest that these films and the forms of spectatorial identification that they privilege are intricately linked to the gendered spatial politics of the multiplex.     

危机事件中的网络视频传播与话语分析

随着网络视频的兴起,网络传播进入视频时代：对央视网和优酷网“甲型H1N1流感”议题的网络视频进行对比研究发现,在视频节目来源、话语平台的影响力和话语影响力以及话语呈现和对话机制方面,网络视频官方话语与民间话语的呈现都存在显著差异和一定规律。更为重要的是,网络视频传播在危机事件中的作用日益显著。