Assessment of Distraction From Erotic Stimuli by Nonerotic Interference

Distraction from erotic cues during sexual encounters is a major contributor to sexual difficulties in men and women. Being able to assess distraction in studies of sexual arousal will help clarify underlying contributions to sexual problems. The current study aimed to identify the most accurate assessment of distraction from erotic cues in healthy men (n = 29) and women (n = 38). Participants were assigned to a no distraction, low distraction, or high distraction condition. Distraction was induced using an auditory distraction task presented during the viewing of an erotic video. Attention to erotic cues was assessed using three methods: a written quiz, a visual quiz, and a self-reported distraction measure. Genital and psychological sexual responses were also measured. Self-reported distraction and written quiz scores most accurately represented the level of distraction present, while self-reported distraction also corresponded with a decrease in genital arousal. Findings support the usefulness of self-report measures in conjunction with a brief quiz on the erotic material as the most accurate and sensitive ways to simply measure experimentally-induced distraction. Insight into distraction assessment techniques will enable evaluation of naturally occurring distraction in patients suffering from sexual problems.     

Product partition latent variable model for multiple change-point detection in multivariate data

The product partition model (PPM) is a well-established efficient statistical method for detecting multiple change points in time-evolving univariate data. In this article, we refine the PPM for the purpose of detecting multiple change points in correlated multivariate time-evolving data. Our model detects distributional changes in both the mean and covariance structures of multivariate Gaussian data by exploiting a smaller dimensional representation of correlated multiple time series. The utility of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments on simulated and real datasets.     

Cyclical Evolution of the Global Right

An understanding of the current right‐wing national and transnational social movements can benefit from comparing them to the global and national conditions operating during their last appearance in the first half of the twentieth century and by carefully comparing twentieth‐century fascism with the neofascist and right‐wing populist movements that have been emerging in the twenty‐first century. This allows us to assess the similarities and differences, and to gain insights about what could be the consequences of the reemergence of populist nationalism and fascist movements. Our study uses the comparative evolutionary world‐systems perspective to study the Global Right from 1800 to the present. We see fascism as a form of capitalism that emerges when the capitalist project is in crisis. World historical waves of right‐wing populism and fascism are caused by the cycles of globalization and deglobalization, the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, long business cycles (the Kondratieff wave), and interactions with both Centrist Liberalism and the Global Left. We consider how crises of the global capitalist system have produced right‐wing backlashes in the past, and how a future terminal crisis of capitalism could lead to a reemergence of a new form of authoritarian global governance or a reorganized global democracy in the future.     

The restructuring of career paths in large service sector organizations:'delayering', upskilling and polarisation1

Drawing on detailed case studies of four large service sector organizations this paper finds little evidence of training provision that links skills development with incremental career progression. Past policies of ‘delayering’ have opened up a ‘gap’ in the job ladder and this has both increased the organizational costs of formal training and reduced the likelihood of informal on‐the‐job training being seen as the basis for promotion to the next level. Managers are thus faced with the challenge of how to establish a new set of premises upon which to strengthen the workforce's loyalty and commitment to the organization, in the context of problems of high staff turnover and low job satisfaction. What we find is a greater emphasis on certificated training provision. However, in the absence of a transparent career path employers rely on more intensive techniques of appraisal and selection of workers for a ‘winner‐takes‐all’ career path. Given the importance of skills acquisition as an important building block of the ‘learning society’, our findings suggest that policymakers in Britain cannot rely solely upon the employer to bridge the skill gap evident in large service sector organizations.     

Cohabitation and commitment: partnership plans of young men and women

Popular commentators on marriage and the family often interpret the increase in heterosexual couples living together without marrying as reduced willingness to create and honour life‐long partnerships. Survey and in‐depth interviews with samples of 20–29 year olds living in an urban area of Scotland finds little support for the postulated link between growing cohabitation and a weakened sense of commitment to long‐term arrangements. Most of the cohabiting couples strongly stressed their ‘commitment’. Socially acceptable vocabularies of motive undoubtedly influenced answers but interviews helped to explore deeper meanings. Many respondents’ views were consistent with previous research predictions of a weakening sense of any added value of marriage. At the same time, some respondents continued to stress the social significance of the distinction between marriage and cohabitation, consistent with research interpreting cohabitation as a ‘try and see’ strategy part‐way to the perceived full commitment of marriage. The notion that ‘marriage is better for children’ continued to have support among respondents. While, on average, cohabiting couples had lower incomes and poorer employment situations than married couples, only very extreme adverse circumstances were presented as making marriage ‘too risky’. Pregnancy‐provoked cohabitation was not always in this category. Cohabitation was maintained because marriage would ‘make no difference’ or because they ‘had not yet got round to’ marriage. Most respondents were more wary of attempting to schedule or plan in their personal life than in other domains and cohabitees’ attitudes to partnership, including their generally ‘committed’ approach, do not explain the known greater vulnerability of this group to dissolution.     

THE DISTRIBUTION SECTOR AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS: ARE THERE PATTERNS? YES

Using an increasing returns specification for distribution, an inverted U pattern between the share of distribution in gross domestic product and the level of development is shown to arise. A cross-section time-series data set is constructed and merged with one used to analyze the service sector. In contrast to the rising pattern found for services, an average time-series relation that exhibits an inverted U pattern is established. The empirical results are robust, for example, to choice of functional form and country and time period coverage. A similar pattern is found in the average cross-section (country) relation between distribution and development.     

Quantifying uncertainty in the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales

Summary.  A crucial issue in the current global warming debate is the effect of vegetation and soils on carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations in the atmosphere. Vegetation can extract CO₂ through photosynthesis, but respiration, decay of soil organic matter and disturbance effects such as fire return it to the atmosphere. The balance of these processes is the net carbon flux. To estimate the biospheric carbon flux for England and Wales, we address the statistical problem of inference for the sum of multiple outputs from a complex deterministic computer code whose input parameters are uncertain. The code is a process model which simulates the carbon dynamics of vegetation and soils, including the amount of carbon that is stored as a result of photosynthesis and the amount that is returned to the atmosphere through respiration. The aggregation of outputs corresponding to multiple sites and types of vegetation in a region gives an estimate of the total carbon flux for that region over a period of time. Expert prior opinions are elicited for marginal uncertainty about the relevant input parameters and for correlations of inputs between sites. A Gaussian process model is used to build emulators of the multiple code outputs and Bayesian uncertainty analysis is then used to propagate uncertainty in the input parameters through to uncertainty on the aggregated output. Numerical results are presented for England and Wales in the year 2000. It is estimated that vegetation and soils in England and Wales constituted a net sink of 7.55 Mt C (1 Mt C = 10¹² g of carbon) in 2000, with standard deviation 0.56 Mt C resulting from the sources of uncertainty that are considered.