Hungarian Horoscopes as a Genre of Postsocialist Transformation

In the mid-1990s in Hungary, astrology publications and horoscopes—along with porn and evangelical literature—were among the Western cultural forms once restricted or banned by the socialist state that were enjoying enormous popular interest. Rather than examine astrology as a religious belief or superstitious practice, I approach it as a particular genre of self-transformation, often regarded as harmless and entertaining but nonetheless having efficacious potential. Drawing on numerous examples from print publications, interviews with professional practitioners and informal discussions, this article makes two observations: first, that readers of horoscopes looked to the divinatory capacity of horoscopes to assist them in making decisions and navigating the uncertain context of the 1990s; second, that as a genre able to shape and constrain subjectivity, horoscopes were instrumental in affecting transformations of normative character, moral codes and worldview from a localist, state-socialist cosmology to one more in accord with the demands (and enticements) of a global, neoliberal capitalist order.     

A two-state regime switching autoregressive model with an application to river flow analysis

We propose a regime switching autoregressive model and apply it to analyze daily water discharge series of River Tisza in Hungary. The dynamics is governed by two regimes, along which both the autoregressive coefficients and the innovation distributions are altering, moreover, the hidden regime indicator process is allowed to be non-Markovian. After examining stationarity and basic properties of the model, we turn to its estimation by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods and propose two algorithms. The values of the latent process serve as auxiliary parameters in the first one, while the change points of the regimes do the same in the second one in a reversible jump MCMC setting. After comparing the mixing performance of the two methods, the model is fitted to the water discharge data. Simulations show that it reproduces the important features of the water discharge series such as the highly skewed marginal distribution and the asymmetric shape of the hydrograph.     

The effect of artificial light at night on the biomass of caterpillars feeding in urban tree canopies

Urban Ecosystems - Alternation of day and night is the oldest cycle on Earth, which is increasingly disturbed by the accelerating rate of urbanization and technological development. Despite the...     

Transferring lean knowledge within multinational networks

Abstract

Transferring lean knowledge is crucial for multinational companies; however, it is very difficult. Nevertheless, our knowledge in the area is limited. This paper investigates (a) how lean knowledge is transferred within multinational networks and (b) the type of organizational context that supports it. We use four case studies with 18 interviews in our exploratory study. Our results indicate that companies use a sophisticated knowledge transfer system with a fine web of practices that serve to transfer both explicit and tacit knowledge. The revealed organizational contexts show different patterns of division of labour (and responsibilities) between a central lean office and the particular subsidiary’s lean office. Our findings highlight the importance of transfer coalition, which consists of the cooperation of lean experts and top management during the knowledge transfer process. Top managers play a key role with their weak inter-unit ties, and they provide guidance for lean efforts and allocate sufficient resources to them. Further findings show that the evolution of lean transitions is not linear, and each of our case companies has witnessed turnaround during their journey.     

Gender differences in work-schooling decisions in rural North India

Based on a rural sample of North Indian children and adolescents, this paper addresses the determinants of participation in work and schooling. The empirical model includes market and domestic work as separate alternatives to schooling in a trivariate probit framework, allowing also for combinations of these activities as well as idleness. This differentiation sheds new light on gender differences in the work-school decisions in North India. While more traditional determinants (like wealth or parental education) mostly affect the trade-off between schooling and the gender specific work activity (market work for boys and domestic work for girls), monetary incentives (wages and schooling costs) are more closely related to market work for both sexes. Girls are also more likely to work for the market if their economic contribution can be made within the family (for instance if the household owns animals). Proxies for cultural factors turn out to play especially a role for participation in the gender non-specific work activities; for instance, overall female labor force participation shifts girls?? activities from domestic towards market work.     

Infants Experience Perceptual Narrowing for Nonprimate Faces

Perceptual narrowing—a phenomenon in which perception is broad from birth, but narrows as a function of experience—has previously been tested with primate faces. In the first 6 months of life, infants can discriminate among individual human and monkey faces. Though the ability to discriminate monkey faces is lost after about 9 months, infants retain human face discrimination, presumably because of their experience with human faces. The current study demonstrates that 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants are able to discriminate nonprimate faces as well. In a visual paired comparison test, 4‐ to 6‐month‐old infants (n = 26) looked significantly longer at novel sheep (Ovis aries) faces, compared to a familiar sheep face (p = .017), while 9‐ to 11‐month‐olds (n = 26) showed no visual preference, and adults (n = 27) had a familiarity preference (p < .001). Infants’ face recognition systems are broadly tuned at birth—not just for primate faces, but for nonprimate faces as well—allowing infants to become specialists in recognizing the types of faces encountered in their first year of life.