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.     

自杀和生命的意义——来自脑科学研究的解读

生命本身是一个随机事件，并不具有高尚的意义。进化的结果使人类可通过工作、家庭和人际关系等给予自己的生命以意义感。当我们的生活方式使脑内奖赏系统获得刺激，就会带来生命具有意义的感受，这种感受给人带来更好的生存机会。生存的欲望是一切生物体最具特征的属性，一些精神疾病患者缺乏这种欲望。自杀主要发生于精神疾病患者，它并非是基于自由意志的行为。抗精神病治疗和适当的社会交往可以预防自杀。由于不同个体有着不同的大脑，人们的生活方式就应该去适应各自大脑的特征。只要人们的生活方式不对他人造成过多的伤害，政府就应该允许和保护人们自由地按照各自的方式生活。     

Book Review: Restless Nation: Starting Over in America. By James M. Jasper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 296 pages,hardcover, ISBN: 0-226-39478-6

Qualitative Sociology -     

Measures of Multigroup Segregation

In this paper we derive and evaluate measures of multigroup segregation. After describing four ways to conceptualize the measurement of multigroup segregation—as the disproportionality in group (e.g., race) proportions across organizational units (e.g., schools or census tracts), as the strength of association between nominal variables indexing group and organizational unit membership, as the ratio of between–unit diversity to total diversity, and as the weighted average of two–group segregation indices—we derive six multigroup segregation indices: a dissimilarity index (D), a Gini index (G), an information theory index (H), a squared coefficient of variation index (C), a relative diversity index (R), and a normalized exposure index (P). We evaluate these six indices against a set of seven desirable properties of segregation indices. We conclude that the information theory index H is the most conceptually and mathematically satisfactory index, since it alone obeys the principle of transfers in the multigroup case. Moreover, H is the only multigroup index that can be decomposed into a sum of between– and within–group components.     

Fire and restoration of the largest urban forest of the world in Rio de Janeiro City,Brazil

National Park of Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) is about 3,300 ha and considered the largest urban forest in the world. Its floristic composition is typical of Atlantic Rain Forest. The reserve is being altered because of fire occurrences and urban expansion. This study identified locations and causes of forest fires, and makes management recommendations to restore damaged areas. From 1991 to 2000, forest firefighters recorded an average of 75-fire occurrences/year. Identified causes included hot air balloons (24%), intentional (24%), rubbish burning (21%) and religious practices (17%). Primary fuels included invasive grasses and ferns. Although hot air balloons destroyed larger areas of forest in each occurrence, a greater number of fires started in the invasive vegetation along roads that bisect the forest. In response to recurrent forests, invasive vegetation has spread gradually into the forest increasing forest degradation. To decrease fire damage, sites with high fire frequencies and density of invasive vegetation were planted with less flammable species. Results indicate that fire frequency decreased and density of invasive vegetation declined. This approach appears to prevent fire incidence, reduce the need for fire fighting, and preserve existing biodiversity.     

Führung durch Selbstführung

This paper outlines the conceptual bases, strategies, and psychological attributes of leadership by self-leadership. In addition, relations to other theories of leadership are drawn. Dimensions and correlates of self-leadership competence are described and discussed. Various approaches for developing self-leadership competence are discussed as well.     

Bayesian modelling of catch in a north-west Atlantic fishery

Summary. We model daily catches of fishing boats in the Grand Bank fishing grounds. We use data on catches per species for a number of vessels collected by the European Union in the context of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization. Many variables can be thought to influence the amount caught: a number of ship characteristics (such as the size of the ship, the fishing technique used and the mesh size of the nets) are obvious candidates, but one can also consider the season or the actual location of the catch. Our database leads to 28 possible regressors (arising from six continuous variables and four categorical variables, whose 22 levels are treated separately), resulting in a set of 177 million possible linear regression models for the log-catch. Zero observations are modelled separately through a probit model. Inference is based on Bayesian model averaging, using a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. Particular attention is paid to the prediction of catches for single and aggregated ships.     

Bayesian analysis of mixture modelling using the multivariate t distribution

A finite mixture model using the multivariate t distribution has been shown as a robust extension of normal mixtures. In this paper, we present a Bayesian approach for inference about parameters of t-mixture models. The specifications of prior distributions are weakly informative to avoid causing nonintegrable posterior distributions. We present two efficient EM-type algorithms for computing the joint posterior mode with the observed data and an incomplete future vector as the sample. Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling schemes are also developed to obtain the target posterior distribution of parameters. The advantages of Bayesian approach over the maximum likelihood method are demonstrated via a set of real data.     

Bayesian networks for imputation

Summary.  Bayesian networks are particularly useful for dealing with high dimensional statistical problems. They allow a reduction in the complexity of the phenomenon under study by representing joint relationships between a set of variables through conditional relationships between subsets of these variables. Following Thibaudeau and Winkler we use Bayesian networks for imputing missing values. This method is introduced to deal with the problem of the consistency of imputed values: preservation of statistical relationships between variables ( statistical consistency ) and preservation of logical constraints in data ( logical consistency ). We perform some experiments on a subset of anonymous individual records from the 1991 UK population census.