Reflective Photobooth – a way to visualise,and challenge perceptions and representations of distanced social groups

Taken-for-granted knowledge about people from other social groups is a key challenge for overcoming stereotypes. This article describes a novel arts-based research method to visualise participants’ frames of distanced social groups and aims to trigger reflections among them. The Reflective Photobooth invites participants to dress up as members of distanced social groups, stage a scene, produce pictures, answer prompting questions, and discuss their visualisations. We argue that the artistic re-enactment that underlies the visualisation process can attract diverse groups of participants to engage with research topics, create places for the articulation of critical statements against existing societal clichés and stereotypical media representations, and trigger reflections among participants about taken-for-granted knowledge. The method was tested within the Frame-a-Farmer project, in which the social distance between consumers and food producers in modern agrifood systems was addressed. Results indicate that despite the method bearing some risks and facing some challenges, three promising areas of future application could be identified: (i) raising awareness among large groups of people, (ii) collecting stories or topical vignettes, and (iii) deconstructing taken-for-granted knowledge and societal clichés.     

Interval censored and truncated data: Rate of convergence of NPMLE of the density

We consider survival data that are both interval censored and truncated. Under appropriate assumptions on the involved distributions, the censoring, truncation and survival, we prove the consistency of the NPMLE of the density of the survival, and give the rate of convergence. Finally, we give an example where the joint law of the censoring and truncation can be explicitly computed.     

Precopulatory Sexual Cannibalism and Other Accidents: Evolution,Material Trans Theory,and Natural Law

Natural law perspectives take existing formations of life-matter and translate them into normative templates. From an evolutionary perspective, the normative aspect of natural law is always under suspicion. Because life-forms have histories and futures that are shaped by a dynamic of accidents, they are not susceptible to normative assertions about what they “should” be or do. This is particularly the case with sex. Sexual reproduction is a minoritarian strategy within the full spectrum of life. Like all aspects of life, sex is a product of a fluctuating backdrop of phylogenetic (species-forming) and ontogenetic (individual-forming) accidents. And like all aspects of life, it continues to vary within this field of material processes. My argument in this essay is that, rather than a fully integrated feature of a lawlike apparatus, sex is a mess. From the evolutionary perspective—and especially, I show, in the light of the new “extended evolutionary synthesis”—sex always has been and always will be barnacled with accidents. This dovetails with what we might call material trans theory, a species of New Materialism that sees sex as a concrescence of material forces and processes introjected into bodies. Both views leave sex fundamentally incompatible with metaphysical explanations or metaphysical norms—including and especially natural law.     

Avian haemosporidian parasites in an urban forest and their relationship to bird size and abundance

Urbanization has been identified as a threat to biodiversity due to landscape modifications. Studies of parasite ecology in urbanized areas lagged behind those made on macro organisms. Here we studied infection prevalence of haemosporidian parasites in an avian community of an urban forest from Germany, and its relationship with bird abundance and body mass. We used PCR to amplify a fragment of the mtDNA cyt b gene to determine the infection status of birds, and bird point counts to determine bird relative abundances. The avifauna was dominated by two small sized insectivore passerines (Parus major, Cyanistes caeruleus), representing ~40 % of the total bird records. The highest haemosporidian prevalence was recorded for Turdus philomelos (100 %) and for Fringilla coelebs (75 %). Bird abundance and body mass were positively associated with infection status for two haemosporidian genera: Plasmodium and Leucocytozoon. Infection rate was lower in juveniles compared to adult birds. We recorded a total of 7 Plasmodium, 26 Haemoproteus, and 10 Leucocytozoon lineages. Avian malaria (P. relictum) was detected infecting 5 individuals of P. major, the most abundant species in the community. These results, together with those of previous studies at the same site, suggest that potentially any of the genetic haemosporidian lineages detected in this urban forest can be transmitted across native and pet bird species, and to species of conservation concern housed at aviaries.     

Child sexual abuse and psychological impairment in victims: results of an online study initiated by victims

Sexual abuse of children has been a topic of scientific investigation for the past few decades. Research in this area, however, is rarely initiated, conceptualized, and conducted by victims themselves. Apart from possibly having painted a one-sided picture of sexual abuse, this presumed dominance of nonvictims might also have marginalized victims in a research area central to their lives. This study was conducted by a victims interest group as an effort to meet the need to add victims' perspectives to our current understanding of this topic. The online survey focused on investigating victims' psychosocial impairment, which was found to be extensive. Results indicated that an intact social support system facilitates better health, especially when offered early on.     

A Critical View of the Institutional Solution in Economics

Institutionalism is the solution at hand when the expected correlations fail to work. The analytical framework is henceforth enriched with institutional pillars such as stable political structures, lack of corrupt practices, well-specified property rights, low-cost enforcement of contracts, etc. This paper’s thesis is that institutionalism has its own limits circumscribed by the original view of the logic of economic inquiry based on causation. Ignoring the external circumstances of the social whole by virtue of ceteris paribus postulation creates an epistemic vacuum as regards the most part of our understanding of economic evolutions. In guise of a practical corollary, the paper ends with a casuistic illustration from Eastern European transition economies and concludes that the uncertainties of transition, neither more obscured, nor more difficult than of any other historical system, are left as much puzzling in orthodox as in institutional recipes.     

E-optimal designs for three treatments

E-optimality is studied for three treatments in an arbitrary n-way heterogeneity setting. In some cases maximal trace designs cannot be E-optimal. When there is more than one E-optimal design for a given setting, the best with respect to all reasonable criteria is determined.     

Native American Food Security and Traditional Foods: A Review of the Literature

This piece explores the emergent themes and subthemes represented within the recent contemporary discourse on Native American food security. Analysis revealed traditional foods as the most common theme present within the sampled literature. We offer a review of this theme (and related subthemes such as food access and human and environmental health) to illuminate the primary concerns, opportunities, preferences, and barriers associated with Native American food security. Our assessments also provide a nuanced understanding of existing literature related to food security and sovereignty, as well as key dimensions of environmental and social equality.     

Resource characteristics in social exchange networks: Implications for positional advantage

Despite the wide range of resources that traverse social networks, social exchange research has focused on only a narrow subset. Notably, prior social exchange research has not considered resources like information that have the capacity to diffuse through networks. The current study investigates how differences between the standard social exchange resource and an information-type resource affect the advantage provided by one's network position. Results of a laboratory experiment support predictions and offer two new insights to the foundations of positional advantage: (1) the location of advantageous positions in a network differs by resource characteristics, and (2) only in particular situations is a single position able to experience high levels of both power and exchange frequency.