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In this article, the author discusses several suggestions on how to select a research paper for discussion-based seminar courses including group appeal, type of paper, and analytical approach. He cites that one must consider the interest and specialties of the audience. He states that empirical papers assess topics broadly, facilitate better discussion, and generate meager interaction. Moreover, research papers which are simple, clear, and concise yield productive discussions.

Our lives are made of social interactions which can be recorded through personal gadgets as well as sensors capturing ubiquitous and social data. This type of data, such as spatio‐temporal data from the real‐time location of people, for example, can then be used for inferring interactions which can be translated into behavioural patterns. In this paper, we consider the automatic discovery of exceptional social behaviour from spatio‐temporal interaction data, focusing on two areas: exceptional subgroups and spatio‐temporal outliers – both in the form of descriptive patterns. For that, we propose a method for exceptional social behaviour discovery, combining subgroup discovery and network science methods for identifying behaviour that deviates from the norm. We also propose the use of two outlier detection metrics for identifying outliers, namely the Local Outlier Factor (LOF) and the Voronoi area. We applied the proposed method on synthetic data as well as two real datasets containing location data from children playing in the school playground. Our results indicate that this is a valid approach which is able to obtain meaningful knowledge from the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how the strength of social ties is affected by the geographical location of other individuals and their social capital. We characterize the equilibrium in terms of both social interactions and social capital. We show that lower travel costs increase not only the interaction frequency but also the social capital for all agents. We also show that the equilibrium frequency of interactions is lower than the efficient one. Using a unique geocoded data set of friendship networks among adolescents in the United States, we structurally estimate the model and show that indeed agents socially interact less than that at the first best optimum. Our policy analysis suggests that, at the same cost, subsidizing social interactions yield a higher total welfare than subsidizing transportation costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the behavioral foundations of non‐Bayesian models of learning over social networks and develops a taxonomy of conditions for information aggregation in a general framework. As our main behavioral assumption, we postulate that agents follow social learning rules that satisfy “imperfect recall,” according to which they treat the current beliefs of their neighbors as sufficient statistics for the entire history of their observations. We augment this assumption with various restrictions on how agents process the information provided by their neighbors and obtain representation theorems for the corresponding learning rules (including the canonical model of DeGroot). We then obtain general long‐run learning results that are not tied to the learning rules' specific functional forms, thus identifying the fundamental forces that lead to learning, non‐learning, and mislearning in social networks. Our results illustrate that, in the presence of imperfect recall, long‐run aggregation of information is closely linked to (i) the rate at which agents discount their neighbors' information over time, (ii) the curvature of agents' social learning rules, and (iii) whether their initial tendencies are amplified or moderated as a result of social interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the buy local movement using social interactions. Social interaction arises if some consumers have preferences for local economic output due to altruism toward local producers and/or because of local amenities that benefit the community. This introduces an incentive for some consumers to advocate for localism and convert other consumers to buy locally. However, when there are competing communities, global efforts to buy more local products leads to lower utility from consumption and, under some scenarios, no increases in local production. This paper analyzes the benefits and costs of buying locally under various types of localism and market structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the limited empirical enquiries into the role of accounting in affecting medical professionals' financial accountability perceptions and related outcomes and performance. It examines the associations among formal and informal feedback processes, managers' financial accountability, work attitudes, and performance. Results of our survey to a sample of 115 senior medical managers in an Italian hospital reveal that the association between performance feedback sources and managerial performance depends on managers' felt accountability and commitment. Further, we find that commitment bridges the link between accountability and managerial performance. Our findings provide two useful insights for healthcare management. First, healthcare managers should improve the technical features of the formal performance feedback practices to update medical managers on their goals in a timely and useful manner. Second, healthcare managers should encourage unplanned, spontaneous, and voluntary social interactions to enhance the positive effects of informal feedback. To sum up, our research adds to the limited knowledge of the accountability and performance literature using data from the actual setting and subjects of concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the case of H5N1 bird flu in Southeast Asia, and develops a basic model of simulation using agent-based modelling to study the dynamic interaction between human activities in Bandung City, West Java province, Indonesia. It evaluates the effectiveness of several policies for Bandung City based on the infection process model for pandemic, depending on social and culture simulation using Spot Oriented Agent Role Simulator or SOARS. The results of these simulations suggest that the government should take action not only from a medical perspective, but also from the perspective of social interactions and their influences on the spread of H5N1 in Bandung City. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When two unequals compete, the stronger, more able, richer competitor commonly stands a better chance of winning. If the stronger competitor does win, this worsens the relative status of the weaker competitor even further. Does this result depend on the type of competition? Does it depend on the size of the reward to be won? In the present paper, we report an experimental study of how a very simple competitive mechanism can affect the relative standing of the weaker, poorer of two competitors. In a lab experiment with 208 participants, we employed competitions with different levels of uncertainty in how a winner was determined and with different sizes of rewards to be won, to explore effects on the relative standing of the weaker and stronger competitors. We used an investment game in which participants differing in their endowed budgets competed against one another, forfeiting their investment whether they won or lost. Two versions of the game were used: a simple all‐pay‐auction contest and a non‐constant‐sum Colonel Blotto contest (Roberson & Kvasov, 2012), both with players that were unequal in their budgets. Results revealed that, in line with published game‐theoretic solutions, the relative standing of the weaker agents worsened following competition, and increasingly so the higher the rewards. At the same time, the effect was mitigated in the variant of the Colonel Blotto game, which involved more uncertainty in how the winner was determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies causal inference in randomized experiments under network interference. Commonly used models of interference posit that treatments assigned to alters beyond a certain network distance from the ego have no effect on the ego's response. However, this assumption is violated in common models of social interactions. We propose a substantially weaker model of "approximate neighborhood interference" (ANI) under which treatments assigned to alters further from the ego have a smaller, but potentially nonzero, effect on the ego's response. We formally verify that ANI holds for well-known models of social interactions. Under ANI, restrictions on the network topology, and asymptotics under which the network size increases, we prove that standard inverse-probability weighting estimators consistently estimate useful exposure effects and are approximately normal. For inference, we consider a network HAC variance estimator. Under a finite population model, we show that the estimator is biased but that the bias can be interpreted as the variance of unit-level exposure effects. This generalizes Neyman's well-known result on conservative variance estimation to settings with interference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In IS research, social presence is generally defined as the perceived capacity of a communication medium to convey contextual cues normally available in face‐to‐face settings. However, theorizing social presence as a property of the technology has been challenged for decades. The objective of this paper is to develop a more contemporary, interactional view of social presence. To this end, this paper develops a new conceptualization of how participants form the sense that each other is present. We characterize the development of this sense as a skilful accomplishment that entails interactants' joint construction of each other as "real." Viewing social presence as contingent on social practice, we seek to answer the following research question: "How is social presence accomplished in virtual environments?" To explicate how virtual others are perceived as becoming socially present, that is, emotionally and psychologically "real" to someone interacting with them, we draw from Goffman's work, particularly his concepts of involvement and involvement obligation. Detailing two examples of social interaction in the virtual world Second Life, our analysis highlights the key role that this moral obligation, intrinsic to everyday social interaction, plays in virtual others becoming perceived as psychoemotionally "there." By outlining a model of how the sense of a virtual other as "real" is produced in and through social interaction, our work contributes a sociological perspective to the construct of social presence and underscores some of the material and social conditions necessary for users to perceive virtual others as present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines academic peer effects in college. Unique new data from the Berea Panel Study allow us to focus on a mechanism wherein a student's peers affect her achievement by changing her study effort. Although the potential relevance of this mechanism has been recognized, data limitations have made it difficult to provide direct evidence about its importance. We find that a student's freshman grade point average is affected by the amount her peers studied in high school, suggesting the importance of this mechanism. Using time diary information, we confirm that college study time is actually being affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Losada observed management teams develop their annual strategic plans in a lab designed for studying team behaviour. Based on these findings he developed a dynamical model of team interaction and introduced the concept of meta learning (ML) which represents the ability of a team to avoid undesirable attractors. This paper analyses the dynamic model in more detail and discusses the relationship between ML and the new concept of systems intelligence (SI) introduced by Saarinen and Hämäläinen. We propose that the ML ability of a team clearly represents a systems intelligent competence. Losada's mathematical model predicts interesting dynamic phenomena in team interaction. However, our analysis shows how the model also produces strange and previously unreported behaviour under certain conditions. Thus, the predictive validity of the model also becomes problematic. It remains unclear whether the model behaviour can be said to be in satisfactory accordance with the observations of team interaction. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The third sector encompasses many types of not‐for‐profit organisations (NPOs). This results in a diverse sector, where accountabilities vary and are complex. In this paper, we explore notions of accountability at the micro level of social analysis, between individuals, and enacted through social interaction. We aim to provide detail on how accountability is enacted at this level of analysis, and the role(s) of trust (if any) in this form of accountability. We employ a theoretical framework incorporating the theoretical constructs of accountability, trust and 'the Other', with additional support derived from literature that specifically discusses the relationship(s) between accountability, the Other and wider ethics. We employ a qualitative methodological framework, with two sources of data. The primary source of data included 42 semi‐structured interviews conducted with service club members, along with representatives of donor organisations, beneficiary organisations and local government. In addition, documentary evidence was utilised in support of the primary data gathered. Following the application of qualitative data analysis techniques, we conclude that, at the micro level of social analysis, trust and accountability are intertwined concepts. We observed that the main mechanism for the discharge of accountability was via the formation and maintenance of personal relationships between members of the service club and key external stakeholders. We also conclude that charity offers individuals a means by which to particularise aspects of the Other, through the undertaking of charitable action. Within this particularisation process, facilitated by connecting with other individuals, accountability not only takes a different form than more hierarchical forms of accountability, but also serves to build interconnectedness between individuals, and provide satisfaction of the desire for the Other in volunteers and stakeholders alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Independent human–wildlife feeding interactions (i.e., the feeding of wildlife by the public outside of organized ecotourism activities) represent an increasingly common way in which humans and wildlife are engaging with one another. It is important to determine what effects these interactions are having on the wildlife involved in order to ensure that optimum coexistence scenarios are being achieved, however the nature of these interactions makes them notoriously difficult to study. Extrapolation from ecotourism activities has suggested detrimental impacts on the health and fecundity of the populations involved. Moreover, recent findings indicate that bold individuals may actually gain reproductive advantages from this excess food supply, driving artificial selection of risk‐taking behaviors within human‐dominated landscapes. Humans may, therefore, be unknowingly manipulating wildlife populations, forcing them into unnatural states, and potentially decreasing future viability. Here, we outline key literature pertaining to the potential impacts of these self‐led interactions on wildlife and address the need for further research into the associated effects. Due to the associated safety risks to the humans involved in these interactions, and by applying the precautionary principle until further research can be performed, we recommend that management actions be employed to actively reduce their occurrence. We address current management practices in use and make recommendations for further research to adapt and improve them. Ultimately, we make a call for further research addressing two fundamental key areas: (i) to explore the effects of these interactions on the wildlife involved, across different species and habitats experiencing this phenomenon, with emphasis on the potential role of artificial selection, and (ii) to work to improve the management practices currently employed to reduce the occurrence of these interactions, at least until such time as the effects of these interactions on both humans and wildlife have been thoroughly disentangled, with the overall goal of improving coexistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The expertise of human experts can be formally extracted from their written documents, research projects, and everyday activities. The process whereby experts are recognized according to their activities is called expert finding. In this paper, we propose an approach to identify the experts in a given field according to the content of 3 easily accessible sources of information: (a) “Publications,” (b) “Social interactions,” and (c) “Scientometric information.” We employed the Dempster‐Shafer theory to combine the results obtained from individual sources to find a final unified ranking. In Digital Bibliography & Library Project standard data, it is shown that the Dempster‐Shafer combination creates a desired synergy between 2 bodies of knowledge, which improves the precision of the top‐ranked results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social interactions are widely recognized to play an important role in smoking initiation among adolescents. In this paper, we hypothesize that emotionally stable, conscientious individuals are better able to resist peer pressure in the uptake of smoking. We exploit detailed friendship nominations in the US Add Health data, and extend the Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) model to deal with (i) endogenous peer selection, and (ii) unobserved contextual effects, in order to identify heterogeneity in peer effects with respect to personality. The results indicate that peer effects in the uptake of smoking are predominantly affecting individuals who are emotionally unstable. That is, emotionally unstable individuals are more vulnerable to peer pressure. This finding not only helps understanding heterogeneity in peer effects, but additionally provides a promising mechanism through which personality affects later life health and socioeconomic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When people are engaged in social interaction, they can repeat aspects of each other's communicative behavior, such as words or gestures. This kind of behavioral alignment has been studied across a wide range of disciplines and has been accounted for by diverging theories. In this paper, we review various operationalizations of lexical and gestural alignment. We reveal that scholars have fundamentally different takes on when and how behavior is considered to be aligned, which makes it difficult to compare findings and draw uniform conclusions. Furthermore, we show that scholars tend to focus on one particular dimension of alignment (traditionally, whether two instances of behavior overlap in form), while other dimensions remain understudied. This hampers theory testing and building, which requires a well‐defined account of the factors that are central to or might enhance alignment. To capture the complex nature of alignment, we identify five key dimensions to formalize the relationship between any pair of behavior: time, sequence, meaning, form, and modality. We show how assumptions regarding the underlying mechanism of alignment (placed along the continuum of priming vs. grounding) pattern together with operationalizations in terms of the five dimensions. This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena (including behavior matching, mimicry, entrainment, and accommodation) to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner. The framework also enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a class of generalized methods of moments (GMM) estimators for general dynamic panel models, allowing for weakly exogenous covariates and cross‐sectional dependence due to spatial lags, unspecified common shocks, and time‐varying interactive effects. We significantly expand the scope of the existing literature by allowing for endogenous time‐varying spatial weight matrices without imposing explicit structural assumptions on how the weights are formed. An important area of application is in social interaction and network models where our specification can accommodate data dependent network formation. We consider an exemplary social interaction model and show how identification of the interaction parameters is achieved through a combination of linear and quadratic moment conditions. For the general setup we develop an orthogonal forward differencing transformation to aid in the estimation of factor components while maintaining orthogonality of moment conditions. This is an important ingredient to a tractable asymptotic distribution of our estimators. In general, the asymptotic distribution of our estimators is found to be mixed normal due to random norming. However, the asymptotic distribution of our test statistics is still chi‐square. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a nationally representative longitudinal dataset of the British people, this paper explores how different areas of a person's life evolved before and after unemployment. There is evidence that unemployment is preceded, on average, by a year of dissatisfaction with one's finance and job, for both genders. Having entered unemployment, men and women reported a significant and persistent drop in satisfaction with finance and social life, which perhaps explains why there is little overall hedonic adaptation to unemployment. This paper proposes a two-layer model to study leads and lags in life satisfaction to changes in employment status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we provide evidence that social sanctions represent a very strong deterrent of property crime. We present a formal model relating crime and social sanction to social interaction density. Consistently with our theoretical framework and the literature on network closure and social interactions, we resort to demographic and geomorphological information to develop an exogenous and reliable measure for the density of social interactions based on town dimension and isolation. We estimate a spatial panel model by means of a GMM procedure and we find that areas with denser social interactions display significantly and substantially lower rates of property crime. Resumen. En este artículo aportamos pruebas de que las sanciones sociales constituyen un elemento disuasorio muy poderoso para el crimen contra la propiedad. Presentamos un modelo formal que relaciona el crimen y la sanción social con la densidad de interacción social. De manera consecuente con nuestro marco teórico y la literatura sobre exclusión de redes e interacciones sociales, acudimos a información demográfica y geomorfológica para desarrollar una medida exógena y fiable de la densidad de las interacciones sociales, basada en el tamaño y aislamiento de la ciudad. Estimamos un modelo de panel espacial por medio de un procedimiento de método generalizado de momentos (MGM) y hallamos que las áreas con interacciones sociales más densas muestran significativa y substancialmente tasas menores en crímenes contra la propiedad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: To compare anterior and posterior standing balance reactions, as measured by single-stepping thresholds, in children with and without spastic cerebral palsy (CP).Method: Seventeen ambulatory children with spastic CP (eight males, nine females) and 28 typically developing children (13 males, 15 females; age range 5-12y, mean [SD] 9y 2mo [2y 3mo]), were included in this cross-sectional, observational study. Balance reaction skill was quantified as anterior and posterior single-stepping thresholds, or the treadmill-induced perturbations that consistently elicited a step in that direction. In order to understand the underlying mechanisms of between-group differences in stepping thresholds, dynamic stability was quantified using the minimum margin of stability. Ankle muscle activation latency, magnitude, and co-contraction were assessed with surface electromyography.Results: We observed an age and group interaction for anterior thresholds (p=0.001, partial η2 =0.24). At older (≈11y; p<0.001, partial η2 =0.48), but not younger (≈7y; p=0.33, partial η2 =0.02) ages, typically developing children had larger anterior thresholds than those with CP. In response to near-threshold anterior perturbations, older typically developing children recovered from more instability than their peers with CP (p=0.004, partial η2 =0.18). Older children had no between-group differences in ankle muscle activity. No between-group differences were observed in posterior thresholds.Interpretation: The effects of CP on balance reactions are age- and direction-specific. Older typically developing children are more able or willing to withhold a step when unstable.What This Paper Adds: Children with spastic cerebral palsy have age- and direction-specific balance-reaction impairments. Lower anterior stepping thresholds were observed in older, but not younger children. Older typically developing children withheld a forward step at higher levels of instability. No between-group differences were seen in posterior stepping thresholds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intuition is a useful tool for negotiators, as negotiations are often highly complex endeavors in which people make holistic judgments with incomplete information and no time for deliberation. Therefore, one might expect that intuition greatly influences negotiations and their outcomes and that negotiators would use intuition to their advantage. However, there is almost no systematic research into the meaning of intuition for negotiation. In this conceptual paper, drawing on five interviews of experienced negotiators, we apply general research on intuition to the specific case of negotiation and find that negotiators use intuition specifically for attribution and social interaction. We distinguish different intuition attitudes; identify preparation, time, and negotiation stages as relevant drivers for the use of intuition in negotiation; clarify the distinction between intuition and routine; and shine new light on the concept of domain‐specific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The complexity and rapid pace of social life stress our ability to make sound and timely group decisions. The cult of the all-wise absolute manager is a relic of the feudal and mechanical ages that works only in routine and not-too-complicated situations. The organizational pyramid was satisfactory for the linear pace of the mechanical age, but moves too slowly today. Efforts to get everyone involved and hear all points of view can take so much exertion and time—and produce so little result that managers hesitate to try them and workers/citizens grow weary of them. A rational solution to this bleak situation is a dialogue process that efficiently enlists broad participation and produces timely results. This paper describes methods for facilitating dialogic decisions as employed in Structured Dialogic Design. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Reformed clergy across two different settings - the United States and Scotland in an effort to determine how theological orthodoxy is related to political participation. The paper demonstrates that (1) clergy in both settings tend to be politically active (2) the level of clergy political activity tends to be greater in the United States than in Scotland (3) the relationship between orthodoxy and political activity is complex, varying by the specific type of activity examined and (4) while theological orthodoxy and modernist clergy tend to differ in the nature of their political activities, there is no longer a major "gap" in level of political activity between the two groups of ministers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The distance between actors in an organization affects how they interact with each other, and particularly whether they will exchange (innovative) knowledge with each other. Actors in each other's proximity have fewer conflicts, more trust towards each other, for example, and are thus more involved in knowledge transfer. Actors close to others thus are believed to perform better: by being more innovative, for instance. This theory of propinquity's claim resonates widely in the literature and has intuitive appeal: 'people are most likely to be attracted towards those in closest contact with them' (Newcomb, Th. (1956). American Psychologist, 11, p. 575). Knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are close is more readily accessed, better understood and more readily useable. At the same time, however, and in contrast to the what the theory of propinquity suggests, knowledge that a focal actor receives from alters who are at a greater distance may be more diverse, offer unexpected and valuable insights, and therefore give rise to innovation. In order to understand these opposing expectations, scholars have indicated that distance must be conceived of as multifaceted: individuals can be close to each other in one way, while at the same time distant in another. No prior paper has extensively studied the effects of distance as a multifaceted concept, however. This study offers two distinct contributions. It argues, first, why some instances of distance affect the opportunity to interact with alters, potentially lowering an actor's performance, while other instances of distance affect the expected benefits from interaction. The latter would increase an actor's performance. Secondly, this paper is the first study to test empirically the expectations about how seven different measures of distance affect an actor's innovative performance. Innovative performance is measured as both creative contribution and contribution to knowledge that has immediate commercial use (patents). In the setting of a large research lab, it is found, contrary to expectations, that distance does not hurt individual innovative performance and sometimes helps it in unexpected ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

GOTTMAN, JOHN M, and RINGLAND, JAMES T The Analysis of Dominance and Bidirectionality in Social Development CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1981, 52, 393-412 This paper is a reexamination of 2 concepts that have played a role in the direct observation of social interaction and the study of social development, namely, the concepts of dominance and bidirectionality This paper argues that a reconceptualization based on the sequential character of social interaction would add much theoretical clarity to these 2 concepts In this paper the sequential nature of social interaction is addressed by applying time-series analysis to redefine (as a function of social context) the concept of dominance as asymmetry in predictability in the behavior of 2 interacting individuals The potential benefits of this redefinition are then discussed in the context of literature on children's social behavior with their peers Bidirectionality in social interaction, defined as symmetrical predictability in behavior, is then discussed in the context of parent-infant interaction A serious methodological problem is then raised, namely, the problem of autocorrelation in each person's behavior in making references about cross-correlation between people Mathematical models and corresponding statistical procedures are presented to solve this problem Procedures are discussed that address the concepts of cyclicity within a person and synchronicity between people who are interacting and that assess asymmetry and symmetry (ie, dominance and bidirectionality) in social interaction Previously published data on mother-infant play is then reexamined to illustrate the practical use of this approach These techniques are, however, completely general for inferring relationships between 2 variables that change with time and thus may provide a foundation for the study of other developmental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to make explicit the process and strategies by which one urban setting (a freeway coffee shop) attempts to guide, influence, and direct the interpretations of passersby. In this way, we might begin to see how urban settings and organizations construct and manage impressions which facilitate the codification schemes of urbanites. Finally, the approach suggested in this paper is one which will hopefully contribute to the broader study of urban social organization. The data were collected through informal conversations, unstructured interviews, and participant observation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to illustrate the value of interpreting organizational processes from a variety of perspectives. It demonstrates that this approach reflects the natural richness of organization and avoids the rather bunkered search for single-paradigm explanations. It does not seek to offer the answer, but rather some possible insights. By combining both actor and researcher frames, it sheds light upon a particular process of social interaction within an organization. Both the context, an NHS trust hospital, and the content, a significant change scenario, brings richness and relevance to the debate. The paper outlines the macro and micro context before focusing on the interpretative methodological approach. The research involved collecting and analysing over thirty hours of taped, semi-structured interview discourse with senior and middle management and some junior staff. After describing the change initiative, an attempt at multi-skilling and the response of recipient actors to the proposals, the paper outlines three readings which seek to explain the events that occurred. The reader is invited to play the game 'Call my Bluff' and to choose the scenario that represents the most plausible explanation. The three interpretative frames employed are a managerial, a cultural and a political perspective. The paper concludes by raising some important issues in research, organizational change and the NHS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Methods in Ecology & Evolution is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Abstract: Human cognition and behavior are dominated by symbol use. This paper examines the social learning strategies that give rise to symbolic communication. Experiment 1 contrasts an individual‐level account, based on observational learning and cognitive bias, with an inter‐individual account, based on social coordinative learning. Participants played a referential communication game in which they tried to communicate a range of recurring meanings to a partner by drawing, but without using their conventional language. Individual‐level learning, via observation and cognitive bias, was sufficient to produce signs that became increasingly effective, efficient, and shared over games. However, breaking a referential precedent eliminated these benefits. The most effective, most efficient, and most shared signs arose when participants could directly interact with their partner, indicating that social coordinative learning is important to the creation of shared symbols. Experiment 2 investigated the contribution of two distinct aspects of social interaction: behavior alignment and concurrent partner feedback. Each played a complementary role in the creation of shared symbols: Behavior alignment primarily drove communication effectiveness, and partner feedback primarily drove the efficiency of the evolved signs. In conclusion, inter‐individual social coordinative learning is important to the evolution of effective, efficient, and shared symbols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has long been recognised that the interaction between monetary and fiscal policy may be an important determinant of the outcomes of both policies. To provide some insights into how this interaction and macroeconomic outcomes can be improved, a symposium was held at the 2010 Australian Conference of Economists. This piece summarises the discussion, with the full papers by Michal Franta, Jan Libich and Petr Stehlík; Don Brash; Carl Walsh; Jacopo Cimadomo; Stephen Kirchner; and Eric Leeper and Todd Walker appearing later in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing interest in the geographies of schooling has led to an exploration of a variety of school spaces. An increasing number of secondary schools offer internal fixed-term exclusions so that temporary removal from school is not seen as ‘time off’ for students. This particular strategy has led to the creation of a new type of space in schools. Drawing upon research undertaken in a London secondary school, this paper explores the geography of these new secluded spaces. We highlight that the configuration of physical space in Seclusion Units and the regulation of spatial practices create highly controlled and segregated spaces of punishment. We explore the powerful transformative effects of these spaces to change students' behaviour, social interaction and attitudes to learning. However, rather than simply creating docile subjects, we recognise that domination is never complete and we explore the extent and the limit of student resistance to the discipline and control of the Seclusion Unit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents one case of the particularities of power. Drawing upon interviews with UK-based elites, I unpack the general with the specific through discussing how I experienced power as a relational effect of social interaction. Within the parameters of a collaborative research project, this involved the challenge of gaining access to and interviewing elites as means to explore the role of a flagship shopping mall as part of a wider urban regeneration agenda. I conclude with some recommendations on how to negotiate the unequal power relations between elites and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines two methods of modeling binary choice with social interactions: models assuming homogeneous rational expectations and models using subjective data on expectations. Exploiting a unique survey conducted during the 1996 US presidential election that was designed to study voting behavior under social context, we find that in various model specifications using subjective expectations consistently improves models' goodness-of-fit; and that subjective expectations are not rational as formulated by Brock and Durlauf. Specifically, members' characteristics are individually important in forming expectations. We also include correlated effect in the rational expectation model. This extension provides a remedy to the selection issues that often arise in social interaction models. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper stresses the importance of understanding the connections across self, others (including sentient beings), the environment and technological applications, in order to ensure sustainable futures. It makes a case for ethical dialogue as a process to engage and co-create shared meanings, in order to enhance democracy and rescue the enlightenment from its failings. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles macroeconomist and social scientist Edmund Phelps who introduce various concepts of modern growth theory. It states that Phelps have changed the way people think about macroeconomic theory and policy because of his imperfect information and communication about macroeconomic theory. It likewise claims that he treated the theory as social science whose subject matter stresses about how people interact in groups. Moreover, it stresses the contributions of Phelps which give further understanding of the nature and significance of imperfect information to human's life.

Scalar theory has recently come under attack for its emphasis on hierarchy. Yet the notion of scalar hierarchies cannot be abandoned if we want to understand actually-existing social relations and the governance structures in which they are enmeshed. The conception of hierarchy employed by political economists is also more complex than that suggested by the ‘Russian dolls’ metaphor. A multiplicity of diversely structured, overlapping interscalar hierarchies operate in and across diverse policy fields. While these arrangements clearly influence what happens at the local scale, sufficient room often exists for local actors to modify the effects. The complexity of scalar hierarchies is illustrated through an analysis of the governance of child care provision in Canada. Child care arrangements are becoming integral to social reproduction in post-industrial economies, where women form an increasingly important part of the labour force. This paper focuses on child care in three of Canada's largest cities, each of which is subject to a distinct provincial regime through which federal contributions are filtered. Yet, as we shall see, these cities are more than ‘puppets on a string.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W.E.H. Stanner is a key figure in the history of Australian anthropology and Aboriginal affairs. A student of both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, Stanner undertook anthropological work from the 1930s in north Australia, Africa and briefly in the Pacific. This paper traces Stanner's attempt to wrestle with the conceptual framework he inherited as a student of structural-functionalism, on the ground, during his first field research in north Australia. A selective reading of the notes Stanner made in Radcliffe-Brown's lectures, his field diaries and unpublished master's thesis provides the main materials for my discussion. Prior to travelling to the Daly River Stanner had intended to make a study of regional social organisation. The situation he encountered proved to be much more conducive to a description and analysis of 'culture contact'. The unpublished writings Stanner produced in his attempt to make sense of this complex social field reveal an attempt to transcend some fundamental aspects of anthropological theorising of the day, and to produce a new conceptual model for taking hold of social transformation. The argument is presented that in reading these materials we gain a glimpse of an important early attempt to develop an intercultural analysis of Aboriginal Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of estimating a local interaction model defined at the level of individual agents, in the absence of perfect information about agent locations in the relevant socio-economic space. We consider two types of data limitations: one in which individual locations are measured with error, the other in which location information is correct but only up to some spatial region (e.g., census tracts or zip codes). Our results indicate that the model parameters are not identified almost surely in the former situation, whereas identification is preserved in the latter. We also suggest a potential estimation strategy that can yield useful information about the likely range of parameters even when point identification fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we estimate a model of housing demand with neighbourhood effects. We exploit special features of the national sample of the American Housing Survey and properties of housing markets that allow us to create 'natural' instruments and therefore identify the impact of social interactions. We find evidence of both endogenous and contextual neighbourhood effects. We report two alternative sets of estimates for neighbourhood effects that differ in terms of the instruments we use for estimating the model. When the endogenous neighbourhood effect is large the respective contextual effects are weak, and vice versa. The elasticity of housing demand with respect to the mean of the neighbours' housing demands (the endogenous effect) ranges from 0.19 to 0.66 and is generally very significant. The contextual effects are also very significant. A key such effect, the elasticity with respect to the mean of neighbours' permanent incomes, ranges from 0.17 to 0.54. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General systems theory is compatible with the spirit of feminist thought. The unnecessary association of systems theory with hierarchy and status quo-oriented proponents has formed a limited impression of what it can offer to feminisms. Looking at a fuller range of systems-oriented work shows up that, like feminisms, systems theory has been radical in its rejection of traditional ways of analytic thinking. This paper looks at two central feminist ideas, sexuality and equality, as a spirit of feminism to forge a link between feminisms and systems theory. This shows up several areas of common ground between feminisms and a general systems theory approach to the benefit of both. The idea that action and inaction and equally causal derives from cybernetics and echoes a cell to action for social change in feminisms. Cybernetic causality reflects notions of discourse and fluid identities, allowing analysts to move beyond blame and dichotomous units. The idea that systems of logic are parallel relates closely to standpoint feminism. Systems focus on different outcomes to the same stimuli provides a way to capture emotion as a property of human interaction. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we use a modeling approach to explore the population regulatory consequences of individual choices for where to breed in heterogeneous environments. In contrast to standard models, we focus on individuals that interact only indirectly through their choices of breeding sites (i.e., individuals preempt the occupation of a breeding site by others when they choose to breed there). We consider the consequences of individuals choosing breeding sites either randomly or sequentially from best to worst. Our analysis shows that average per-capita fecundity of the population is independent of the number of occupied breeding sites if individuals choose sites at random and that variation in average per-capita fecundity increases as population size declines. In contrast, if individuals choose breeding sites sequentially from highest to lowest quality, then as population size increases average per-capita fecundity declines and variation in average per-capita fecundity increases. Consequently, aggregate population-level demographic rates can change in ways that generate population regulation, even when change in population size does not change the demographic performance of any individual on any particular breeding site. However, such regulation occurs only when individuals make adaptive choices of where to breed. Because variation in average per-capita fecundity decreases when population size declines, populations regulated in a site-dependent manner should be much less susceptible to the vicissitudes of small population size than those which choose breeding sites at random. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of event-based social networks (EBSNs) has generated great demand for personalized event recommendation. Indeed, new events are published every day in EBSNs. In this paper, we focus on the problem of recommending new events (i.e., the newly published events that have not yet received any user response) to registered users in EBSNs. Notice that collaborative filtering is ineffective for recommending new events due to the short lifetime of events and the lack of historical information, that is, the cold-start problem. A straightforward approach to address this problem is to adopt content-based recommendation techniques, for example, deriving user interests through the content information of the events they attended. Nevertheless, we observe that organizer influence and geographical preference also play important roles in a user's decision to participate in an event. Motivated by this observation, we combine user interest, organizer influence, and geographical preference to present a unified model for new event recommendation. In particular, we utilize a topic model to derive user interests while adopting matrix factorization to infer organizer influences on users from the interactions between users and organizers. Moreover, we model users' geographical preferences via their location histories of attended events. We conduct a performance evaluation using real-world data collected from DoubanEvent. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed recommendation model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phenotypic variation exists in and at all levels of biological organization: variation exists among species, among-individuals within-populations, and in the case of l within-populations abile traits, within-individuals. Mixed-effects models represent ideal tools to quantify multilevel measurements of traits and are being increasingly used in evolutionary ecology., Mixed-effects models are relatively complex, and two main issues may be hampering their proper usage: (i) the relatively few educational resources available to teach new users how to implement and interpret them and (ii) the lack of tools to ensure that the statistical parameters of interest are correctly estimated., In this paper, we introduce Statistical Quantification of Individual Differences ( SQu ID), a simulation-based tool that can be used for research and educational purposes. SQu ID creates a virtual world inhabited by subjects whose phenotypes are generated by a user-defined phenotypic equation, which allows easy translation of biological hypotheses into quantifiable parameters., Statistical Quantification of Individual Differences currently models normally distributed traits with linear predictors, but SQu ID is subject to further development and will adapt to handle more complex scenarios in the future. The current framework is suitable for performing simulation studies, determining optimal sampling designs for user-specific biological problems and making simulation-based inferences to aid in the interpretation of empirical studies., Statistical Quantification of Individual Differences is also a teaching tool for biologists interested in learning, or teaching others, how to implement and interpret linear mixed-effects models when studying the processes causing phenotypic variation. Interface-based modules allow users to learn about these issues. As research on effects of sampling designs continues, new issues will be implemented in new modules, including nonlinear and non- Gaussian data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Body mass is one of the most important phenotypic attributes in animal ecology and life history. This trait is widely used in the fields of ecology and macroevolution, since it influences physiology, morphological functions, and a myriad of ecological and social interactions. In this data set, our aim was to gather a comprehensive bird and mammal body mass data set from northern South America. We report body mass, discriminated by sex, for 42,022 individual birds and 7,441 mammals representing 1,317 bird species (69% of Colombia's avifauna) and 270 mammal species (51% of Colombian mammals) from the Neotropics. The data were sourced from vouchers collected between 1942 and 2020 and from individuals captured and released at banding stations over the last two decades for birds (2000–2020) and the last decade for mammals (2010–2020), by 10 research groups and institutions in Colombia. This data set fills gaps identified in other similar databases, as it focuses on northern South America, a highly diverse Neotropical region often underrepresented in morphological data sets. We provide wide taxonomic coverage for studies interested in information both at regional and local scales. There are no copyright restrictions; the present data paper should be appropriately cited when data are used for publication. The authors would appreciate learning about research projects, teaching exercises, and other uses given to this data set and are open to contribute in further collaborations using these data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the communist era, numerous social and political constraints limited civic engagement in communities throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This paper explores whether such constraints have left lasting marks, and whether such lingering effects potentially slow the process of democratization. Three specific questions were explored: (1) whether civic engagement in a post-communist state differs from that in an established Western democracy; (2) whether the quality of social perception suffers when civic engagement is constrained; and (3) whether a link exists between civic engagement and tangible forms of political judgment. Data were analyzed from surveys conducted in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 1994 and in South Bend, Indiana, in 1984. Compared with South Bend residents, the people of Cluj-Napoca discuss politics less, engage in interactive forms of political participation at lower rates, know less about their neighbors, and fail to link the interests of people in the community to broader political judgments. Given the centrality of civic engagement to democratic legitimacy, these findings justify concern regarding the prospects for full democratization in Central and Eastern European contexts in which social interaction does not yet flourish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]