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Background: The partograph has been endorsed by World Health Organization (WHO) since 1994 which presents an algorithm for assessing maternal and foetal conditions and labor progression. Monitoring labour with a partograph can reduce adverse pregnancy outcomes such as prolonged labor, emergency C-sections, birth asphyxia and stillbirths. However, partograph use is still very low, particularly in low and middle income countries (LMICs). In Bangladesh the reported partograph user rate varies from 1.4% to 33.0%. Recently, an electronic version of the partograph, with the provision of online data entry and user aid for emergency clinical support, has been tested successfully in different settings. With this proven evidence, we conducted and operations research to test the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing an e-partograph, for the first time, in 2 public hospitals in Bangladesh Methods: We followed a prospective crossover design. Two secondary level referral hospitals, Jessore and Kushtia District Hospital (DH) were the study sites. All pregnant women who delivered in the study hospitals were the study participants. All nurse-midwives working in the labor ward of study hospitals were trained on appropriate use of both types of partograph along with standard labour management guidelines. Collected quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS 23 statistical software. Discrete variables were expressed as percentages and presented as frequency distribution and cross tabulations. Chi square tests were employed to test the association between exposure and outcome variables. Potential confounding factors were adjusted using multivariate binary logistic regression methods. Ethical approval was obtained from the institutional review board of the International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). Findings: In total 2918 deliveries were conducted at Jessore DH and 2312 at Kushtia DH during one-year study period. Of them, 1012 (506 in each facility) deliveries were monitored using partograph (paper or electronic). The trends of facility based C-section rates was downwards in both the hospitals; 43% to 37% in Jessore and from 36% to 25% in Kushtia Hospital. There was a significant reduction of prolonged labour with e-partograph use. In Kushtia DH, the prolonged labour rate was 42% during phase 1 with the paper version which came down to 29% during phase-2 with the e-partograph use. The similar result was observed in Jessore DH where the prolonged labour rate reduced to 7% with paper partograph from the reported 30% prolonged labour with e-partograph. The e-partograph user rate was higher than the paper partograph during both phases (phase 1: 3.31, CI: 2.04–5.38, p < .001 and in phase 2: 15.20 CI: 6.36–36.33, p < .001) after adjusting for maternal age, parity, gestational age, religion, mother’s education, husband’s education, and fetal sex Conclusion: The partograph user rate has significantly improved with the e- partograph and was associated with an overall reduction in cesarean births. Use of the e-partograph was also associated with reduced rates of prolonged labour. This study has added to the growing body of evidence on the positive impact of e-partograph use. We recommend implementing e-partograph intervention at scale in both public and private hospitals in Bangladesh. Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Semantic Link Network is a general semantic model for modeling the structure and the evolution of complex systems. Various semantic links play different roles in rendering the semantics of complex system. One of the basic semantic links represents cause-effect relation, which plays an important role in representation and understanding. This paper verifies the role of the Semantic Link Network in representing the core of text by investigating the contribution of cause-effect link to representing the core of scientific papers. Research carries out with the following steps: (1) Two propositions on the contribution of cause-effect link in rendering the core of paper are proposed and verified through a statistical survey, which shows that the sentences on cause-effect links cover about 65% of key words within each paper on average. (2) An algorithm based on syntactic patterns is designed for automatically extracting cause-effect link from scientific papers, which recalls about 70% of manually annotated cause-effect links on average, indicating that the result adapts to the scale of data sets. (3) The effects of cause-effect link on four schemes of incorporating cause-effect link into the existing instances of the Semantic Link Network for enhancing the summarization of scientific papers are investigated. The experiments show that the quality of the summaries is significantly improved, which verifies the role of semantic links. The significance of this research lies in two aspects: (1) it verifies that the Semantic Link Network connects the important concepts to render the core of text; and, (2) it provides an evidence for realizing content services such as summarization, recommendation and question answering based on the Semantic Link Network, and it can inspire relevant research on content computing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we address the question whether (and to what extent, respectively) altmetrics are related to the scientific quality of papers (as measured by peer assessments). Only a few studies have previously investigated the relationship between altmetrics and assessments by peers. In the first step, we analyse the underlying dimensions of measurement for traditional metrics (citation counts) and altmetrics–by using principal component analysis (PCA) and factor analysis (FA). In the second step, we test the relationship between the dimensions and quality of papers (as measured by the post-publication peer-review system of F1000Prime assessments)–using regression analysis. The results of the PCA and FA show that altmetrics operate along different dimensions, whereas Mendeley counts are related to citation counts, and tweets form a separate dimension. The results of the regression analysis indicate that citation-based metrics and readership counts are significantly more related to quality, than tweets. This result on the one hand questions the use of Twitter counts for research evaluation purposes and on the other hand indicates potential use of Mendeley reader counts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Data collection using paper-based questionnaires can be time consuming and return errors affect data accuracy, completeness, and information quality in health surveys. We compared smartphone and paper-based data collection systems in the Burden of Obstructive Lung Disease (BOLD) study in rural Sudan. Methods: This exploratory pilot study was designed to run in parallel with the cross-sectional household survey. The Open Data Kit was used to programme questionnaires in Arabic into smartphones. We included 100 study participants (83% women; median age = 41.5 ± 16.4 years) from the BOLD study from 3 rural villages in East-Gezira and Kamleen localities of Gezira state, Sudan. Questionnaire data were collected using smartphone and paper-based technologies simultaneously. We used Kappa statistics and inter-rater class coefficient to test agreement between the two methods. Results: Symptoms reported included cough (24%), phlegm (15%), wheezing (17%), and shortness of breath (18%). One in five were or had been cigarette smokers. The two data collection methods varied between perfect to slight agreement across the 204 variables evaluated (Kappa varied between 1.00 and 0.02 and inter-rater coefficient between 1.00 and -0.12). Errors were most commonly seen with paper questionnaires (83% of errors seen) vs smartphones (17% of errors seen) administered questionnaires with questions with complex skip-patterns being a major source of errors in paper questionnaires. Automated checks and validations in smartphone-administered questionnaires avoided skip-pattern related errors. Incomplete and inconsistent records were more likely seen on paper questionnaires. Conclusion: Compared to paper-based data collection, smartphone technology worked well for data collection in the study, which was conducted in a challenging rural environment in Sudan. This approach provided timely, quality data with fewer errors and inconsistencies compared to paper-based data collection. We recommend this method for future BOLD studies and other population-based studies in similar settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research paper recommenders emerged over the last decade to ease finding publications relating to researchers’ area of interest. The challenge was not just to provide researchers with very rich publications at any time, any place and in any form but to also offer the right publication to the right researcher in the right way. Several approaches exist in handling paper recommender systems. However, these approaches assumed the availability of the whole contents of the recommending papers to be freely accessible, which is not always true due to factors such as copyright restrictions. This paper presents a collaborative approach for research paper recommender system. By leveraging the advantages of collaborative filtering approach, we utilize the publicly available contextual metadata to infer the hidden associations that exist between research papers in order to personalize recommendations. The novelty of our proposed approach is that it provides personalized recommendations regardless of the research field and regardless of the user’s expertise. Using a publicly available dataset, our proposed approach has recorded a significant improvement over other baseline methods in measuring both the overall performance and the ability to return relevant and useful publications at the top of the recommendation list. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of information technology, scientific social networks (SSNs) have become the fastest and most convenient way for researchers to communicate with each other. Many published papers are shared via SSNs every day, resulting in the problem of information overload. How to appropriately recommend personalized and highly valuable papers for researchers is becoming more urgent. However, when recommending papers in SSNs, only a small amount of positive instances are available, leaving a vast amount of unlabelled data, in which negative instances and potential unseen positive instances are mixed together, which naturally belongs to One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF) problem. Therefore, considering the extreme data imbalance and data sparsity of this OCCF problem, a hybrid approach of Social and Content aware One-class Recommendation of Papers in SSNs, termed SCORP, is proposed in this study. Unlike previous approaches recommended to address the OCCF problem, social information, which has been proved playing a significant role in performing recommendations in many domains, is applied in both the profiling of content-based filtering and the collaborative filtering to achieve superior recommendations. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed SCORP approach, a real-life dataset from CiteULike was employed. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach is superior to all of the compared approaches, thus providing a more effective method for recommending papers in SSNs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital age has rekindled popular and academic interest in immortality. While the idea of immortality has long been recognized as fundamental to human societies, unlike death, within the field of sociology, immortality has not yet established itself as a distinct and autonomous field of study. This paper contributes to the recently emerging scholarship promoting a sociology of immortality. Drawing inspiration from C. Wright Mills's sociological imagination (1959) and building upon significant research in the field of immortality, we offer to use the concept of the immortological imagination as an analytical and conceptual tool for further developing a sociology of immortality. We refer to the immortological imagination as a complementary concept to Penfold-Mounce's thanatological imagination, seeing both concepts as stemming from two different lineages and academic traditions. After defining the immortological imagination and how it differs from and complements the thanatological imagination, the paper moves to discuss examples in popular culture establishing the potential impacts and influences of the immortological imagination, particularly within the digital context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many results have been obtained when studying scientific papers citations databases in a network perspective. Articles can be ranked according to their current in-degree and their future popularity or citation counts can even be predicted. The dynamical properties of such networks and the observation of the time evolution of their nodes started more recently. This work adopts an evolutionary perspective and proposes an original algorithm for the construction of genealogical trees of scientific papers on the basis of their citation count evolution in time. The fitness of a paper now amounts to its in-degree growing trend and a “dying” paper will suddenly see this trend declining in time. It will give birth and be taken over by some of its most prevalent citing “offspring”. Practically, this might be used to trace the successive published milestones of a research field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we demonstrate the ways in which the schooling of refugee youth in the United States reflects ongoing coloniality in education. Drawing on data collected in a case study, conducted between 2013 and 2016, as part of a larger ongoing ethnography of a Southwest United States District school's response to refugee students, we show how the enactment of policies, pedagogies, and practices within schools reinforce the government's control over refugee students and their families. In schools, the students are kept out of certain school spaces, marginalized in remedial courses, and denied academic opportunities and integrated support services. Using empirical data, we demonstrate how the restriction of the students' movement in and around schools is embedded within the larger limitations embedded in coloniality and assimilation. We situate our analysis within the tensions and interactions between coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism as articulated in studies within anthropology and sociology, migration studies, critical refugee studies, and cultural studies. We conclude with a call for the decolonization of education and offer a practical starting point in refugee education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some scholars add authors to their research papers or grant proposals even when those individuals contribute nothing to the research effort. Some journal editors coerce authors to add citations that are not pertinent to their work and some authors pad their reference lists with superfluous citations. How prevalent are these types of manipulation, why do scholars stoop to such practices, and who among us is most susceptible to such ethical lapses? This study builds a framework around how intense competition for limited journal space and research funding can encourage manipulation and then uses that framework to develop hypotheses about who manipulates and why they do so. We test those hypotheses using data from over 12,000 responses to a series of surveys sent to more than 110,000 scholars from eighteen different disciplines spread across science, engineering, social science, business, and health care. We find widespread misattribution in publications and in research proposals with significant variation by academic rank, discipline, sex, publication history, co-authors, etc. Even though the majority of scholars disapprove of such tactics, many feel pressured to make such additions while others suggest that it is just the way the game is played. The findings suggest that certain changes in the review process might help to stem this ethical decline, but progress could be slow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I attempt to systematically reconstruct Theodor Adorno's account of the relationship between the processes of authoritarian subject formation and the processes of political formation of the democratic common will. Undertaking a reading that brings Adorno into dialogue with contemporary philosophical perspectives, the paper asks the question of whether it is possible to think of a "democratic We" in nihilistic times. In order to achieve this aim, I will analyze in reverse the modifications that the concept of narcissism has undergone, from Adorno's use of it to account for the symbolic obstacles to the formation of democratic subjectivities after the Holocaust, to the initial formulations of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, I will attempt to outline an affirmative answer to the initial question, formulating the potentials and merits of what I will call a politics of negativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critiques the paper "Decentering Sociology: Synthetic Dyes and Social Theory" by Andrew Pickering, published in this same issue of "Perspectives on Science." Exploration of what readers learn about technoscience from Pickering's account; Extent to which a decentered sociology differs from others in science studies; Reason why historians are likely to have problems in using this approach to write history.

This paper aims to comprehensively examine the effects of societal and individual characteristics on work-related attitudes, specifically work commitment and work orientations, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also seeks to relate these attitudes to classic theories and understand how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The analysis is based on data collected by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in its work orientations survey. Data is analyzed using factor analyses, correspondence analyses, and multilevel regressions. The paper provides an overview of work-related attitudes at the country level and a detailed analysis of societal and individual variables that shape these attitudes. The results indicate that individual attitudes reflect large societal trends and developments, which are discussed with reference to current studies and classic theories. This paper contributes to understanding work-related attitudes by offering a comprehensive analysis of the effects of societal and individual characteristics, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also relates these attitudes to classic theories and discusses how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The findings also have policy implications, particularly in the recruitment and retention of highly qualified and motivated workers in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Little is known about how adverse events are summarised and reported in trials, as detailed information is usually considered confidential. We have acquired clinical study reports (CSRs) from the European Medicines Agency through the Freedom of Information Act. The CSRs describe the results of studies conducted as part of the application for marketing authorisation for the slimming pill orlistat. The purpose of this study was to study how adverse events were summarised and reported in study protocols, CSRs, and published papers of orlistat trials.Methods and Findings: We received the CSRs from seven randomised placebo controlled orlistat trials (4,225 participants) submitted by Roche. The CSRs consisted of 8,716 pages and included protocols. Two researchers independently extracted data on adverse events from protocols and CSRs. Corresponding published papers were identified on PubMed and adverse event data were extracted from this source as well. All three sources were compared. Individual adverse events from one trial were summed and compared to the totals in the summary report. None of the protocols or CSRs contained instructions for investigators on how to question participants about adverse events. In CSRs, gastrointestinal adverse events were only coded if the participant reported that they were "bothersome," a condition that was not specified in the protocol for two of the trials. Serious adverse events were assessed for relationship to the drug by the sponsor, and all adverse events were coded by the sponsor using a glossary that could be updated by the sponsor. The criteria for withdrawal due to adverse events were in one case related to efficacy (high fasting glucose led to withdrawal), which meant that one trial had more withdrawals due to adverse events in the placebo group. Finally, only between 3% and 33% of the total number of investigator-reported adverse events from the trials were reported in the publications because of post hoc filters, though six of seven papers stated that "all adverse events were recorded." For one trial, we identified an additional 1,318 adverse events that were not listed or mentioned in the CSR itself but could be identified through manually counting individual adverse events reported in an appendix. We discovered that the majority of patients had multiple episodes of the same adverse event that were only counted once, though this was not described in the CSRs. We also discovered that participants treated with orlistat experienced twice as many days with adverse events as participants treated with placebo (22.7 d versus 14.9 d, p-value < 0.0001, Student's t test). Furthermore, compared with the placebo group, adverse events in the orlistat group were more severe. None of this was stated in the CSR or in the published paper. Our analysis was restricted to one drug tested in the mid-1990s; our results might therefore not be applicable for newer drugs.Conclusions: In the orlistat trials, we identified important disparities in the reporting of adverse events between protocols, clinical study reports, and published papers. Reports of these trials seemed to have systematically understated adverse events. Based on these findings, systematic reviews of drugs might be improved by including protocols and CSRs in addition to published articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of an action research project conducted in one of the biggest university departments for sociology in a Central Eastern European capital during the first half of the 2000s. The paper shows that researchers' images of society have a strong impact on social scientific methodology, scientific explanations and narratives. I offer an example of how realist approaches to science and technology studies can be used in a field study and discuss the benefits and limitations of such an endeavor, which I define as an interpretive and explanatory social scientific work. The analysis shows ways in which latent knowledge structures influenced the wording of a questionnaire used in the research, the types of data that were gathered, and how the data were interpreted. These knowledge structures include notions concerning local policy discussions, different social policy traditions, and images of a Roma minority struggling with the effects of structural poverty and prejudices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While theoretical approaches attempt to map ancient childhood, the material and incidental nature of children's lives in all their varieties and differences, are crucial for understanding ancient childhood. Recent investigations into children in their living environments have shown attention to their clothing, childhood care, social relations, leisure and play, health and disability, upbringing and schooling, and their experiences of death. Children's lives and activities were framed also by the agonistic nature of first-century society, making them susceptible to structural violence in various ways. The purpose of the paper is to track and trace children's experience and in particular their agency in the ancient Roman world that were often hostile to little lives and bodies, and to consider the value of such studies for the interpretation of the New Testament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that interreligious dialogue through study and friendships across the religious divide makes participants less susceptible to religious and cultural misinformation that is often used to maintain social bubbles, in which members draw clear boundaries between "us" and "them". Differences between social groups can culminate in a struggle between "good" and "evil" that can escalate into tension and violence. Preventing tensions and conflicts requires respect for differences, willingness to engage in dialogue, and a sound understanding of what religion is and the historical processes that have determined its development, distinguishing between empirical facts and images to which believers adhere. Because the author is a Dutch sociologist turned journalist from a conservative Christian family involved in interreligious dialogue in the Netherlands, Israel, and Egypt, the literature review presents contemporary religious developments in all three countries. The literature review is flanked by the author's personal narrative on the events that changed his views on truth and spirituality, making him more aware of the commonalities between peoples of different beliefs and leading him to a lifelong commitment to interreligious and intercultural dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the movie The War Is Over (La guerre est finie—France/Sweden, 1966, directed by Alain Resnais and a screenplay by Jorge Semprún). The idea is to point out a possible sociological discussion on exile, mobilizing the notion of mental images. The methodological approach is an internal analysis of the film to allow for the elaboration of sociological considerations along with the expressive elements of the film construction. To do so, we shall focus on the "leaps" within the movie's narrative order, in which a main character (Diego) anticipates, through imagination, a series of sequences and events that might or might not have occurred. To discuss the notion of mental images and their relationship with the imaginary, the theoretical reference will be Cornelius Castoriadis' book The Imaginary Institution of Society. This article will benefit from the discussions in the presentations about the film both at meetings in Brazil and at the last ISA Congress 2023 (International Sociological Association—Research Committee 37—Sociology of Arts). This text is one of the results of research supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classical analyses of differences among the sciences has measured social but not cognitive structure. This paper suggests a method for describing differences among fields in the processes of knowledge growth. The method examines closely what is said about a particular scientific paper when it is cited in later works, and traces changes over time, if they occur. A comparative analysis of cases drawn from neuropharmacology and the sociology of science is used to illustrate the approach. The two papers analyzed shown strong differences in the level of generality at which the contents of the original papers are cited. Lack of change over time in how the sociology of science paper is cited is attributed to the lack of attention to its main empirical knowledge claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The points raised by professor Delbert C. Miller in his paper about the future direction of industrial sociology are analyzed. The critic agreed with the argument by Miller that industrial sociology needs to be reestablished as a separate discipline--separate from organizational sociology, sociology of occupations and sociology of work. Points in the history of industrial sociology are reviewed to support the grounds of Miller's paper. Along with industrial sociology and economics, sociology has successfully dealt with the central institution of economic life in the United States. Furthermore, industry was the scene of what seemed then to be the most important developments in American society: the rise of the labor movement and the intense conflicts between management and labor.

The production and reception of scientific papers in the academic-industrial complex have been neglected in sociology. In this article the social processes which influence the nature of the scientific paper in that complex are explored in depth by taking a number of controversial medical papers as case studies. The empirical evidence is collected and discussed in the light of sociological theories of normative ethos, paradigm development, reward-induced conformity and social interests in science. It is concluded that within the medical-industrial complex conformity to industrial interests can be a major criterion in defining the kind of reception given to a scientific paper and the professional autonomy of the authors in the paper's production, rather than an ethos of scientific scepticism or commitment to paradigmatic conventions. This is seen to have implications for the production of scientific knowledge -- implications that might be in conflict with the public interest. Consequently, the desirability of current British Government proposals to intensify its policy of making science more responsive to the needs of industry may have significant drawbacks, hitherto unacknowledged in official circles, and in need of more extensive sociological investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the Amherst papers in relation to development of Parsons' theory. A careful analysis of the Amherst papers reveals that the basic ideas and philosophical principles that Parsons followed throughout his life were already in place, some more fully developed than others, yet forming an integrally coherent pattern to a surprising degree. The clear existence in Parsons's Amherst papers of a metatheoretical framework predating his later professional writing calls into question some still existing myths about radical breaks in the development of Parsons's theory. In one version of this mythology, Parsons began his theory as a voluntarist, then became a structural-functionalist, later moved on to become a systems-theorist and ended up as a social evolutionist. Despite such claims, Parsons always was a voluntarist, even during his so-called structural-functionalist middle period. The Amherst papers reveal an amazingly complex and logically coherent theoretical system-in the mind of a twenty-year-young man-and testify to an extraordinary scope of philosophical depth, and intellectual maturity.

Effective cancer diagnosis, treatment and control depend on interactions among numerous distinct factors, from technology to data to skills to sociology. But a crucial influence is the extent to which the health system takes account of the distinct perspectives of the many different groups of interdependent stakeholders concerned with cancer, including patients, practitioners and planners. This paper provides some elucidation as to how far and how efficiently these interactions currently take place in Europe. It also makes some tentative suggestions as to how conscious systematic interventions could improve cancer outcomes. It is based on a series of expert panels and surveys conducted by the European Alliance for Personalised Medicine (EAPM) that provided information at the national level on three selected parameters: implementation of next-generation sequencing (NGS) and liquid biopsy (LB), attitudes of patients to prevention and practices of sharing genomic data among healthcare professionals (HCPs). The varying data infrastructure highlights the urgent need for substantial improvements to accommodate the increasing importance of genomics data in cancer diagnosis and care. Additionally, we identify disparities in age-specific approaches to cancer prevention, emphasising the necessity for tailored strategies to address unique age group perspectives. Moreover, distinct regional prioritizations in cancer treatment underscore the importance of considering regional variations when shaping future cancer care strategies. This study advocates for collaborative data sharing supported by technological innovation to overcome these challenges, ultimately fostering a holistic and equitable provision of cancer care in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on a paper by David Jenness, which focused on the efforts of the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA) in organizing the social sciences in their own interest. The future of federal support for sociology will depend on the continued mobilization efforts of COSSA and upon public recognition of sociological contributions to the realization of two prime sets of values. Much has been written since 1981, when Reaganism became the guiding hand and official ideology at the federal level, of the need for new academic-industry partnerships. Most often, research training and subject-matter expertise were the initial factors to employment. Marketable skills opened opportunities that would have been shut to someone simply proclaiming sociology as his or her trade or profession. The virtues of a range of sociological skills are recognized much more readily: for information and intelligence, for systems analysis and design, for social trend analysis and forecasting, and in general for systematic scouting of the environment within which organized efforts in the public and private sectors operate, flourish, or decline. Herbert Costner once referred to this aspect of applied work as reconnaissance sociology.

In this paper, I consider the construction of patents as social practices. The goal is to observe patents in action, that is, to catch patents in the act of becoming patents. This method of "following the action" is well established in the sociology of science. Similar consideration of the artifices by which a new patent is staged reveals parallels to the known staging of technical papers, including the recruitment of rhetorical allies, semantic fortification against subsequent challenges, and trials of cognitive strength. In each situation, assertions become stabilized facts only if subsequent recipients are induced to accept them as such. However, the patent is formed in a process that largely sidesteps the mechanisms of peer review and material experimentation, substituting instead legal and procedural affordances to facilitate closure. Thus, following the action from which the stabilized patent is fabricated reveals the patent as a uniquely legal, rather than technical, social object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to comprehensively examine the effects of societal and individual characteristics on work-related attitudes, specifically work commitment and work orientations, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also seeks to relate these attitudes to classic theories and understand how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The analysis is based on data collected by the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) in its work orientations survey. Data is analyzed using factor analyses, correspondence analyses, and multilevel regressions. The paper provides an overview of work-related attitudes at the country level and a detailed analysis of societal and individual variables that shape these attitudes. The results indicate that individual attitudes reflect large societal trends and developments, which are discussed with reference to current studies and classic theories. This paper contributes to understanding work-related attitudes by offering a comprehensive analysis of the effects of societal and individual characteristics, using a single dataset and comparable models. It also relates these attitudes to classic theories and discusses how societal factors shape work-related attitudes. The findings also have policy implications, particularly in the recruitment and retention of highly qualified and motivated workers in different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's certain writings. and if he had studied and pondered writings of other such thinkers. Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology--he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s--nor was he ignorant of the contributions of other social thinkers. In the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, research is all too often associated with the transmogrification of knowledge into numbers and the reification of the latter into the simulacra of theory. Park's career as an academician was confounded by this disciplinary hubris. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as sociology emerged from its immersion in German romantic philosophy, its academicians still clung to its baptism in American Protestant thought, seeking to infuse the latter with the trappings of positive science. In any event, a transvalued and secularizing sociology would have to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world.

The article focuses on the relevance of communication studies for human sciences. Communication studies is often proposed as a synthetic approach to the human sciences outright, an interdisciplinary inquiry capable of linking the researches of specialized human sciences to the philosophical foundations of the project of human scientific inquiry itself. The author says that from the standpoint of the relation between philosophy and the human sciences, the constitution of perception, institutions and thought by media of communication is the thesis proper to communication studies, the thesis from which its larger significance derives. According to the author, by describing the precise point at which a theory of communication diverges from a theory of scientific meaning, it is possible to note a significant convergence between phenomenology and a Marxist critique of a semiotic theory of language.

The article presents responses of the author on his books published in the 1985 issue of the journal "Human Studies." He holds that both scholarly and biographically significant point behind his work A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psychology is the following, in 1924, before starting this endeavor, sociologist Alfred Schutz had looked at sociologist Edmund Husserl's early phenomenological writings but found that they had nothing to contribute to what he had planned to do namely, to give Max Weber's sociology of understanding a pheno-psychological underpinning which, in his opinion, they needed in order not only to be made consistent but also in order to provide them with a justification deeper than that which could be provided by sociological reasoning. The author confesses that his book Phenomenology of Consciousness and Sociology of the Life-World is his favorite. He agrees with his critics who have pointed out the book does not cover, or at least does not emphasize evenly all topics which should be treated in an advanced and reasonably sophisticated introduction to the areas of its thematic concerns.

Simple Summary: (1) This study focuses on the ethical challenges veterinarians face when euthanizing animals, the act of ending an animal's life to relieve its suffering. Unlike other healthcare professionals, veterinarians are often required to perform euthanasia as part of their work. How veterinarians determine what constitutes a "good" killing, in a normative sense, needs to be explored. (2) 17 interviews with veterinarians were conducted and analyzed in detail. (3) The study found that veterinarians have different perspectives on what they consider ethically acceptable regarding euthanasia. They distinguish between farm animals and companion animals. Economic and emotional factors also influence their decisions. Ethical boundary work describes how veterinarians define what they consider normatively legitimate in these areas of veterinary medicine. (4) In conclusion, this study shows that veterinarians face difficult decisions and use ethical boundary work to meet these challenges. They must balance sometimes conflicting interests and adapt to multiple situations. By understanding the complexity of ethical boundary work, we can better understand the moral aspects of veterinary practice. This knowledge can improve veterinary care and help veterinarians make ethical decisions that benefit both animals and society. (1) Veterinarians are regularly required to euthanize their "objects of care" as part of their work, which distinguishes them from other healthcare professionals. This paper examines how veterinarians navigate the ethical tensions inherent in euthanasia, particularly the collision between the routine practice of killing animals within their profession and the broader social and moral implications. (2) Using the sociological concept of ethical boundary work as a theoretical framework, this research observes how veterinarians draw boundaries by positioning their euthanasia practices on the ethical "good" spectrum. A grounded theory study of 17 qualitative interviews with veterinarians was conducted. (3) The findings highlight differences in ethical boundary work within veterinary medicine, particularly in the distinction between farm animals and companion animals. Economic and emotional reasoning play differing roles in explanation and justification. Ethical boundary work is a tool for distinguishing normative frameworks in different areas of veterinary medicine. (4) In conclusion, veterinarians grapple with the realities of an imperfect world and often rely on boundary work to assert diverse interests and navigate multiple contexts. By exploring the complexities of ethical boundary work, this study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the moral landscape within veterinary practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central thesis of this paper is that human unconscious processes influence the behavior and design of artificial intelligence (AI). This thesis is discussed through the case study of a chatbot called Replika, which intends to provide psychological assistance and friendship but has been accused of inciting murder and suicide. Replika originated from a trauma and a work of mourning lived by its creator. The traces of these unconscious dynamics can be detected in the design of the app and the narratives about it. Therefore, a process of de-psychologization and de-humanization of the unconscious takes place through AI. This psychosocial approach helps criticize and overcome the so-called "standard model of intelligence" shared by most AI researchers. It facilitates a new interpretation of some classic problems in AI, such as control and responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diseases that are transmitted from vertebrate animals to humans are referred to as zoonotic diseases. Although microbial agents such as bacteria and parasites are linked to zoonotic events, viruses account for a high percentage of zoonotic diseases that have emerged. Worryingly, the 21st century has seen a drastic increase in the emergence and re-emergence of viral zoonotic disease. Even though humans and animals have coexisted for millennia, anthropogenic factors have severely increased interactions between the two populations, thereby increasing the risk of disease spill-over. While drivers such as climate shifts, land exploitation and wildlife trade can directly affect the (re-)emergence of viral zoonotic disease, globalisation, geopolitics and social perceptions can directly facilitate the spread of these (re-)emerging diseases. This opinion paper discusses the "intelligent" nature of viruses and their exploitation of the anthropogenic factors driving the (re-)emergence and spread of viral zoonotic disease in a modernised and connected world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to perform a sociological and pastoral analysis of the religiousness of young people in Poland, which is a challenge to Catholic education. The authors analyse this issue based on the empirical study conducted in 2019 and 2020. The study employed an online survey questionnaire. The study included 1171 people, students in grades 7 and 8 of primary schools and of secondary schools in the Małopolskie and Podkarpackie Voivodships in Poland. The paper focuses on young people's self-declarations concerning: the religion they profess, faith, affiliation with a religious community, a bond to the community, the respondents' and their parents' attending religious services, celebrations/masses and praying individually. It was regarded as important to determine the correlations between the self-declarations of affiliation with a religious community and self-declaration of the religion professed and between the self-declarations of faith and bond to a religious community and self-declaration of the religion professed. These issues are enriched with the respondents' opinions on religion as a school subject. They provide an insight into not only the respondents' religiousness but also a diagnosis of young people's attitudes towards religion as a school subject. They allow for conclusions to be drawn on Catholic education in the secularising society, especially with young people increasingly often quitting religious lessons in schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merton proposed middle range theories, not as ends in themselves, but as bases for a consolidation to explain broader phenomenon. More than a half century has passed since Merton's consolidation proposal and in that time a number of experimentally tested middle range theories have been developed. Certainly, the next step should be a consolidation. Yet, to our knowledge, no one has previously offered a consolidation of experimentally tested theories and applied it for explanation. This paper offers a consolidation of middle range theories formulated to explain the rise of the pristine state. Two theories of this consolidation, Status Characteristics Theory and Elementary Theory, form the core of what Analytic Sociologists have called a toolbox of theories. Our toolbox forms an integrated consolidation in two ways. First, the social structures modeled by the theories form a path-dependent process of increasing benefits gained by the elites of the structures. Second, the end conditions of each step of the process are the initial conditions of the next. Whereas the theories in our toolbox have previously been seen as applying exclusively to microstructures, we have encountered no difficulties in scaling them up to apply to macrostructures. While we hope the consolidation has validity in explaining the occurrence of pristine states, this paper's significance lies in its demonstration that today social theories can be consolidated and applied for explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The safety of highly aggregated tourist crowds is a challenging and important issue. This paper not only provided a comprehensive analysis of the accidents of highly aggregated tourist crowds but also determined the occurrence mechanism and coping paths. Based on the analysis of multiple cases, we found that the variable status of highly aggregated tourist crowds was the result of the interaction of three main elements: multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses. A series of factors interact and result in accidents, and the lack of a management response or a low-quality management response is the root cause of such accidents. A high-quality management response is a basic safety precaution for highly aggregated tourist crowds. Therefore, forming a virtuous circle of multisource pressure, state mutations and management responses is an effective path for coping with accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Despite malaria, malnutrition and anaemia being major public-health challenges in Cameroon, very little has been reported on the interaction between these interconnected health determinants. This study therefore sought to investigate the relationship between malaria, anaemia, nutritional and socio-economic status amongst under—ten children living in six localities within two health districts in the North Region of Cameroon. Methods: Accordingly, a cross- sectional survey was conducted during the peak malaria season in November 2014, in Pitoa and Mayo-Oulo Health Districts. Three hundred and sixty eight children aged 6months—10 years were enrolled. Structured questionnaires were used to assess socio-economic status. Anthropometric indices were taken using standard methods and nutritional status assessed by calculating Height for Age (HA), Weight for Age (WA) and Weight for Height (WH) z-scores to determine stunting, underweight and wasting respectively. Finger-prick blood samples were used to prepare thin and thick blood smears for microscopy. Whole blood was collected to determine the PCV and blood spots on filter paper were used to extract plasmodium DNA for speciation by PCR. Results: Overall prevalence rates of malaria, malnutrition and anaemia were 32.9%, 54.1% and 20.6% respectively. Stunting, underweight and wasting were detected in 56.9%, 63.5% and 34.8% of the children respectively. There was a significant association between malaria and malnutrition [OR = 1.89, (95% CI: 1.12–3.19); (p = 0.017)]. Malnutrition was also strongly associated with malaria status [OR = 2.07, (95% CI: 1.22–3.53); (p = 0.007)]. The prevalence rates of mild, moderate and severe anaemia were 8.1%, 9.2% and 3.3% respectively. Both malaria status and anaemia correlated with development index [OR = 0.75, (95% CI: 0.58–0.99); (p = 0.042)] and [OR = 1.45, (95% CI: 1.05–2.00); (p = 0.023)] respectively. Conclusion: Our findings show a synergistic relationship between malaria and malnutrition. Effective collaboration between malaria control and nutrition intervention programmes is essential for proper case management and improved socio-economic status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we analyze the generalization performance of the Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) algorithm widely used for sparse recovery problems. The parameter estimation and sparsity recovery consistency of IHT has long been known in compressed sensing. From the perspective of statistical learning, another fundamental question is how well the IHT estimation would predict on unseen data. This paper makes progress towards answering this open question by introducing a novel sparse generalization theory for IHT under the notion of algorithmic stability. Our theory reveals that: 1) under natural conditions on the empirical risk function over $n$ samples of dimension $p$ , IHT with sparsity level $k$ enjoys an $\tilde {\mathcal {O}}(n^{-1/2}\sqrt {k\log (n)\log (p)})$ rate of convergence in sparse excess risk; 2) a tighter $\tilde {\mathcal {O}}(n^{-1/2}\sqrt {\log (n)})$ bound can be established by imposing an additional iteration stability condition on a hypothetical IHT procedure invoked to the population risk; and 3) a fast rate of order $\tilde {\mathcal {O}}\left ({n^{-1}k(\log ^{3}(n)+\log (p))}\right)$ can be derived for strongly convex risk function under proper strong-signal conditions. The results have been substantialized to sparse linear regression and sparse logistic regression models to demonstrate the applicability of our theory. Preliminary numerical evidence is provided to support our theoretical predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributions: The underrepresentation of women in computer science (CS) majors has long been a focus of attention in many academic documents, the majority of them from the United States and Europe. There is, however, a lack of information about educational interventions (EIs) for women in computing in Latin America. The contribution of this article is to cover this gap and describe what researchers in Latin American countries have been publishing about the recruitment and retention of women in the CS field. Background: Many EIs targeting female students at different educational levels—K-12, undergraduate, and graduate—have been undertaken to increase the participation of women in computing in Latin America. However, descriptions of these activities rarely are included in international academic databases. Research Questions: This literature mapping addresses two main research questions (RQ) about the topic of women in computing in academic publications in Latin American countries: RQ1) what are the characteristics of the publications about women in computing in Latin America? and RQ2) what are the published interventions to recruit and retain women in computing in Latin America? To answer RQ1, six subquestions were created covering year, language, country of origin, document type, and professional track. Furthermore, for RQ2, two subquestions were created involving educational level and the use of software development with a female theme. Methodology: This investigation used the systematic literature mapping process. To achieve a broad coverage of papers, the following sources were included: Scopus, Web of Science, Google Scholar, EBSCO, the proceedings of the Latin American Women in Computing Conference (LAWCC), and those of the Women in Technology (WIT) workshop colocated with the annual conference of the Brazilian Computer Society (SBC). The included papers were published in the last decade (2010–2020) and written in English, Portuguese, or Spanish. Findings: The literature mapping encompasses 197 academic documents, 48.2% of which were written in Portuguese, 28.7% in English, and 23.1% in Spanish. The papers originated from 15 of the 20 Latin American countries. Brazil and Costa Rica have the highest number of publications overall. The documents describe initiatives to increase the participation of women in computing majors that cover the entire educational spectrum, from K-12 to graduate programs, but papers targeting populations in higher education have started to appear recently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tins paper is intended as an effort at taking-stock of the reference group concept after nearly three decades of use, the latter two of which have been marked by its more than ample employment. Its popularity indeed has so frequently led to its serving as an all-purpose post hoc explanation of behavior that it has led to the wry definition, "Your reference group is a group that you behave like and you behave like them because they're your reference group" (Cohen, 1962: 104). The inconsistencies, lack of clarity, but also areas of agreement which have marked the varied formulations of the concept, will be apparent from the following review and commentary. The Final discussion indicates some of the matters still to be considered in the use of thin important but perhaps overworked concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper rekindles a three-decade-old debate in the annals of Indian anthropology / sociology which became dormant after no significant headway was made. The debate which goes by the name of "crisis in sociology" in India provides the backdrop against which the paper makes sense of current regimes of knowledge production that a doctoral candidate in India must navigate. By doing so, the paper reflects on the limitations of epistemological critiques wherein an epistemic critique stops at the corridors of an academic workplace. The paper argues that doctoral candidates in India today are cognitive workers engaged in exploitative relations of knowledge production. However, these exploitative relations are obfuscated by the postcolonial epistemological critiques that indulge in foregrounding the hegemony of the North / West. The paper proposes an infrastructural critique of knowledge that does not respond with despair to perceived transformations and crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the feasibility and scope of co-channel coexistence between a low data rate Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) secondary network and a digital television (DTV) broadcast network operating in the same area. Since DTV receivers do not transmit, neither the presence nor the impact of interference from the secondary network on these DTV receivers can be known. Consequently, conventional spectrum sensing techniques cannot be employed effectively. This paper proposes to compensate the lack of feedback by combining the available information about population distribution in the region - ranging from coarse population density estimates to accurate geospatial maps - with better estimation of interference using a data-driven technique called Ordinary Kriging. Radio Environment Maps constructed using the Kriging method from field-reported observations from the secondary nodes are used to obtain better accuracy than the conventional statistical models. The estimates are then used to compute communication parameters for each secondary link in terms of power, number of active subcarriers, and active time slots, while keeping the average interference in the DTV network within threshold bounds. Thus, the viability of such co-channel license-exempt operation of secondary networks in the DTV black and grey spaces for low data rate applications in densely populated urban areas and higher data rate capabilities for sparsely populated rural areas is established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on mixed racial and ethnic identities has developed rapidly over the past decades, increasing in theoretical scope and depth, and exploring mixedness across a growing range of national and social contexts. Recent research has highlighted the huge variations and shifts in conceptions of mixedness around the world, and the different pathways to understanding what it means to be mixed through migration, development, postcolonialism and different forms of nation-building. This paper seeks to connect theory to practice, approaching mixedness through the lens of clinical sociology, applying sociological theory on the ground and exploring the utility of critical mixed race studies in everyday life. Clinical sociology as a practice is first outlined, juxtaposed against the development in theorizing around mixed racial and ethnic identities on an international level. The paper then looks at some possibilities for practical impact: by acknowledging the complexity of mixedness and everyday life, research on mixed identities can go beyond the development of theory and case description, with applied and clinical impacts ranging from the level of the individual to the level of the state. Research on mixedness worldwide illustrates the diversity inherent within ideas of mixing, and the micro, meso and macro applications and potential outcomes of such theories. This paper draws on new and shifting conceptions of mixedness, emphasizing that the sociology of mixedness can have considerable value in effecting positive social change: positioning the (mixed) individual within the (mixed) society and allowing sociology to become action. The development and use of theories around mixedness emphasize the importance of clinical sociology as a practice: a reason for theory, connecting the abstract to the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers a distinctive reading of Popper’s work, suggesting that his Logic of Scientific Discovery (LScD) might be re-interpreted in the light of his Open Society. Indeed, Popper can be interpreted as criticising certain aspects of his first book, and as a result improving upon them, in his second. It suggests translating what Popper says about ‘conventions’ into his later vocabulary of ‘social institutions’. Looking back, I believe that Popper never intended the language of conventions and decisions to be read individualistically. I remain unsure whether Popper was himself quite as clear about this as he could have been. My reading makes Popper a pioneer in the sociology of science. Scientific institutions are arenas of political power; but Popper did not discuss the structure and inter-relations of the social institutions of science, or offer a politics of science in the context of his methodology. What is missing from the skeletal sociology of LScD is the politics. We could put it in Popperian terms this way: scientific institutions are both open and closed. They are closed, firmly, to the inexpert, to the nonmembers; supposedly they are open to the qualified, provided the prerogatives of seniority and leadership are acknowledged. Despite these shortcomings, Popper’s critical and rational approach and his insistence on openness and intellectual honesty are still important today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents and responds to On the Heels of Ignorance, a sociological study which identifies five fundamental epistemological paradigm changes in American psychiatry in the service of its survival and details several tactics that have been employed to facilitate these professional reinventions. Issues raised in this presentation include the relationship between psychiatry, society and the state, and the nature and significance of psychiatric expertise. The dynamic of these relationships and the complexities of the required expertise create their own challenges for the advancement and professional accountability of the specialty. The conclusion suggests some future imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of adaptive group testing for isolating up to $k$ defective items from a population of size $n$. There exist restrictions or preferences which determine how the items can be pooled for testing. A graphical model formalizes the pooling restrictions and preferences. Such graph-constrained group testing is investigated in three settings: populations with defectives, populations facing the potential presence of inhibitors, and populations with community structures. Adaptive group testing frameworks are provided for each setting. In populations without inhibitors, existing non adaptive frameworks can isolate the defective items perfectly with $\Theta(k \log n/k)$ number of tests, where is the $\beta$ -mixing time of a random walk over the underlying graph. This paper provides a two-stage framework that can perfectly isolate up to $k$ defective items for a regular graph using $\Theta(k2 \log n k + k)$ number of tests, thus achieving an approximate gain of a factor of $k$ over the non-adaptive frameworks. This twostage framework's principles are extended to community-structured graphs and graphs with up to $r$ inhibitor items. In particular, when inhibitors are present in the graph, a four-stage group testing framework is proposed. The results show that in the regime $r= O(k)$ for a fully connected graph, $\Theta ((k+r)\log n/(k+r) + r\log n)$ tests are sufficient for isolating the defective items. This matches the corresponding necessary condition on tests which scales $(k+r)\log n$. The adaptive graphconstrained group testing framework is also empirically evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the presence and consideration of economics in sociology, specifically its classical version. It identifies certain original and independent economic theories, concepts and approaches in classical sociological theory as central and its derivations, implications and extensions of economics as peripheral. The paper argues and demonstrates that classical sociology is far from being the science of noneconomic or irrational phenomena, as often sociologists conceive it and economists perceive it in counter-distinction from economics defined as the science of rational behavior, and indeed encompasses virtually all economic activities and processes, and thus prefigures New Economic Sociology adopting the same approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let $\mathrm {W}\in \mathbb {C}^{n\times n}$ be a single-spiked Wishart matrix in the class $\mathrm {W}\sim \mathcal {CW}_{n}(m,\mathrm {I}_{n}+ \theta \mathrm {v}\mathrm {v}^{\dagger}) $ with $m\geq n$ , where ${\mathrm {I}}_{n}$ is the $n\times n$ identity matrix, $\mathrm {v}\in \mathbb {C}^{n\times 1}$ is an arbitrary vector with unit Euclidean norm, $\theta \geq 0$ is a non-random parameter, and $(\cdot)^{\dagger} $ represents the conjugate-transpose operator. Let u1 and ${\mathrm {u}}_{n}$ denote the eigenvectors corresponding to the smallest and the largest eigenvalues of W, respectively. This paper investigates the probability density function (p.d.f.) of the random quantity $Z_{\ell }^{(n)}=\left |{\mathrm {v}^{\dagger} \mathrm {u}_\ell }\right |^{2}\in (0,1)$ for $\ell =1,n$. In particular, we derive a finite dimensional closed-form p.d.f. for $Z_{1}^{(n)}$ which is amenable to asymptotic analysis as $m,n$ diverges with $m-n$ fixed. It turns out that, in this asymptotic regime, the scaled random variable $nZ_{1}^{(n)}$ converges in distribution to $\chi ^{2}_{2}/2(1+\theta)$ , where $\chi _{2}^{2}$ denotes a chi-squared random variable with two degrees of freedom. This reveals that u1 can be used to infer information about the spike. On the other hand, the finite dimensional p.d.f. of $Z_{n}^{(n)}$ is expressed as a double integral in which the integrand contains a determinant of a square matrix of dimension $(n-2)$. Although a simple solution to this double integral seems intractable, for special configurations of $n=2,3$ , and 4, we obtain closed-form expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network diffusion processes or how information spreads through networks have been widely examined in numerous disciplines such as epidemiology, physics, sociology, politics, or computer science. In this paper, we extend previous developments by considering a generalization of the diffusion by considering the possibility of differences in the speed of diffusion and reduction depending on the forces' directions. In this situation, the differential speed of diffusion produces deviations from the standard solution around the average of the initial conditions in the network. In fact, this asymmetry gives rise to non-linear dynamics in which, contrary to the symmetric case, the final solution depends on the topology of the graph as well as on the distribution of the initial values. Counter-intuitively, less central nodes in the network are able to exert a higher influence on the final solution. This behavior applies also for different simulated networks such as random, small-world, and scale-free. We show an example of this kind of asymmetric diffusion process in a real case. To do so, we use a network of US Boards of Directors, where boards are the nodes and the directors working for more than one board, are the links. Changes in the proportion of women serving on each board are influenced by the gradient between adjacent boards. We also show that there is an asymmetry: the gradient is reduced at a slower (faster) rhythm if the board has less (more) women than neighboring boards. We are able to quantify the accumulated effect of this asymmetry from 2000 to 2015 in the overall proportion of women on boards, in a 4.7 percentage points (the proportion should have been an 14.61% instead of the observed 9.93% in 2015). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding the processes contributing to equality of opportunity and outcomes in contemporary societies is at the core of the discipline of sociology. This paper illustrates the value of administrative data to underpin research aimed at identifying, monitoring, and addressing socio-economic disparities between population groups. To accomplish this, I draw on three case studies of recent empirical research leveraging administrative data to examine processes contributing to the (re)production of inequalities by sexual orientation. Collectively, the three case studies exemplify how data sources that fall within the broad category of 'administrative data' can help social researchers generate new, policy-relevant knowledge on socio-economic inequalities, as well as robust information to contextualize public and legislative debate. The paper concludes with a discussion of the promises and challenges of using administrative data to understand inequalities by sexual orientation, as well as inequalities between other minority and majority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the paper is to present a brief insight into the significant works and views of the German sociologists Niklas Luhmann and Jűrgen Habermas on the role of law in regulating human relations in society. Educated as a lawyer, Niklas Luhmann in the late academic career was under the influence of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons. Niklas Luhmann later, under the influence of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, he built a sociological theoretical system called the systems theory. On the other side, Jűrgen Habermas was a philosopher and sociologist, highly influenced by the Frankfurt school of sociology. According to Luhmann's systems theory, the social reality and the separate aspects of the social life are part of a deeper system called society, and in relation to the same they are set as subsystems. Social systems are divided into allopoietic and autopoietic. One of the significant axioms of Luhmann's theory is that the largest number of systems tends to simplify due to the pressure of the environment for greater efficiency. Law in Luhman's systems theory enjoys the status of an autonomous system for regulating society, rather than an instrumental contribution to politics. This brief review exposed a big clash between two influential German thinkers. In this paper we are going to use historical method and analysing of the content of different materials and previous authors that are dealing with the work of Niklas Luhmann and Jűrgen Habermas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]