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Researchers can use data visualization techniques to explore, analyze, and present data in new ways. Although quantitative data are visualized most often, recent innovations have brought attention to the potential benefits of visualizing qualitative data. In this article, the authors demonstrate one way researchers can use networks to analyze and present ethnographic interview data. The authors suggest that because many respondents know one another in ethnographic research, networks are a useful tool for analyzing the implications of respondents' familiarity with one another. Moreover, respondents often share familiar cultural references that can be visualized. The authors show how visualizing respondents' ties in conjunction with their shared cultural references sheds light on the different systems of meaning that respondents within a field site use to make sense of the social phenomena under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly debates on sex dolls tend to view them in one of two ways. Either the purchase and use of sex dolls reflects and exacerbates misogyny, or that dolls are themselves a technological marvel meeting an array of sexual and emotional needs in sex negative cultures. I complicate these views by analyzing how and why heterosexual men personify their hyperreal sex toys in conventionally feminine, albeit hypersexualized, ways. Drawing on digital ethnographic observations and interviews with 41 love and sex doll owners who use digital media to personify their dolls, I suggest that the creation of hyper-gendered doll personas tends to reproduce culturally specific gender norms due to social dynamics within the community. Specifically, I show how doll community norms privilege heterosexual masculinity and thus limit the doll personas that are imagined and created. By focusing on the social practices of this community rather than how sex dolls are designed, this research suggests a way for scholars to be critical of taboos against technologically assisted sexual pleasure while acknowledging the tendency of futuristic sex practices to reproduce social inequalities. Implications for how future sexual technologies could someday challenge status-quo inequalities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association curates a special issue highlighting sociological contributions to technology and media studies. That tradition continued in 2020, even as everything else changed. The articles included in this year's special issue were mostly written pre-Pandemic, yet their implications seem amplified by the current historical moment. With a globe gone remote, mediated communication rose from a specialist academic subject to an acute social consideration, intersecting with and illuminating basic sociological concerns about inequality, the nature of work, family life, and the compounding effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they interplay with social and material conditions. These topics are all reflected in the articles from this year's issue, now inflected with a post-Pandemic reality that shows insights from CITAMS are needed now, more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutionally equivalent groups that occur in a single molecule are classified on the basis of their topic relationships by comparing their environments. The proposed classification extends earlier suggestions of Mislow and Raban. The existence of homotopic groups (those indistinguishable under any conditions) is related to the symmetry properties (gyrosymmetry) of rigid as well as flexible finite moieties. Stereoheterotopic groups (those that are distinguishable but occur in constitutionally equivalent environments) may be associated with various steric elements which will be fully discussed in a second paper. Each of these elements, the center, the axis, the plane and the torsional element, is divided into four mutually exclusive classes: the chiral and achiral elements of stereoisomerism; the prochiral and proachiral elements of prostereoisomerism. Of these classes, only the various centers of stereoisomerism and of prostereoisomerism are discussed in this report. Some modifications in our earlier proposals for the naming of individual stereoheterotopic groups are introduced. The utility of these new and revised terminologies for biochemical discussions is indicated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a simplified method for mass screening for lead poisoning in children. Determination of the level of urinary δaminolevulinic acid; Comparison of the dipstick and column methods of urine assays; Ease of collecting samples by parents.