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Social networks influence health-related behavior, such as obesity and smoking. While researchers have studied social networks as a driver for diffusion of influences and behavior, it is less understood how the structure or topology of the network, in itself, impacts an individual's health behavior and wellness state. In this paper, we investigate whether the structure or topology of a social network offers additional insight and predictability on an individual's health and wellness. We develop a method called the Network-Driven health predictor (NetCARE) that leverages features representative of social network structure. Using a large longitudinal data set of students enrolled in the NetHealth study at the University of Notre Dame, we show that the NetCARE method improves the overall prediction performance over the baseline models—that use demographics and physical attributes—by 38%, 65%, 55%, and 54% for the wellness states—stress, happiness, positive attitude, and self-assessed health—considered in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper studies the care of children < 1 year in professional sectors of the City of Buenos Aires. The activities, interactions and feelings observed in four hours of care between a mother and her 11-month-old baby are analyzed in the context of a series of interviews carried out with mothers and fathers of this socioeconomic stratum. The project is part of the social studies of care and the sociology of emotions, fields that have sought to better understand the motivations and experiences of social actors in their affective practices with others. The main hypothesis is that the dynamics and rhythms of care in this sector can assume unique temporal arrangements, linked to simultaneity, alternation, continuous bonding and permanent availability among children and their caregivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration, here we aim to quantitatively study regional identity, cross-region communication and sentiment. This paper presents a new methodology to study social interaction within and between social-geographic regions, and then applies the methodology to a case study of England and Wales. We use a social network, built from geo-located Twitter data, to identify contiguous geographical regions with a shared social identity and then investigate patterns of communication within and between them. In contrast to other approaches (e.g. using phone call data records or online friendship networks), use of Twitter data provides message contents as well as social connections. This allows us to investigate not only the volume of communication between locations, but also the sentiment and vocabulary used in the messages. For example, our case study shows: a significant dialect difference between England and Wales; that regions tend to be more positive about themselves than about others, with the South being more ‘self-regarding’ than the North; and that people talk politics much more between regions than within. This study demonstrates how social media can be used to quantify regional identity and inter-region communications and sentiment, exposing these previously hard-to-observe geographic concepts to analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theoretical essay discusses the issue of race relations in Brazil and explores its interfaces with studies on diversity management in organizations. Therefore, it seeks to problematize this field's appropriation of American studies, pushing to the background -- or even ignoring -- studies on race relations developed in Brazilian anthropology and sociology. This questioning helps us realize that organizational studies in Brazil have been displaced in this debate, either by the assumption that our diversity management should follow Anglo-Saxon parameters, or by the distance that the area has maintained from Brazilian studies that address racial minorities and their dynamic relations. The final part of the paper retrieves two important works produced under Brazilian studies on race relations and, from them, examines this debate's contributions to the study of Brazilian organizations. The paper concludes by drawing researchers' attention to the need to rescue the Brazilian debate as a way of contextualizing diversity management in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that the publication of the lectures of sociologist Harvey Sacks has been started by the journal "Human Studies," which begins a process which will eventually make publicly available all, or virtually all, of the lectures by Sacks on conversation and related topics in social science. Most of the lectures in this larger corpus were originally delivered to classes at the University of California, first to sociology classes at the University of California in Los Angeles campus, and then after 1968 to classes in the School of Social Science at the Irvine campus of the University. When he wrote papers, Sacks imposed standards of formality and precision that were extremely hard for him to meet to his own satisfaction. Most of the papers he published on his own were work-ups of lectures, for example, the paper on story-telling, the paper on puns, etc. He drafted on his own as papers he was never sufficiently satisfied with to publish. Sacks' 1964-65 lectures can be furnished two sorts of intellectual reference points, one is his own intellectual development and ones in the intellectual context around him. Several features of these landmarks in Sacks' intellectual terrain, and of the early lectures, display some of the most potent influences on his thinking at that time. These lectures, then, have more than merely historical interest as embryonic versions of later developed work. These series of lectures began a most remarkable, inventive and productive presentation of a strikingly new vision of how to study human sociality.

We tested the effectiveness of an intensive, on average 17-session, adaptive and computerized working-memory training program for improving performance on untrained, paper and pencil working memory tasks, standardized school achievement tasks, and teacher ratings of classroom behavior. Third-grade children received either a computerized working memory training for about 30 minutes per session (n = 156) or participated in regular classroom activities (n = 126). Results indicated strong gains in the training task. Further, pretest and posttest transfer measures of working memory and school achievement, as well as teacher ratings, showed substantial correlations with training task performance, suggesting that the training task captured abilities that were relevant for the transfer tasks. However, effect sizes of training-specific transfer gains were very small and not consistent across tasks. These results raise questions about the benefits of intensive working-memory training programs within a regular school context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges the conventional academic wisdom that supports the "publish or perish" doctrine. Employing a theoretical framework derived from Berger and Luckmann (1966), other sources of legitimation are analyzed. While the doctrine is related to themes in the larger culture (i.e., a high mass production/consumption economy), this does not fully explain why research and publication receive such determined support from faculty, particularly since alternative means of evaluation exist. An explanation of the publish or perish doctrine is offered in terms of the use of esoteric knowledge (its product) to enhance and preserve professional authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]