Social Science posts
- April 15, 2010
- 06:01 PM
- 2,600 views
Not all risk is risk
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
The article lists and discusses eight risk definitions, and then suggests an alternative and comprehensive definition that captures all aspects of [ ... ]... Read more »
Aven, T. (2010) On how to define, understand and describe risk. Reliability Engineering , 95(6), 623-631. DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2010.01.011
- April 15, 2010
- 05:36 AM
- 520 views
Harsh Attitudes of Child Protection Workers
by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types
Douglas and Walsh (2010) paint a not so pretty picture of what child protection workers think about their clients, particularly those battered mothers entangled in what are usually, extraordinarily complicated dynamics. The authors suggest several possible improvements, including better worker supervision, tougher police interventions, and more holistic service delivery for victims and their children.
... Read more »
Douglas, H., & Walsh, T. (2010) Mothers, Domestic Violence, and Child Protection. Violence Against Women, 16(5), 489-508. DOI: 10.1177/1077801210365887
- April 13, 2010
- 11:57 AM
- 814 views
Why (and How) People of a Feather Flock Together
by David Berreby in Mind Matters
Seeking the hidden causes of behavior, some scientists work on the scale of brain regions and neurons, searching inside people's heads. Others work on the scale of crowds, neighborhoods and nations, seeking hidden patterns in the way multitudes behave. What's unusual about this paper in PLoS One is that it combines both those perspectives: Mehdi Moussaïd and his co-authors have worked out the physical effects of a psychological motivation. That gave them a new way to predict how people wa........ Read more »
Moussaïd, M., Perozo, N., Garnier, S., Helbing, D., & Theraulaz, G. (2010) The Walking Behaviour of Pedestrian Social Groups and Its Impact on Crowd Dynamics. PLoS ONE, 5(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010047
Nagy, M., Ákos, Z., Biro, D., & Vicsek, T. (2010) Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks. Nature, 464(7290), 890-893. DOI: 10.1038/nature08891
- April 13, 2010
- 05:42 AM
- 491 views
The Parochial and the Cosmopolitan - Globalization helps cooperation
by Simon Halliday in Amanuensis
Continuing my trend of reporting on papers about cooperation, I thought I'd comment on a recent paper by Nancy Buchan and co-authors about human cooperation and globalization. I've argued previously about the role of parochialism in punishment and in theories about the evolution of war and cooperation, today, though, the theme is the extent to which more cosmopolitan countries tend to foster individuals who are more willing to cooperate globally. Sounds intuitive, but how does it work experim........ Read more »
Buchan, N., Grimalda, G., Wilson, R., Brewer, M., Fatas, E., & Foddy, M. (2009) Globalization and human cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(11), 4138-4142. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0809522106
- April 12, 2010
- 06:04 PM
- 1,628 views
Supply chain vulnerability: A list of mitigation strategies
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
Which mitigation strategy that works best when faced with which supply chain catastrophe? This is a paper that every supply chain manager should read, at least [ ... ]... Read more »
Stecke, K., & Kumar, S. (2009) Sources of Supply Chain Disruptions, Factors That Breed Vulnerability, and Mitigating Strategies. Journal of Marketing Channels, 16(3), 193-226. DOI: 10.1080/10466690902932551
- April 12, 2010
- 04:55 PM
- 697 views
Blood donations: religious and non-religious are equally generous
According to a new analysis of data from the US National Survey of Family Growth, there is no relationship between giving blood any any facet of religiosity. Neither the religion in which the person was raised (versus none), nor religious service attendance, nor the importance of religion in daily life, were related to whether the person had given blood in the past.In terms of raw numbers, women raised as mainline protestants were slightly more likely to have given blood than people from other r........ Read more »
Gillum RF, & Masters KS. (2010) Religiousness and blood donation: findings from a national survey. Journal of health psychology, 15(2), 163-72. PMID: 20207660
- April 12, 2010
- 12:01 AM
- 968 views
Domestic violence in a multilingual world
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
Non-English speakers’ access to emergency services in Australia is in the news again as a Melbourne man has been convicted of the murder of his wife. What makes the case particularly shocking is the fact that the victim, who was originally from Afghanistan, tried to call police a few days before the murder but couldn’t [...]... Read more »
Piller, Ingrid, & Takahashi, Kimie. (2010) Language, Migration, and Human Rights. Wodak, Ruth, Paul Kerswill and Barbara Johnstone. Eds. Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Sage. info:/
- April 9, 2010
- 10:29 PM
- 822 views
The Bad Male Habit of Dropping Dead Early
by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types
Pinkhasov et al. (2010) discuss why it is that in developed countries around the world, life expectancy for men is several years less than for women. Their attention to actual disease states such as coronary heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and cancer, excludes a broader, sociocultural approach to the problem. I should think that if you want to reduce the 'gender disparity', as the authors call it, between the life expectancy of men and women, you first need to understand how gen........ Read more »
Pinkhasov, R., Shteynshlyuger, A., Hakimian, P., Lindsay, G., Samadi, D., & Shabsigh, R. (2010) Are men shortchanged on health? Perspective on life expectancy, morbidity, and mortality in men and women in the United States. International Journal of Clinical Practice, 64(4), 465-474. DOI: 10.1111/j.1742-1241.2009.02289.x
- April 9, 2010
- 04:17 PM
- 811 views
Risk versus vulnerability
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
What is risk, and what is vulnerability? While connected, they are not the same and it is important to see the difference. In this paper safety and security are brought together in a unifying risk and vulnerability framework that covers both accidental and malicious events.... Read more »
AVEN, T. (2007) A unified framework for risk and vulnerability analysis covering both safety and security. Reliability Engineering , 92(6), 745-754. DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2006.03.008
- April 8, 2010
- 11:00 PM
- 609 views
The Language of Science – it’s “just a theory”
by S.C. Kavassalis in The Language of Bad Physics
Anyone who has seriously studied an empirical or mathematical science knows there is something very special about how those studies affect the way we view the world. There is something very profound feeling in the way our minds works after we’ve been exposed to logical and testable systems, and it enters into almost [...]... Read more »
Leshner, A. (2005) Redefining Science. Science, 309(5732), 221-221. DOI: 10.1126/science.1116621
Steinhardt, P. (2002) A Cyclic Model of the Universe. Science, 296(5572), 1436-1439. DOI: 10.1126/science.1070462
- April 8, 2010
- 03:51 PM
- 613 views
Social Learning in Antisocial Animals
by Neuroskeptic in Neuroskeptic
In an unusual study with potentially revolutionary implications, Austrian biologists Wilkinson et al show evidence of Social learning in a non-social reptile.Social learning means learning to do something by observing others doing it, rather than by doing it yourself. Many sociable animal species, including mammals, birds and even insects, have shown the ability to learn by observing others doing things. It's often seen as a distinct form of cognition, separate to "normal" learning, which evolve........ Read more »
Wilkinson, A., Kuenstner, K., Mueller, J., & Huber, L. (2010) Social learning in a non-social reptile (Geochelone carbonaria). Biology Letters. DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2010.0092
- April 8, 2010
- 06:00 AM
- 647 views
Will you read this post? Think about it…
by David Winter in Careers - in Theory
What do you think would motivate people more — getting them to focus on what they will do or asking them to think about whether they will do it or not?... Read more »
Ibrahim Senay, Dolores Albarracín, & Kenji Noguchi. (2010) Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior Through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense. Psychological Science. info:/10.1177/0956797610364751
Vohs, K., & Schooler, J. (2008) The Value of Believing in Free Will: Encouraging a Belief in Determinism Increases Cheating. Psychological Science, 19(1), 49-54. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02045.x
Greenwald, A., Carnot, C., Beach, R., & Young, B. (1987) Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote. Journal of Applied Psychology, 72(2), 315-318. DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.72.2.315
- April 7, 2010
- 12:13 AM
- 922 views
Social Adversity Precedes Psychosis Onset
by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types
Does mental disorder spring from the ether or is it the product of unhealthy environments? While biopsychiatrists would favour the former, Morgan and Hutchinson (2009) show that disadvantage and discrimination are behind the exponentially higher rate of mental disorder amongst Black Caribbean and Black African people in the UK (when compared with White people in the UK). The problem, thus, to be fixed, is not 'them' but the social adversity to which those citizens are unfortunately exp........ Read more »
Morgan, C., & Hutchinson, G. (2009) The social determinants of psychosis in migrant and ethnic minority populations: a public health tragedy. Psychological Medicine, 40(05), 705. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291709005546
- April 6, 2010
- 06:50 PM
- 1,969 views
Ecosystem Based Management: Managing for Everything or Nothing At All
by Bluegrass Blue Crab in Southern Fried Science
www.californiafires.com
Managing for stability just doesn’t work.
This epiphany has helped forge the development of ecosystem based management (EBM), theoretically a more holistic approach to natural resource management that is more in tune with natural processes. However, we still haven’t worked out the kinks so something good in theory often falls flat. A couple of recent [...]... Read more »
GRANEK, E., POLASKY, S., KAPPEL, C., REED, D., STOMS, D., KOCH, E., KENNEDY, C., CRAMER, L., HACKER, S., BARBIER, E.... (2010) Ecosystem Services as a Common Language for Coastal Ecosystem-Based Management. Conservation Biology, 24(1), 207-216. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01355.x
PETERSON, M., HALL, D., FELDPAUSCH-PARKER, A., & PETERSON, T. (2010) Obscuring Ecosystem Function with Application of the Ecosystem Services Concept. Conservation Biology, 24(1), 113-119. DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2009.01305.x
- April 6, 2010
- 12:34 PM
- 1,531 views
RSVP—A Cultural Construct?
by Krystal D'Costa in Anthropology in Practice
I saw this Op-Ed piece earlier this month about the decline of the RSVP, and it resonated strongly. It reminded me of my own experience last year when I organized my sister-in-law's (husband's sister) bridal shower. Apparently, I came very close to alienating the guest list, which contained mostly family members, because of the way my invitation was delivered.
The gathering was limited to "
... Read more »
Abu-Zahra, N. (1974) Material Power, Honour, Friendship, and the Etiquette of Visiting. Anthropological Quarterly, 47(1), 120. DOI: 10.2307/3317030
- April 5, 2010
- 03:09 PM
- 624 views
Improved Mind Reading Through Matching Construal Levels
by Daniel Hawes in Ingenious Monkey | 20-two-5
Thinking about what's going on in other people's heads, is something we do practically all the time. But the truth is, we're not that good at it. Here's some research that tells you why, and what you can do about it...... Read more »
Tal Eyal, Nicholas Epley. (2010) How to Seem Telepathic : Enabling Mind Reading by Matching Construal. Psychological Science. info:/10.1177/0956797610367754
- April 4, 2010
- 09:53 AM
- 1,251 views
Friend or foe or both?
by Jan Husdal in husdal.com
Supply chain collaboration, easy or difficult? And can it really work? In theory yes, but in reality? Maybe not. While supply chain collaboration has been hailed by many as the way to improve supply chain performance, more often than not supply chain partnerships fails miserably, because the required prerequisites are not met by [ ... ]... Read more »
Kampstra, R., Ashayeri, J., & Gattorna, J. (2006) Realities of supply chain collaboration. The International Journal of Logistics Management, 17(3), 312-330. DOI: 10.1108/09574090610717509
- April 4, 2010
- 01:32 AM
- 779 views
Schizophrenia and the Right to Die
by Ultimo167 in Strong Silent Types
Hewitt (2010) challenges the seemingly irrefutable view that people living with schizophrenia lack capacity and therefore, any ability to make rational decisions about their own suicide.... Read more »
Hewitt J. (2010) Schizophrenia, mental capacity, and rational suicide. Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 31(1), 63-77. PMID: 20237854
- April 3, 2010
- 10:51 AM
- 1,231 views
French Language Day
by Ingrid Piller in Language on the Move
I missed the UN’s French language day! It’s not the fact that I missed it that bothers me – I’m late for pretty much everything – it’s the fact that there is such a thing as a UN-sponsored French language day that I find surprising to say the least. Why the French language?! I mean [...]... Read more »
Alexandre Duchêne. (2008) Ideologies Across Nations. Mouton de Gruyter. info:/
- April 2, 2010
- 10:20 PM
- 1,249 views
Death 2.0: Digital Mourning
by Krystal D'Costa in Anthropology in Practice
As today is Good Friday, perhaps it's a good time to talk about death in the digital world. While millions of Catholics engage in rituals of remembering today, I'd like to talk about how Web 2.0 technologies are changing the experience of death for those charged with remembering.
Death has been referred to as the great equalizer—it is the one fate we cannot escape. And cultures around the world
... Read more »
Aggarwal, R. (2001) At the Margins of Death: Ritual Space and the Politics of Location in an Indo-Himalayan Border Village. American Ethnologist, 28(3), 549-573. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2001.28.3.549
Dernbach, Katherine Boris. (2005) Spirits of the Hereafter: Death, Funerary Possession, and the Afterlife in Chuuk, Micronesia. Ethnology, 44(2), 99-123. info:/
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