Digital inequalities in Europe are underpinned by divides in children’s access, interest and confidence

Recent research on digital inequalities has focused predominantly on the differences in internet use and digital competencies, while indirectly assuming that inequalities in access to devices and internet connection have been superseded to a large extent. Yet, the coronavirus pandemic showed a different reality when images of children sitting outside fast-food restaurants trying to get connected to be able to do their schoolwork went viral on social media. It quickly became apparent that not all children in Europe are equally able to take advantage of online opportunities raising concerns about the consequences of digital deprivation on children’s education, social connectedness, and leisure activities. For www.parenting.digital, Sara Ayllón discusses her recent work on digital inequality in Europe and the role of multiple disadvantages on children’s prospects

Reforms, Remoteness and Risk in Africa: Understanding Inequality and Poverty during the 1990s

reforms, remoteness, risk, poverty, Africa

What's the big idea? A critical exploration of the concept of social capital and its incorporation into leisure policy discourse

Starting from the overwhelming welcome that Putnam's (2000) treatise on social capital has received in government circles, we consider its relative merits for examining and understanding the role for leisure in policy strategies. To perform this critique we identify some of the key points from Putnam's work and also illustrate how it has been incorporated into a body of leisure studies literature. This is then extended to a discussion of the methodological and theoretical underpinnings of his approach and its link to civic communitarianism. We suggest that the seduction of the 'niceness' of Putnam's formulation of social capital not only misses the point of the grimness of some people's lives but it also pays little attention to Bourdieu's point that poorer community groups tend to be at the mercy of forces over which they have little control. We argue that if the poor have become a silent emblem of the ways in which the state has more and more individualised its relationship with its citizens, it is they who also tend to be blamed for their own poverty because it is presumed that they lack social capital. This in turn encourages 'us' to determine what is appropriate for 'them'. As a critical response to this situation, we propose that Bourdieu's take on different forms of 'capital' offers more productive lines for analysis. From there we go on to suggest that it might be profitable to combine Bourdieu's sociology with Sennett's recent interpretation of 'respect' to formulate a central interpretive role for community leisure practitioners - recast as cultural intermediaries - if poorer community groups are to be better included. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

Perfectly Secure Communication, based on Graph-Topological Addressing in Unique-Neighborhood Networks

We consider network graphs $G=(V,E)$ in which adjacent nodes share common secrets. In this setting, certain techniques for perfect end-to-end security (in the sense of confidentiality, authenticity (implying integrity) and availability, i.e., CIA+) can be made applicable without end-to-end shared secrets and without computational intractability assumptions. To this end, we introduce and study the concept of a unique-neighborhood network, in which nodes are uniquely identifiable upon their graph-topological neighborhood. While the concept is motivated by authentication, it may enjoy wider applicability as being a technology-agnostic (yet topology aware) form of addressing nodes in a network

Diversity of graphs with highly variable connectivity

A popular approach for describing the structure of many complex networks focuses on graph theoretic properties that characterize their large-scale connectivity. While it is generally recognized that such descriptions based on aggregate statistics do not uniquely characterize a particular graph and also that many such statistical features are interdependent, the relationship between competing descriptions is not entirely understood. This paper lends perspective on this problem by showing how the degree sequence and other constraints (e.g., connectedness, no self-loops or parallel edges) on a particular graph play a primary role in dictating many features, including its correlation structure. Building on recent work, we show how a simple structural metric characterizes key differences between graphs having the same degree sequence. More broadly, we show how the (often implicit) choice of a background set against which to measure graph features has serious implications for the interpretation and comparability of graph theoretic descriptions