How cult leader Charles Manson was able to manipulate his ‘family’ to commit murder

On the occasion of Charles Manson's death, this blog analysed the coercive control exerted by Manson on his followers which resulted in them committing numerous murders upon his instructions but without him being present when they occurred. Factors including Manson's charisma, optimism bias, drug-induced altered states of consciousness, and the promise of a revolution in which the followers would hold privileged status were considered

Domestic abuse : even the judges are getting it wrong

A judge in a recent court case involving domestic abuse stated that the victim of abuse had not been vulnerable because of her university education and circle of supportive friends. The authors comment on the nature of coercive control, and the lack of understanding about the universal vulnerability to domestic abuse, which is not mitigated by education or social support

New class of thermosetting plastics has improved strength, thermal and chemical stability

New class of thermosetting plastics has high hydrocarbon content, high stiffness, thermal stability, humidity resistance, and workability in the precured state. It is designated cyclized polydiene urethane, and is applicable as matrices to prepare chemically stable ablative materials for rocket nose cones of nozzles

TACC COVID-19 Twitter Dataset Enables Social Science Research about Pandemic

You're viewing a past article from the Good Systems Grand Challenge team at The University of Texas at Austin about COVID-19 published in May 2020.Office of the VP for Researc

Changes in Social Structure, Class, and Stratification: The Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN)

We present an overview of the intellectual foundations and some major research questions and topics of the Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN). Carried out since 1988 in 5-year intervals, with the latest in 2013, POLPAN is the longest continuously run panel survey on changes in social structure, class and stratification in Central and Eastern Europe. The 2018 round is in planning. POLPAN is strongly anchored in recent theoretical innovations surrounding analyses of social structure and its change, as well as in the most up-to-date survey methodology. As such, POLPAN has major substantive and methodological contributions. Substantively, POLPAN constitutes a breakthrough that stems from taking into account individuals' life courses in a long time span. Methodologically, POLPAN enhances knowledge about how to conduct long-term panel studies and how to assess the quality of this type of data. Social scientists interested in the dynamics of social structure, class, and stratification, as well as political attitudes and behaviors, have a wealth of data with which to address timeless and timely research questions from a variety of perspectives and fields

Cross-National Measures of Political Inequality of Voice

Social scientists have long argued that political power is a key dimension of stratification, yet few empirically analyze political inequality or explicitly discuss the methodological implications of their measures of it. Political inequality is a distinct dimension of social stratification and a form of power inequality whose domain is all things related to political processes. It is a multidimensional concept–comprised of voice, response, and policy–that occurs in all types of governance structures. Conceptions of political inequality of voice reflect the well-established finding that position within the social and political structure impacts individual and group political influence. I argue that definitions and measures of political inequality of voice should focus on the extent of influence given its connection, but not reduction, to economic resources. This article proposes and evaluates cross-national structural measures of political inequality of voice based on the relationship between socioeconomic status and political participation. I explore the relationships between the measures and the rankings of European countries using data from the European Social Survey 2008 and the Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy 2008’s “political participation” category

Decomposition of Long-term Changes in Political Opinions According to Group-Specific Markov Processes

;In this paper I use longitudinal data for Poland to test the assumption that political opinion change through time is not entirely due to some universal and time-constant processes; rather, it depends on the initial conditions in a person’s state. Information on Poles’ evaluations of the past socialist regime available for repeated intervals, and over a sufficiently long time period—ten years—allows me to decompose long-term changes in assessment of socialism into short-term change, and the reliability of responses according to group-specific Markov processes. I obtain three types of stochastic matrices: Mt, t+10, Mt, t+1, Mrel = R, where M refers to a matrix of opinions in time t by opinions in subsequent time, t refers to specific years, and R is the reliability matrix from the measurement of opinions in one-month period. To assess the fit of the observed transition matrix for the 10-year period as a linear combination of matrices Mt, t+1 and Mrel, I apply the random effect maximum likelihood function in STATA, with the bootstrap option for obtaining the standard errors of the coefficients. Results demonstrate that Markovtype processes do not have significant explanatory power for long-term change in opinions about socialism. Substantively, this means that the ‘subjective’ legacy of the past, namely peoples’ views of the former regime, matters

Choosing among Discrete Choice Models for Voting Behavior

Analyses presented in this paper aim at testing demographic cues hypothesis, which explains voting behavior as a function of the distance between the voter and the object of the vote, expressed as demographic similarity. Four types of multivariate regression models–binomial logistic (BNL), multinomial logistic (MNL), contrast logistic (CONTRAST), and conditional logistic (CLOGIT)–are applied to explain vote choice among Polish parties in the 1997 parliamentary election. For all models I use survey data combined with information on political parties derived from characteristics of the electoral candidates. The results demonstrate that for testing demographic cues hypothesis CLOGIT and BNL are the most advisable options in terms of elucidation of the regression coefficients; MNL and CONTRAST involve cumbersome interpretation and their fit to the theory is questionable

Investigation of resin systems for improved ablative materials Final report, 19 Jun. 1964 - 31 Jul. 1965

Resin systems investigated for improving ablative materials for use with fluorine-containing liquid propellant system