The Economic Resource Receipt of New Mothers

U.S. federal policies do not provide a universal social safety net of economic support for women during pregnancy or the immediate postpartum period but assume that employment and/or marriage will protect families from poverty. Yet even mothers with considerable human and marital capital may experience disruptions in employment, earnings, and family socioeconomic status postbirth. We use the National Survey of Families and Households to examine the economic resources that mothers with children ages 2 and younger receive postbirth, including employment, spouses, extended family and social network support, and public assistance. Results show that many new mothers receive resources postbirth. Marriage or postbirth employment does not protect new mothers and their families from poverty, but education, race, and the receipt of economic supports from social networks do

Affection, virtue, pleasure, and profit: Developing an understanding of friendship closeness and intimacy in western and Asian societies

The development of friendship understanding has rarely been explored from a cross-cultural perspective. In this study, children and adolescents from Iceland, China, Russia, and the former East Germany were investigated in one longitudinal and three cross-sectional samples. Children from three different Chinese ecologies were interviewed to account for within-culture variation. Participants were interviewed about friendship closeness and intimacy at ages 7, 9, 12, and 15 years. Their statements were scored according to (a) structural-developmental stages and (b) content aspects of friendship reasoning. Results reveal that the development of friendship reasoning of participants from all societies could be captured by the cognitive-structural stages and content categories developed in western cultures. At the same time, distinct cultural differences emerged, especially between the Russian and Chinese participants, on the one hand, and the Icelandic and East German participants, on the other hand. The within-China analyses reveal little differences for the content aspects of friendship understanding between the three ecologies, but differences in the cognitive-structural aspects of friendship reasoning were found. © 2008 The International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development

IT controls in the public cloud : success factors for allocation of roles and responsibilities

The rapid adoption of cloud computing by organizations has resulted in the transformation of the roles and responsibilities of staff in managing the information technology (IT) resources (via IT governance controls) that have migrated to the cloud. Hence, the objective of this research is to provide a set of success factors that can assist IT managers to allocate the roles and responsibilities of IT controls appropriately to staff to manage the migrated IT resources. Accordingly, we generated a set of success factors from behavioral and information systems (IS) literature. These success factors were verified using in-depth interviews of executives from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The empirical intervention suggests that the role allocation is driven predominantly by people’s skills, competencies, organizational strategy, structures, and policies. In addition, the research made clear that the most significant competency and skill for a person allocated to IT controls is to be able to evaluate and manage a cloud service provider, especially in terms of risks, compliance, and security issues related to public cloud technology. The findings of this study not only offer new insights for scholars and practitioners involved in assigning responsibilities but also provide extensions for IT governance framework authorities to align their guidelines to the emerging cloud technology

Daughter-Specific Transcription Factors Regulate Cell Size Control in Budding Yeast

The asymmetric localization of cell fate determinants results in asymmetric cell cycle control in budding yeast