Representation of women in the parliament of the Weimar republic: Evidence from roll call votes

This is the post-print version of the article which has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input in Politics and Gender. Copyright @ Cambridge University Press.In modern democracies, the representation of voter interests and preferences is primarily the job of political parties and their elected officials. These patterns can however change when issues are at stake that concern the interests of social groups represented by all relevant parties of a political system. In this article we focus on the behavior of female MPs in the parliament of Weimar Germany and, thus, in a parliament where legislative party discipline was very high. On the basis of a dataset containing information on the legislative voting behavior of MPs, we show that gender, even when controlling for a battery of further theoretically derived explanatory factors, had a decisive impact on the MPs’ voting behavior on a law proposal to curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.Zukunftskolleg (University of Konstanz) and the German Research Foundatio

The evolution of leader-follower reciprocity: The theory of service-for-prestige

Copyright © 2014 Price and Van Vugt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.We describe the service-for-prestige theory of leadership, which proposes that voluntary leader–follower relations evolved in humans via a process of reciprocal exchange that generated adaptive benefits for both leaders and followers. We propose that although leader–follower relations first emerged in the human lineage to solve problems related to information sharing and social coordination, they ultimately evolved into exchange relationships whereby followers could compensate leaders for services which would otherwise have been prohibitively costly for leaders to provide. In this exchange, leaders incur costs to provide followers with public goods, and in return, followers incur costs to provide leaders with prestige (and associated fitness benefits). Because whole groups of followers tend to gain from leader-provided public goods, and because prestige is costly for followers to produce, the provisioning of prestige to leaders requires solutions to the “free rider” problem of disrespectful followers (who benefit from leader services without sharing the costs of producing prestige). Thus service-for-prestige makes the unique prediction that disrespectful followers of beneficial leaders will be targeted by other followers for punitive sentiment and/or social exclusion. Leader–follower relations should be more reciprocal and mutually beneficial when leaders and followers have more equal social bargaining power. However, as leaders gain more relative power, and their high status becomes less dependent on their willingness to pay the costs of benefitting followers, service-for-prestige predicts that leader–follower relations will become based more on leaders’ ability to dominate and exploit rather than benefit followers. We review evidential support for a set of predictions made by service-for-prestige, and discuss how service-for-prestige relates to social neuroscience research on leadership

A Comparison of Sociodemographic Correlates of Cigarette, Alcohol, and Energy Drink Consumption among High School Students in the United States, 2010-2015

OBJECTIVE: Despite growing awareness about the harmful physiological effects of energy drinks, especially among young people, there is little regulation governing the marketing and sale of these products to adolescents. Thus, in contrast to substances such as cigarettes and alcohol, energy drinks are readily available to adolescents, and widely consumed. It is not known if the easy availability of energy drinks has the effect of increasing usage of these substances among adolescents, and reducing sociodemographic differences in the consumption of energy drinks. In this study, we use pooled data (2010-2015) from the nationally representative Monitoring the Future survey (n=43,283), to compare consumption of energy drinks with other substance use, and to compare the sociodemographic correlates of energy drink consumption among high school students (10th and 12th grade) with those of cigarette and alcohol consumption. METHODS: Covariate-adjusted estimates for prevalence of consumption of energy drinks, cigarettes, and alcohol for each of different sociodemographic strata were obtained via logistic regression analysis. Additional analyses examined the extent to which socioeconomic disparities in prevalence of consumption of energy drinks are predicated by cigarette smoking and alcohol use. RESULTS: While the patterning of differences in energy drink use by sex, grade, race and parental education (as a measure of socioeconomic status) were similar to those seen in cigarette smoking and ever-use of alcohol, the magnitude of differences across subgroups varied across these behaviors. Racial/ethnic, socioeconomic and age differences were smaller in the case of energy drink use compared to alcohol or cigarette use. Gender differences were larger than in the case of cigarette smoking. In all cases, energy drink use were higher among students who were current users of alcohol or cigarettes, but there was little evidence that sociodemographic variables were differentially associated with energy drink use within these strata. CONCLUSIONS: Ready availability of energy drinks has resulted in elevated use of these products relative to cigarette smoking and alcohol, and some narrowing of socioeconomic differentials in use. Regardless of socioeconomic status, use of energy drinks is higher among current users of cigarettes and / or alcohol

Effect of pressure on the electronic structure of hcp Titanium

The effect of pressure on the hexagonal close-packed structure of titanium is investigated. The lattice parameters of the equilibrium structure were determined in terms of the Gibbs free energy using the Epitaxial Bain Path method. When this process was repeated for several pressures, the effect of pressure on the lattice parameters was revealed. The calculated lattice parameters were in good agreement with the experimental and theoretical results. The effects of pressure on parameters depending on the electronic structure such as conductivity and resistivity in the ground state were also investigated up to 30 GPa using density functional theory.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figure

Observations related to chronologic and gynecologic age in pregnant adolescents.

A low chronologic age (less than or equal to 15 years) and low gynecologic age (less than or equal to 2 years) have been considered factors that increase medical complications among adolescent pregnant women. Gynecologic age (GA) is defined in this study as age in years at conception minus age at menarche. Two hundred twelve consecutive pregnant teenagers were followed prospectively in the Teen OB Clinic at the University of California, San Diego Medical Center, between August 1978 and July 1981. The clinic population consisted of 37.3 percent Whites, 35.8 percent Hispanics, 20.8 percent Blacks, and 6.1 percent other (mostly Indochinese). Sixty-eight percent of the patients were funded by MediCal. The patient population was divided by chronological age (CA) at conception into those 15 years or less or 16 years or older. A low chronological age was found to be a significant risk factor for premature rupture of membranes. Teenagers with a low gynecologic age (less than or equal to 2) had a lower mean pre-pregnancy weight and body mass index (Kg/M2) than teenagers with a higher gynecologic age. In this study, we did not find that a low CA or GA was correlated with a higher frequency of pregnancy-induced hypertension, prenatal medical problems, obstetrical problems at labor or delivery, or an excessive number of low-birthweight infants

Black-hole binaries: life begins at 40 keV

In the study of black-hole transients, an important problem that still needs to be answered is how the high-energy part of the spectrum evolves from the low-hard to the high-soft state, given that they have very different properties. Recent results obtained with RXTE and INTEGRAL have given inconsistent results. With RXTE, we have found that the high-energy cutoff in GX 339-4 during the transition first decreases (during the low-hard state), then increases again across the Hard-Intermediate state, to become unmeasurable in the soft states (possibly because of statistical limitations). We show Simbol-X will be able to determine the spectral shape with superb accuracy. As the high-energy part of the spectrum is relatively less known than the one below 20 keV, Simbol-X will provide important results that will help out understanding of the extreme physical conditions in the vicinity of a stellar-mass black hole.Comment: Proc. "Simbol-X: Focusing on the Hard X-Ray Universe", Paris, 2-5 Dec. 2008, ed. J. Rodriguez and P. Ferrando; 4 pages, 3 figure

Progress in Time-Dependent Density-Functional Theory

The classic density-functional theory (DFT) formalism introduced by Hohenberg, Kohn, and Sham in the mid-1960s, is based upon the idea that the complicated N-electron wavefunction can be replaced with the mathematically simpler 1-electron charge density in electronic struc- ture calculations of the ground stationary state. As such, ordinary DFT is neither able to treat time-dependent (TD) problems nor describe excited electronic states. In 1984, Runge and Gross proved a theorem making TD-DFT formally exact. Information about electronic excited states may be obtained from this theory through the linear response (LR) theory formalism. Begin- ning in the mid-1990s, LR-TD-DFT became increasingly popular for calculating absorption and other spectra of medium- and large-sized molecules. Its ease of use and relatively good accuracy has now brought LR-TD-DFT to the forefront for this type of application. As the number and the diversity of applications of TD-DFT has grown, so too has grown our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the approximate functionals commonly used for TD-DFT. The objective of this article is to continue where a previous review of TD-DFT in this series [Annu. Rev. Phys. Chem. 55: 427 (2004)] left off and highlight some of the problems and solutions from the point of view of applied physical chemistry. Since doubly-excited states have a particularly important role to play in bond dissociation and formation in both thermal and photochemistry, particular emphasis will be placed upon the problem of going beyond or around the TD-DFT adiabatic approximation which limits TD-DFT calculations to nominally singly-excited states. Posted with permission from the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, Volume 63 \c{opyright} 2012 by Annual Reviews, http://www.annualreviews.org

Geographical trends in research: a preliminary analysis on authors' affiliations

In the last decade, research literature reached an enormous volume with an unprecedented current annual increase of 1.5 million new publications. As research gets ever more global and new countries and institutions, either from academia or corporate environment, start to contribute with their share, it is important to monitor this complex scenario and understand its dynamics. We present a study on a conference proceedings dataset extracted from Springer Nature Scigraph that illustrates insightful geographical trends and highlights the unbalanced growth of competitive research institutions worldwide. Results emerged from our micro and macro analysis show that the distributions among countries of institutions and papers follow a power law, and thus very few countries keep producing most of the papers accepted by high-tier conferences. In addition, we found that the annual and overall turnover rate of the top 5, 10 and 25 countries is extremely low, suggesting a very static landscape in which new entries struggle to emerge. Finally, we highlight the presence of an increasing gap between the number of institutions initiating and overseeing research endeavours (i.e. first and last authors' affiliations) and the total number of institutions participating in research. As a consequence of our analysis, the paper also discusses our experience in working with affiliations: an utterly simple matter at first glance, that is instead revealed to be a complex research and technical challenge yet far from being solved

The emerging population of pulsar wind nebulae in hard X-rays

The hard X-ray synchrotron emission from pulsar wind nebulae (PWNe) probes energetic particles, closely related to the pulsar injection power at the present time. INTEGRAL has disclosed the yet poorly known population of hard X-ray pulsar/PWN systems. We summarize the properties of the class, with emphasys on the first hard X-ray bow-shock (CTB 80 powered by PSR B1951+32), and highlight some prospects for the study of Pulsar Wind Nebulae with the Simbol-X mission.Comment: Proceedings of the 2nd Simbol-X Symposium, AIP Conf. Proc. Series, Eds. P. Ferrando and J. Rodriguez (4 pages, 2 figures