Cycling Through History: Making an American Sport 1880-present, Blog 1

Student blog posts from the Great VCU Bike Race Book

Organic seeds: towards a transparent European market

The use of organic seeds and propagating material is one of the fundamental principles of organic agriculture. This is reflected in current European regulations which stipulate that the use of organically produced plant reproductive material is mandatory if a crop is to be sold as organic produce

Busting a myth with the Bayes Factor: Effects of letter bigram frequency in visual lexical decision do not reflect reading processes

Psycholinguistic researchers identify linguistic variables and assess if they affect cognitive processes. One such variable is letter bigram frequency, or the frequency with which a given letter pair co-occurs in an orthography. While early studies reported that bigram frequency affects visual lexical decision, subsequent, well-controlled studies not shown this effect. Still, researchers continue to use it as a control variable in psycholinguistic experiments. We propose two reasons for the persistence of this variable: (1) Reporting no significant effect of bigram frequency cannot provide evidence for no effect. (2) Despite empirical work, theoretical implications of bigram frequency are largely neglected. We perform Bayes Factor analyses to address the first issue. In analyses of existing large-scale databases, we find no effect of bigram frequency in lexical decision in the British Lexicon Project, and some evidence for an inhibitory effect in the English Lexicon Project. We find strong evidence for an effect in reading aloud. This suggests that, for lexical decision, the effect is unstable, and may depend on item characteristics and task demands rather than reflecting cognitive processes underlying visual word recognition. We call for more consideration of theoretical implications of the presence or absence of a bigram frequency effect

Social representations of national identity in culturally diverse societies

The concept of identity, although quite recent in the social sciences (it was popularized by Erikson in the 1950s; see Gleason, 1983), is one of the few concepts to have been so widely studies and theorized. Psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, even political philosophers, have used the term to shed light on a variety of sociopolitical phenomena, ranging from belonging to exclusion and from stability and homogeneity to social change and cultural pluralism. As such, identity has acquired an array of conflicting meanings, from essentialist notions which focus on unity and distinctiveness to conceptions which emphasize the fragmentation of the modern subject (Brubaker and Cooper, 2000). The challenge in defining identity stems from the fact that it refers to both an individual's sense of self as well as to an individual's relations with others. It is, in other words, a concept that resists the individual-social dichotomy which has traditionally dominated the social sciences in general, and social psychology in particular. In this chapter we adopt a social representations perspective to theorize identity at the social-individual interface. We focus on national identities which have been particularly problematized in the context of growing cultural diversity within nation-states and are often seen as declining or changing. The chapter is structured as follows: we start with a brief account of the theory of social representations and then present our main argument of identity as a social representation embedded in strategic projects. Then, in two different sections, we discuss national identity projects in culturally diverse societies with a particular focus on Britain and Greece. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of these national identity projects for the integration of migrants

Wage Continuation During Sickness: Observations on Paid Sick Leave Provisions in Times of Crises

[Excerpt] The economic costs of working while sick go far beyond increased health care costs due to treating a significantly higher number of people showing more severe signs of ill health. They also involve costs due to lower productivity and subsequent impacts on economic growth and development, in addition to collective costs of growing health and social inequalities. However, many aspects of social health protection including the role, patterns and costs of paid sick leave are misunderstood or underappreciated especially during times of economic crisis and recession. It is often said that paid sick leave schemes are open to abuse, especially if the benefit levels appear generous. This is undoubtedly a danger, and points to the need for strong administration. However, it is all too easy to overstate the case. ILO analyses of stimulus packages and policies addressing the crises reveal that cuts of social and health budgets are among the first national responses to recover the costs of bailing out those that have contributed to the crisis. Concerned are social health protection measures that provide access to health services and financial protection in case of sickness, such as paid sick leave. Limited evidence is available for governments, employers and workers’ unions on the consequences of gaps in providing for paid sick leave and costs of failing to address the needs of the vulnerable. Developing reliable internationally comparable data is constrained by the complex interplay of health and socio-economic conditions including regulations, labour market structure and vulnerability when taking up paid sick leave. Against this background, this paper seeks to focus on the existing national and international evidence and provides some insights into the concepts, patterns and affordability of paid sick leave in countries throughout the world. Further, it is argued that providing for sick leave and related income replacement is a key component of decent work and should be considered within national social protection floors

Antidumping as Strategic Trade Policy Under Asymmetric Information

This paper investigates the domestic government’s antidumping duty choice in an asymmetric information framework where the foreign firm’s cost is observed by the domestic firm, but not by the government. To induce truthful revelation, the government can design a tariff schedule, contingent on firms’ cost reports, accompanied by a threat of auditing and implementing penalty duties. We show that the antidumping framework within GATT/WTO may not only offer the means to pursue strategic trade policy disguised as fair trade policy, but may also help overcome the informational problems with regard to determining the optimal strategic trade policy.antidumping duties, asymmetric information, trade protection, strategic trade policy

Lightweight Data Integration Frameworks for Clinical Research

Research data from a single clinical study is often spread across multiple applications and systems. We present a reusable, lightweight, secure framework for automatically integrating and querying study data from heterogeneous sources in order to answer routine, operational questions for researchers