Community-based Crisis Response: Evidence from Sierra Leone’s Ebola Outbreak

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model designed to allay fears about western medical care and, thus, encourage early reporting, isolation, and treatment. We employ new panel data on reported Ebola cases and a difference-in-difference design and find that Community Care Centers dramatically increased reporting, potentially reducing the spread of Ebola. Our results highlight how community-based efforts to increase confidence in health systems can be critical for crisis management

Os fundamentos geográficos da política externa

Foreign policy is linked to the vital space of the State, wherein it has developed; the first duty of the State being its maintenance and expansion if possible. Simultaneously, within the State a policy that allows the capacity to be self-sufficient (autarchy) must be defined. Demographic pressure urges Germany and Japan to increase their vital space by necessity, in contrast with the great space availability in the old and new colonial powers; thus, a smart foreign policy in Germany should search for an alliance with Japan ―without disregarding one with Russia―. Centrifugal tendencies in Germany are associated to different vital space experiences in its component parts that make some of its leaders underestimate the territorial losses occurred in the wake of the First World War. Geopolitics must be, above all, a tool to construct an effective foreign policy that must be transmitted onto the people in order to secure the construction of the State.La política exterior está vinculada al espacio vital del Estado, en el que éste se ha desarrollado, y es su primer deber mantenerlo y agrandarlo si cabe. Al mismo tiempo, en el interior del Estado se tiene que definir una política que preserve la capacidad de bastarse por sí mismo (autarquía). La presión demográfica en Alemania y Japón aboca necesariamente a estos Estados a aumentar su espacio vital, en contraste con la gran disponibilidad de espacio de las viejas y nuevas potencias coloniales; por este motivo, una política exterior alemana inteligente debería buscar una alianza con Japón ―sin desechar otra con Rusia―. Las tendencias centrífugas en Alemania se asocian a diferentes experiencias de espacio vital en sus partes componentes, que hacen minusvalorar a algunos de sus dirigentes las pérdidas territoriales acaecidas tras la Primera Guerra Mundial. La geopolítica debe de ser, ante todo, una herramienta para construir una política exterior eficaz, que ha de ser transmitida al pueblo para afianzar la construcción del Estado.A política externa está vinculada ao espaço vital do Estado, no qual este se desenvolveu, e é o seu primeiro dever mantê-lo e, se possível, ampliá-lo. Ao mesmo tempo, no interior do Estado é preciso definir uma política que preserve a capacidade de bastar-se em si mesmo (autarquia). A pressão demográfica na Alema-nha e no Japão leva necessariamente esses Estados a aumentar seu espaço vital, em contraste com a grande disponibilidade de espaço das velhas e novas potências coloniais; por esse motivo, uma política externa alemã inteligente deveria buscar uma aliança com o Japão – sem descartar outra com a Rússia. As tendências centrífugas na Alemanha estão associadas a diferentes experiências de espaço vital em suas partes compo-nentes, que fazem alguns de seus líderes menosprezarem as perdas territoriais ocorridas após a Primeira Guerra Mundial. A geopolítica deve ser, antes de tudo, uma ferramenta para construir uma política externa eficaz, que deve ser transmitida ao povo de modo a fortalecer a construção do Estado

For Love or Money: A Common Neural Currency for Social and Monetary Reward

Two papers in the current issue of Neuron (Izuma et al. and Zink et al.) report that activity in specific regions of the brain, especially the striatum, reflects a common signal of reward in both the economic (e.g., money) and social (e.g., praise and status) domains

Multivariate Patterns in Object-Selective Cortex Dissociate Perceptual and Physical Shape Similarity

Prior research has identified the lateral occipital complex (LOC) as a critical cortical region for the representation of object shape in humans. However, little is known about the nature of the representations contained in the LOC and their relationship to the perceptual experience of shape. We used human functional MRI to measure the physical, behavioral, and neural similarity between pairs of novel shapes to ask whether the representations of shape contained in subregions of the LOC more closely reflect the physical stimuli themselves, or the perceptual experience of those stimuli. Perceptual similarity measures for each pair of shapes were obtained from a psychophysical same-different task; physical similarity measures were based on stimulus parameters; and neural similarity measures were obtained from multivoxel pattern analysis methods applied to anterior LOC (pFs) and posterior LOC (LO). We found that the pattern of pairwise shape similarities in LO most closely matched physical shape similarities, whereas shape similarities in pFs most closely matched perceptual shape similarities. Further, shape representations were similar across participants in LO but highly variable across participants in pFs. Together, these findings indicate that activation patterns in subregions of object-selective cortex encode objects according to a hierarchy, with stimulus-based representations in posterior regions and subjective and observer-specific representations in anterior regions

Measuring and bounding experimenter demand

We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We present a model in which participants respond to their beliefs about the researcher's objectives. Bounds are obtained by manipulating those beliefs with "demand treatments." We apply the method to 11 classic tasks, and estimate bounds averaging 0.13 standard deviations, suggesting that typical demand effects are probably modest. We also show how to compute demand-robust treatment effects and how to structurally estimate the model

Repressionen und Gewalt gegen Journalisten im Spiegel der russischen Presse

Es geht um die in den letzten Jahren in Russland stattgefundenen Repressionen und Gewalt gegenüber Vertretern der Presse und anderen Medien. In der Arbeit wurde außerdem untersucht, wie sich die Berichterstattung zu bestimmten Fällen verändert hat

Pressekarikaturen in der Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise

Die Arbeit behandelte Karikaturen der Tageszeitungen in der Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise. Von Interesse war, welche Personen, Insitutionen und Nationalitäten in den Fokus der Kritik gerückt wurden