The determinants of social spending in Spain (1880-1960): Is Lindert right?

[spa] El principal objetivo de este artículo se centra en analizar los orígenes del Estado de Bienestar en España a partir del marco teórico elaborado por Peter Lindert. Con este fin, se ofrece un análisis econométrico de los factores que determinaron la evolución del gasto social público en este país entre 1880 y 1960. Utilizando nueva evidencia cuantitativa, se construyó un panel de datos por quinquenios con el porcentaje de gasto social respecto al PIB desagregado en tres partidas: sanidad, seguridad social y beneficencia. El análisis permite insertar el caso español en el debate internacional y los resultados revelan interesantes singularidades de este país.

The reconstruction of social meaning in the space of flows

Artikkeli on alunperin julkaistu teoksessa: The informational city (1989) / Manuel Castells

How Much Does It Cost? Optimization of Costs in Sequence Analysis of Social Science Data

One major methodological problem in analysis of sequence data is the determination of costs from which distances between sequences are derived. Although this problem is currently not optimally dealt with in the social sciences, it has some similarity with problems that have been solved in bioinformatics for three decades. In this article, the authors propose an optimization of substitution and deletion/insertion costs based on computational methods. The authors provide an empirical way of determining costs for cases, frequent in the social sciences, in which theory does not clearly promote one cost scheme over another. Using three distinct data sets, the authors tested the distances and cluster solutions produced by the new cost scheme in comparison with solutions based on cost schemes associated with other research strategies. The proposed method performs well compared with other cost-setting strategies, while it alleviates the justification problem of cost schemes.

The influence of social structure on brood survival and development in a socially polymorphic ant: insights from a cross-fostering experiment.

Animal societies vary in the number of breeders per group, which affects many socially and ecologically relevant traits. In several social insect species, including our study species Formica selysi, the presence of either one or multiple reproducing females per colony is generally associated with differences in a suite of traits such as the body size of individuals. However, the proximate mechanisms and ontogenetic processes generating such differences between social structures are poorly known. Here, we cross-fostered eggs originating from single-queen (= monogynous) or multiple-queen (= polygynous) colonies into experimental groups of workers from each social structure to investigate whether differences in offspring survival, development time and body size are shaped by the genotype and/or prefoster maternal effects present in the eggs, or by the social origin of the rearing workers. Eggs produced by polygynous queens were more likely to survive to adulthood than eggs from monogynous queens, regardless of the social origin of the rearing workers. However, brood from monogynous queens grew faster than brood from polygynous queens. The social origin of the rearing workers influenced the probability of brood survival, with workers from monogynous colonies rearing more brood to adulthood than workers from polygynous colonies. The social origin of eggs or rearing workers had no significant effect on the head size of the resulting workers in our standardized laboratory conditions. Overall, the social backgrounds of the parents and of the rearing workers appear to shape distinct survival and developmental traits of ant brood.

The co-evolution of social institutions, demography, and large-scale human cooperation.

Human cooperation is typically coordinated by institutions, which determine the outcome structure of the social interactions individuals engage in. Explaining the Neolithic transition from small- to large-scale societies involves understanding how these institutions co-evolve with demography. We study this using a demographically explicit model of institution formation in a patch-structured population. Each patch supports both social and asocial niches. Social individuals create an institution, at a cost to themselves, by negotiating how much of the costly public good provided by cooperators is invested into sanctioning defectors. The remainder of their public good is invested in technology that increases carrying capacity, such as irrigation systems. We show that social individuals can invade a population of asocials, and form institutions that support high levels of cooperation. We then demonstrate conditions where the co-evolution of cooperation, institutions, and demographic carrying capacity creates a transition from small- to large-scale social groups.

The evolution of social discounting in hierarchically clustered populations.

The expression of a social behaviour may affect the fitness of actors and recipients living in the present and in the future of the population. When there is a risk that a future reward will not be experienced in such a context, the value of that reward should be discounted; but by how much? Here, we evaluate social discount rates for delayed fitness rewards to group of recipients living at different positions in both space and time than the actor in a hierarchically clustered population. This is a population where individuals are grouped into families, families into villages, villages into clans, and so on, possibly ad infinitum. The group-wide fitness effects are assumed to either increase or decrease the fecundity or the survival of recipients and can be arbitrarily extended in space and time. We find that actions changing the survival of individuals living in the future are generally more strongly discounted than fecundity-changing actions for all future times and that the value of future rewards increases as individuals live longer. We also find that delayed fitness effects may not only be discounted by a constant factor per unit delay (exponential discounting), but that, as soon as there is localized dispersal in a population, discounting per unit delay is likely to fall rapidly for small delays and then slowly for longer delays (hyperbolic discounting). As dispersal tends to be localized in natural populations, our results suggest that evolution is likely to favour individuals that express present-biased behaviours and that may be time-inconsistent with respect to their group-wide effects.

Characterization and discrimination of soils by their reflected electromagnetic energy

The objective of this work was to verify if reflected energy of soils can characterize and discriminate them. A spectroradiometer (Spectral reflectance between: 400-2,500 nm) was utilized in laboratory. The soils evaluated are located in Bauru region, SP, Brazil, and are classified as Typic Argiudoll (TR), Typic Eutrorthox (LR), Typic Argiudoll (PE), Typic Haplortox (LE), Typic Paleudalf (PV) and Typic Quartzipsamment (AQ). They were characterized by their spectral reflectance as for descriptive conventional methods (Brazilian and International) according to the types of spectral curves. A method for the spectral descriptive evaluation of soils was established. It was possible to characterize and discriminate the soils by their spectral reflectance, with exception for LR and TR. The spectral differences were better identified by the general shape of spectral curves, by the intensity of band absorption and angle tendencies. These characteristics were mainly influenced by organic matter, iron, granulometry and mineralogy constituents. A reduction of iron and clay contents, which influenced higher reflectance intensity and shape variations, occurred on the soils LR/TR, PE, LE, PV and AQ, on that sequence. Soils of the same group with different clay textures could be discriminated. The conventional descriptive evaluation of spectral curves was less efficient on discriminating soils. Simulated orbital data discriminated soils mainly by bands 5 and 7.

EEG windowed statistical wavelet scoring for evaluation and discrimination of muscular artifacts

EEG recordings are usually corrupted by spurious extra-cerebral artifacts, which should be rejected or cleaned up by the practitioner. Since manual screening of human EEGs is inherently error prone and might induce experimental bias, automatic artifact detection is an issue of importance. Automatic artifact detection is the best guarantee for objective and clean results. We present a new approach, based on the time–frequency shape of muscular artifacts, to achieve reliable and automatic scoring. The impact of muscular activity on the signal can be evaluated using this methodology by placing emphasis on the analysis of EEG activity. The method is used to discriminate evoked potentials from several types of recorded muscular artifacts—with a sensitivity of 98.8% and a specificity of 92.2%. Automatic cleaning ofEEGdata are then successfully realized using this method, combined with independent component analysis. The outcome of the automatic cleaning is then compared with the Slepian multitaper spectrum based technique introduced by Delorme et al (2007 Neuroimage 34 1443–9).

The University of Iowa School of Social Work National Poetry Contest for Social Workers.

After 21 years of hosting the Creative Writing Seminar for Helping Professionals, in 2012 the School expanded its efforts to reach social workers and showcase their creativity through a national poetry competition. For more information about creative writing at Iowa, please go to page 42.

Investigation of ICA algorithms for feature extraction of EEG signals in discrimination of Alzheimer disease

In this paper we present a quantitative comparisons of different independent component analysis (ICA) algorithms in order to investigate their potential use in preprocessing (such as noise reduction and feature extraction) the electroencephalogram (EEG) data for early detection of Alzhemier disease (AD) or discrimination between AD (or mild cognitive impairment, MCI) and age-match control subjects.

Modeling the Emergence of Social Structure from a Phylogenetic Point of View

Based on provious (Hemelrijk 1998; Puga-González, Hildenbrant & Hemelrijk 2009), we have developed an agent-based model and software, called A-KinGDom, which allows us to simulate the emergence of the social structure in a group of non-human primates. The model includes dominance and affiliative interactions and incorporate s two main innovations (preliminary dominance interactions and a kinship factor), which allow us to define four different attack and affiliative strategies. In accordance with these strategies, we compared the data obtained under four simulation conditions with the results obtained in a provious study (Dolado & Beltran 2012) involving empirical observations of a captive group of mangabeys (Cercocebus torquatus)

Neural substrates of social emotion regulation: a FMRI study on imitation and expressive suppression to dynamic facial signals.

Emotion regulation is crucial for successfully engaging in social interactions. Yet, little is known about the neural mechanisms controlling behavioral responses to emotional expressions perceived in the face of other people, which constitute a key element of interpersonal communication. Here, we investigated brain systems involved in social emotion perception and regulation, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 20 healthy participants. The latter saw dynamic facial expressions of either happiness or sadness, and were asked to either imitate the expression or to suppress any expression on their own face (in addition to a gender judgment control task). fMRI results revealed higher activity in regions associated with emotion (e.g., the insula), motor function (e.g., motor cortex), and theory of mind (e.g., [pre]cuneus) during imitation. Activity in dorsal cingulate cortex was also increased during imitation, possibly reflecting greater action monitoring or conflict with own feeling states. In addition, premotor regions were more strongly activated during both imitation and suppression, suggesting a recruitment of motor control for both the production and inhibition of emotion expressions. Expressive suppression (eSUP) produced increases in dorsolateral and lateral prefrontal cortex typically related to cognitive control. These results suggest that voluntary imitation and eSUP modulate brain responses to emotional signals perceived from faces, by up- and down-regulating activity in distributed subcortical and cortical networks that are particularly involved in emotion, action monitoring, and cognitive control.

Models of social networks based on social distance attachment

We propose a class of models of social network formation based on a mathematical abstraction of the concept of social distance. Social distance attachment is represented by the tendency of peers to establish acquaintances via a decreasing function of the relative distance in a representative social space. We derive analytical results (corroborated by extensive numerical simulations), showing that the model reproduces the main statistical characteristics of real social networks: large clustering coefficient, positive degree correlations, and the emergence of a hierarchy of communities. The model is confronted with the social network formed by people that shares confidential information using the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption algorithm, the so-called web of trust of PGP.