Search results for "world"

Open Access Publishing as a Bridge Across the Digital Divide

2007

In today’s world of snappy catchphrases, the complexity of a phenomenon is often hiddenbehind the simplicity of the terminology. Take, for instance, the concept of the digital divide.In short, the term means that there is a gap between those people who have effective access todigital technologies (and all the benefits that brings) and those who do not (Organization forEconomic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2001; Selhofer & Husing, 2002). Whilethe definition seems simple enough, in fact, there are numerous reasons for the technologygap among people in the world. Typical reasons for the digital divide include material access(i.e., no access to a computer, lack of access to specific soft…

‘Whose side are you on?’: negotiations between individual liberty and collective responsibility in Millar and McNiven’sMarvel Civil War

2015

The Civil War series by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, published between July 2006 and January 2007, involves superheroes in a battle among themselves as an allegory for political conflicts of the United States, post-Patriot Act. Akin to Alan Moore’s Watchmen and the Uncanny X-Men series, Civil War centers on a political solution to regulate and control superhero vigilante justice. The rhetoric represented by the conflicting factions orbits the concerns of individual liberty vs. collective responsibility, with Captain America (a World War Two and Cold War warrior) siding most adamantly against government supervision and Iron Man fighting in favor of government control. The civil war played …

Brain, Sociobiology, and Evolution in Primates

1981

Socialization in primates can be understood essentially as a function of the information processing ability of the CNS, which can be roughly measured in terms of relative brain size in closely related species groups. Both the cephalization constant (Hemmer 1971, 1974) and the extra neuron number (Jerison 1964, 1973) may be used for relevant quantification, as there is a highly significant correlation of both parameters in primates (7 ape species: r = 0.97, 20 Old World monkey species: r = 0.99; Hemmer 1978). The author has shown in a previous paper (Hemmer 1979) close negative correlations of relative brain size and the social organization as expressed in troop size (r = −0.92) and of relat…

Secrets to design an effective message on Facebook: an application to a touristic destination based on big data analysis

2018

The objective of this research is to identify which are the key variables for designing a message in a social network that can be used by an advertiser to generate Positive/Negative Engagement. The...

Children with their dreams – what kind of reveries are accepted in school context?

2011

The media and the contemporary consumer culture are central categories in modern childhood. They have opened new kinds of experiences and learning situations for children. In this article we are interested in the role of the media and consumption in schoolchildren's daily life. The data consist of writings and drawings of 7–12-year-old schoolchildren. Children have told us about their dreams, social worlds and doings in the mediated world. By asking children about all these things we are most likely able to find out how modern childhood and the learning situations in the class are influenced by the media and consumer goods. It is important to analyse children's experiences in the virtual en…

Collective memory and political generations: A survey of German journalists

1993

Abstract In 1989, just before German reunification, 498 German journalists were asked to indicate which, from a list of 34 major historical events, such as the end of World War II, the 1949 German currency reform, the building of the Berlin wall, the student movement, and the Chernobyl disaster, they vividly remembered, which still oriented their political thinking, and their political reaction to these events. While some events stand out for all ages, younger journalists, having no memory of World War II and its aftermath, focused more exclusively on such recent events as Chernobyl and the discovery of the AIDS virus. The dominant thrust from recent historical experiences on all age groups…

Perceived Corruption and Individuals’ Life Satisfaction: The Mediating Role of Institutional Trust

2018

Corruption degrades the quality of institutions, increases economic inequality and limits growth. Recent studies indicate that corruption is also associated with lower satisfaction with life. This research examines a potential explanation for this association and investigates the role of institutional trust in mediating the linkage between perceived corruption and satisfaction with life. Specifically, in two studies, we tested the novel hypothesises that perceived corruption affects life satisfaction indirectly by undermining individuals’ confidence in institutions. Study 1 (N = 251) involved an opportunity sample from the US. Study 2 (N = 9508) analysed data from the World Value Survey and…

2018

With a mounting communist threat from Eastern Europe after the Second World War, in Western Europe an attempt was made to create permanent structures not only to help in facilitating cooperation in...

An Unlikely Refuge: Latvia’s Women Volunteers in the Red Army in World War II

2020

This article examines women’s wartime experiences with a focus on Latvia’s women volunteers in the Red Army in World War II. An estimated 8 percent of the Red Army was composed of women, who played a wide array of roles, including as snipers, combat engineers, medics, and frontline journalists. This level of female participation was unique in World War II, but a close examination of the phenomenon shows that motives and means for entry into the Red Army at the beginning of the war were not uniform. Our examination of the case of women volunteers from the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic reveals key factors that fed women’s fervent desire to “get to the front.” It shows particular ways in …

Digital transparency and Web 2.0 in Spanish city councils

2016

Abstract The purpose of this study is to provide a Web 2.0 Disclosure Index to measure the Web 2.0 presence of Spanish city councils and the information disclosed by them on these media, and to test whether the use of Web 2.0 tools and social media by local governments improve their Web 1.0 digital transparency. We have structured the Web 2.0 Index as the sum of three partial indexes, referred to presence, the content and the interactivity of the Web, and we have estimated these indexes by a content analysis of the city council's websites. We find that the use of Web 2.0 tools has an essentially ornamental focus, and thus it is necessary to increase the content disclosed, especially at the …