Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Sociology

Twenty-nine teams involving 61 analysts used the same data set to address the same research question: whether soccer referees are more likely to give red cards to dark-skin-toned players than to light-skin-toned players. Analytic approaches varied widely across the teams, and the estimated effect sizes ranged from 0.89 to 2.93 ( Mdn = 1.31) in odds-ratio units. Twenty teams (69%) found a statistically significant positive effect, and 9 teams (31%) did not observe a significant relationship. Overall, the 29 different analyses used 21 unique combinations of covariates. Neither analysts’ prior beliefs about the effect of interest nor their level of expertise readily explained the variation in the outcomes of the analyses. Peer ratings of the quality of the analyses also did not account for the variability. These findings suggest that significant variation in the results of analyses of complex data may be difficult to avoid, even by experts with honest intentions. Crowdsourcing data analysis, a strategy in which numerous research teams are recruited to simultaneously investigate the same research question, makes transparent how defensible, yet subjective, analytic choices influence research results.

We examined the association between rate of cholesterol esterification in plasma depleted of apolipoprotein B-containing lipoproteins (FER(HDL)), atherogenic index of plasma (AIP) [(log (TG/HDL-C)], concentrations, and size of lipoproteins and changes in coronary artery stenosis in participants in the HDL-Atherosclerosis Treatment Study. A total of 160 patients was treated with simvastatin (S), niacin (N), antioxidants (A) and placebo (P) in four regimens. FER(HDL) was measured using a radioassay; the size and concentration of lipoprotein subclasses were determined by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The S+N and S+N+A therapy decreased AIP and FER(HDL), reduced total VLDL (mostly the large and medium size particles), decreased total LDL particles (mostly the small size), and increased total HDL particles (mostly the large size). FER(HDL) and AIP correlated negatively with particle sizes of HDL and LDL, positively with VLDL particle size, and closely with each other (r = 0.729). Changes in the proportions of small and large lipoprotein particles, which were reflected by FER(HDL) and AIP, corresponded with findings on coronary angiography. Logistic regression analysis of the changes in the coronary stenosis showed that probability of progression was best explained by FER(HDL) (P = 0.005). FER(HDL) and AIP reflect the actual composition of the lipoprotein spectrum and thus predict both the cardiovascular risk and effectiveness of therapy. AIP is already available for use in clinical practice as it can be readily calculated from the routine lipid profile.

Abstract The present research tested the idea that the ecological impact of intergroup contact on outgroup attitudes can be fully understood only when relative frequency and relative influence of positive and negative contact are considered simultaneously. Participants from five European countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland and Slovakia; N = 1276) freely described their contact experiences with people of neighboring nationalities and then reported on their outgroup attitudes. Contact descriptions were coded for positive versus negative valence and for person versus situation framing. Consistently across the five participant groups, positive intergroup contact was reported to occur three times more frequently than negative intergroup contact; however, positive contact was found to be only weakly related to outgroup attitudes. On the contrary, the less frequent negative (vs. positive) contact was comparatively more influential in shaping outgroup attitudes, especially when negativity was reported around the contact person, rather than the contact situation. This research's findings reconcile contrasting lines of past research on intergroup contact and suggest that the greater prevalence of positive contact may compensate for the greater prominence of negative contact, thus leading to modest net improvements in outgroup attitudes after intergroup contact. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Abstract Meta‐analysis has become the conventional approach to synthesizing the results of empirical economics research. To further improve the transparency and replicability of the reported results and to raise the quality of meta‐analyses, the Meta‐Analysis of Economics Research Network has updated the reporting guidelines that were published by this Journal in 2013. Future meta‐analyses in economics will be expected to follow these updated guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta‐analysis should deviate from them.

The zigzag-edged triangular graphene molecules (ZTGMs) have been predicted to host ferromagnetically coupled edge states with the net spin scaling with the molecular size, which affords large spin tunability crucial for next-generation molecular spintronics. However, the scalable synthesis of large ZTGMs and the direct observation of their edge states have been long-standing challenges because of the molecules' high chemical instability. Here, we report the bottom-up synthesis of π-extended [5]triangulene with atomic precision via surface-assisted cyclodehydrogenation of a rationally designed molecular precursor on metallic surfaces. Atomic force microscopy measurements unambiguously resolve its ZTGM-like skeleton consisting of 15 fused benzene rings, while scanning tunneling spectroscopy measurements reveal edge-localized electronic states. Bolstered by density functional theory calculations, our results show that [5]triangulenes synthesized on Au(111) retain the open-shell π-conjugated character with magnetic ground states.

High-precision measurements by the ATLAS Collaboration are presented of inclusive W + + , W - - and Z / * ( = e, ) Drell-Yan production cross sections at the LHC. The data were collected in proton-proton collisions at s = 7 TeV with an integrated luminosity of 4.6 fb -1 . Differential W + and W - cross sections are measured in a lepton pseudorapidity range | | < 2.5. Differential Z / * cross sections are measured as a function of the absolute dilepton rapidity, for |y | < 3.6, for three intervals of dilepton mass, m , extending from 46 to 150 GeV. The integrated and differential electron-and muon-channel cross sections are combined and compared to theoretical predictions using recent sets of parton distribution functions. The data, together with the final inclusive e p scattering cross-section data from H1 and ZEUS, are interpreted in a next-to-next-to-leading-order QCD analysis, and a new set of parton distribution functions, ATLAS-epWZ16, is obtained. The ratio of strange-to-light sea-quark densities in the proton is determined more accurately than in previous determinations based on collider data only, and is established to be close to unity in the sensitivity range of the data. A new measurement of the CKM matrix element |V cs | is also provided.

Abstract Focussing on the psychosocial dimensions of poverty, the contention that shame lies at the ‘irreducible absolutist core’ of the idea of poverty is examined through qualitative research with adults and children experiencing poverty in diverse settings in seven countries: rural Uganda and India; urban China; Pakistan; South Korea and United Kingdom; and small town and urban Norway. Accounts of the lived experience of poverty were found to be very similar, despite massive disparities in material circumstances associated with locally defined poverty lines, suggesting that relative notions of poverty are an appropriate basis for international comparisons. Though socially and culturally nuanced, shame was found to be associated with poverty in each location, variably leading to pretence, withdrawal, self-loathing, ‘othering’, despair, depression, thoughts of suicide and generally to reductions in personal efficacy. While internally felt, poverty-related shame was equally imposed by the attitudes and behaviour of those not in poverty, framed by public discourse and influenced by the objectives and implementation of anti-poverty policy. The evidence appears to confirm the negative consequences of shame, implicates it as a factor in increasing the persistence of poverty and suggests important implications for the framing, design and delivery of anti-poverty policies.

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This article develops a conceptual framework derived from welfare regime and concomitant literatures to interpret housing reform in post-socialist European countries. In it, settled power structures and collective ideologies are necessary prerequisites for the creation of distinctive housing welfare regimes with clear roles for the state, market and households. Although the defining feature of post-socialist housing has been mass-privatisation to create super-homeownership societies, the emphatic retreat of the state that this represents has not been replaced by the creation of the institutions or cultures required to create fully financialised housing markets. There is, instead, a form of state legacy welfare in the form of debt-free home-ownership, which creates a gap in housing welfare that has been partially filled by households in the form of intergenerational assistance (familialism) and self-build housing. Both of these mark continuities with the previous regime. The latter is especially common in south-east Europe where its frequent illegality represents a form of anti-state housing. The lack of settled ideologies and power structures suggests that these housing welfare regimes by default will persist as part of a process that resembles a path-dependent ‘transformation’ rather than ‘transition’.

The pineal hormone melatonin exhibits a circadian rhythm in body fluids. No data are available on melatonin in human milk. The present study was undertaken to determine whether melatonin is detectable in human milk and, if so, whether it exhibits a daily rhythm. Blood and milk were sampled between 1400-1700 h and again between 0200-0400 h from 10 mothers 3-4 days after delivery. Melatonin in both fluids was beyond the limit of detection during the day, whereas during the night, its concentration was 280 +/- 34 pmol/L in serum and 99 +/- 26 pmol/L in milk. Six mothers collected milk after each feeding throughout 1 24-h period within 3 months after delivery. Melatonin in the milk of all subjects exhibited a pronounced daily rhythm, with high levels during the night and undetectable levels during the day. The presence of the rhythm in milk suggests that melatonin fluctuations in milk might communicate time of day information to breast-fed infants.

Objective: To contribute to the discussion about the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on gender (in)equality. Background: We focus on a core aspect of gender (in)equality in intimate relationships, namely couples’ division of housework and childcare, and whether this has changed during the Corona crisis. Method: Our descriptive analysis is based on pre-release data from the German Family Panel (pairfam; Wave 12) and its supplementary Corona web-survey (n=3,108). Results: We observe no fundamental changes in established aggregate-level patterns of couples’ division of labor, but some shift towards the extremes ('traditional' and 'role reversal') of the distribution. Regarding changes within couples, there is an almost equal split between those in which the female partner’s share in housework and childcare increased and those in which it decreased. Particularly in previously more egalitarian arrangements, a substantial proportion of women is now more likely to be primarily responsible for everything. If male partners increased their relative contribution to housework and childcare, they rarely moved beyond the threshold of an equal split. Changes in employment hours were associated with adaptations of men's, but not women's, relative contribution to domestic and family responsibilities. Conclusion: Our findings neither support the notion of a 'patriarchal pandemic', nor do they indicate that the Corona crisis might have fostered macro-level trends of gender convergence. We rather observe heterogeneous responses of couples to the 'Corona shock'.

Using recent, nationally representative data, we examine the prevalence and social determinants of premarital cohabitation, an important sign of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) in China. Descriptive results show that although only about 7 percent of Chinese adults born before 1980 cohabited before first marriage, cohabitation has grown sharply among recent birth cohorts. Based on the theoretical perspectives of “ideational change” and “economic development,” we conduct multivariate analyses of social determinants of cohabitation that may reveal potential mechanisms of its diffusion. We find that greater exposure to Western culture, higher educational attainment for men, and more advantaged family background were all positively related to premarital cohabitation. Our results also show the influence of a unique social institution in China, with Communist Party members less likely than their counterparts to cohabit before first marriage. Broadly speaking, the positive association between economic development and local rates of premarital cohabitation suggests the transformative influence of modernization on family systems.

The popular media, film, cinema and television, contribute to the public’s general understanding of science. This article focuses on the portrayal of female scientists and the reception of such depictions within the general understanding. The article questions: the images depicted; their relation to scientific reality; how such depictions have changed over time (1929-1997); and their significance within the broader social context.

The circadian clock is an endogenous timekeeper system that controls the daily rhythms of a variety of physiological processes. Accumulating evidence indicates that genetic changes or unhealthy lifestyle can lead to a disruption of circadian homeostasis, which is a risk factor for severe dysfunctions and pathologies including cancer. Cell cycle, proliferation, and cell death are closely intertwined with the circadian clock, and thus disruption of circadian rhythms appears to be linked to cancer development and progression. At the molecular level, the cell cycle machinery and the circadian clocks are controlled by similar mechanisms, including feedback loops of genes and protein products that display periodic activation and repression. Here, we review the circadian rhythmicity of genes associated with the cell cycle, proliferation, and apoptosis, and we highlight the potential connection between these processes, the circadian clock, and neoplastic transformations. Understanding these interconnections might have potential implications for the prevention and therapy of malignant diseases.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the effects of an HIV prevention intervention with social networks of young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in St. Petersburg, Russia and Sofia, Bulgaria. DESIGN: A two-arm randomized trial with a longitudinally-followed community cohort. METHODS: Fifty-two MSM social networks were recruited through access points in high-risk community venues. Network members (n = 276) were assessed to determine risk characteristics, administered sociometric measures to empirically identify the social leader of each network, and counseled in risk reduction. The leaders of 25 experimental condition networks attended a nine-session program that provided training and guidance in delivering ongoing theory-based HIV prevention advice to other network members. Leaders successively targeted network members' AIDS risk-related knowledge and risk reduction norms, attitudes, intentions, and self-efficacy. Participants were re-administered risk assessment measures at 3- and 12-month follow-ups. RESULTS: Among changes produced, the percentage of experimental network members reporting unprotected intercourse (UI) declined from 71.8 to 48.4% at 3-month follow up (P = 0.0001). The percentage who engaged in UI with multiple partners reduced from 31.5 to 12.9% (P = 0.02). After 12 months, the effects became attenuated but remained among participants who had multiple recent sexual partners, the most vulnerable group. Little change was found in control group networks. CONCLUSIONS: Interventions that engage the identified influence leaders of at-risk YMSM social networks to communicate theory-based counseling and advice can produce significant sexual risk behavior change. This model is culturally pertinent for HIV prevention efforts in former socialist countries, as well as elsewhere for other hard-to-reach vulnerable community populations.

Mammalian memory is the result of the interaction of millions of neurons in the brain and their coordinated activity. Candidate mechanisms for memory are synaptic plasticity changes, such as long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is essentially an electrophysiological phenomenon manifested in hours-lasting increase on postsynaptic potentials after synapse tetanization. It is thought to ensure long-term changes in synaptic efficacy in distributed networks, leading to persistent changes in the behavioral patterns, actions and choices, which are often interpreted as the retention of information, i.e., memory. Interestingly, new neurons are born in the mammalian brain and adult hippocampal neurogenesis is proposed to provide a substrate for dynamic and flexible aspects of behavior such as pattern separation, prevention of interference, flexibility of behavior and memory resolution. This work provides a brief review on the memory and involvement of LTP and adult neurogenesis in memory phenomena.

It is relatively uncontroversial to say that increasing workload, speed of change and the feeling that life is getting faster negatively impact on the academic profession. Drawing from primary data and secondary analyses, this article, nonetheless, highlights the specific ambivalence that emerges from investigations of time experience in contemporary academia. The argument presented here distinguishes between dominant oppressive acceleration with adverse implications and subtle, yet non-negligible, energizing accelerative moments. In the first instance, I explore how the increasing inability to determine one’s own temporal rhythm results in increasingly reported feelings of guilt. These feelings are, moreover, exacerbated by the currently ubiquitous doctrine of ‘excellence’, which has specific temporal connotations. Second, reflecting on phenomenological aspects of research conduct – a constitutive academic activity – I track the positive attributes of enabling acceleration as integral components of academic lifeworld. In this, I differ from the existing accounts analysing academic life in the fast lane, which unreservedly define acceleration in unfavourable terms, and yet in no way do I underestimate the seriousness of the negative consequences of rush, hurry and intensified workload for the scholarly profession. Broaching acceleration as a variegated experience, I conclude by outlining the inclusive conception of unhasty time and stress the need for its political enactment in higher education policy.

It has recently been proposed that sequence variation in the gene coding for tissue kallikrein might be involved in the pathogenesis of hypertension. However, molecular evidence of an association between a sequence alteration in the kallikrein gene family and the transmission of increased blood pressure has never been reported. In 32 recombinant inbred (RI) strains derived from the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR) and the normotensive Brown Norway rat (BN), we investigated whether a restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) marking the kallikrein gene family cosegregated with blood pressure. In the RI strains that inherited the kallikrein RFLP from the SHR progenitor strain, the median systolic, diastolic, and mean arterial pressures were significantly greater than in the RI strains that inherited the kallikrein RFLP from the BN progenitor strain. These findings suggest that in the rat, sequence variation in the kallikrein gene family, or in closely linked genes, may have the capacity to affect blood pressure.

The willingness to trust strangers has been associated with a variety of public benefits, from greater civic-mindedness and more honest government to higher rates of economic growth, and more. But a growing body of research finds that such generalized trust is far more common in ethnically homogeneous than in more diverse societies. Ethnic difference is believed to breed more particularistic, ingroup ties, thus undermining both generalized and cross-ethnic trust. We argue that this image is too narrow, and we propose a broader model to identify the factors that give rise to cross-ethnic trust. Using data from two minority regions of Russia, we find considerable support for the model. We also find that high ingroup or particularistic trust is no barrier to faith in another ethnic group.

Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic represents a new and unparalleled stress-test for the already disrupted liberal-representative, democracies. The challenges cluster around three democratic disfigurations: technocracy, populism, and plebiscitarianism—each have the potential to contribute to democratic decay. Still, they can also trigger pushback against illiberalism mobilizing citizens in defense of democracy, toward democratic resilience. This article looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic affects democratic decay and democratic resilience in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). It finds varied responses to the COVID-19 crisis by the CEE populist leaders and identifies two patterns: the rise of autocracy and democratic resilience. First, in Hungary and Poland, the populist leaders instrumentalized the state of emergency to increase executive aggrandizement. Second, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, democracy proved resilient. The COVID-19 pandemic alone is not fostering the rise of authoritarianism. However, it does accentuate existing democratic disfigurations.