Culturally biased voting in the Eurovision Song Contest: Do national contests differ?

The economic literature on the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) establishes empirical evidence for culturally biased voting, more precisely also biases based on geographical closeness, political relations, ethnical and linguistic affinity. The Bundesvision Song Contest (BSC), a similar contest with principally the same rules but organized on the national level in Germany, offers a unique opportunity to compare international voting bias patterns to national voting bias patterns. Thus, this paper presents an innovative analysis by comparatively analyzing the ESC’s historical data from 1998 to 2014 and the BSC’s data from its beginning in 2005 until 2014 with the same econometric methodology. Our results show that voting biases do not only matter in international contests but also occur in similarly organized national contests with roughly similar magnitude and quality—despite the cultural background of participants and voters being much more homogenous.     

Exploring an activist approach of working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds in a sport context

This study explores an activist approach for co-creating a prototype pedagogical model of sport for working with boys from socially vulnerable backgrounds. This paper addresses the key features that emerged when we identified what facilitated and hindered the boys’ engagement in sport. This study was an activist research project that was conducted between July 2013 and December 2013 in a soccer program in a socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhood in Brazil. The lead author, supervised by the second author, worked with a soccer class of 17 boys between ages 13 and 15, 4 coaches, a pedagogical coordinator and a social worker. Multiple sources of data were collected, including 38 field journal/observations and audio records of: 18 youth work sessions, 16 coaches’ work sessions and 3 combined coaches and youth work sessions. In addition, the first and second author had 36 90-minute debriefing and planning sessions. By using an activist approach, three features were identified as being essential: an ethic of care, an attentiveness to the community and a community of sport. Findings suggest that it is possible to use sport as a cultural asset to benefit youth from socially vulnerable backgrounds by offering them a place where they can feel protected and dream about possible futures.     

"The fouled player should not take the penalty himself": an empirical investigation of an old German football myth

In this study, we investigate the old German football myth that the fouled player should not take the resulting penalty himself, as he is at an increased risk of missing. Previous analyses are improved on as we adjust for potential confounders that might influence self-taking as well as successful penalty conversion. Our findings reveal some important predictors for self-taking but, somewhat surprisingly, neither self-taking nor any of the potential confounders predicts scoring a penalty kick.     

Helping grandkin—Grandchildren raised by grandparents: Expanding psychology in the schools

Recently, large numbers of grandparents have become full-time surrogate parents to their grandchildren. The term “grandfamily” was coined to easily identify families in which children are raised by grandparents. Grandchildren in these families are called “grandkin.” Grandparents who raise their grandkin tend to have elevated levels of stress that negatively impact their well-being. Grandkin tend to develop problems with attachment and establishing social networks, which can lead to poor psychological adjustment and development. Grandparents who raise their grandchildren significantly influence the development of their grandkin in the school environment. Often the children experience severe academic and behavioral problems in school. This article provides a review of the literature about grandkin and grandparents in grandfamilies, particularly as the relationship influences the children's school functioning. In addition, the Grandfamily School Support Network is discussed as a means of ameliorating the difficulties experienced by grandkin and grandparents. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Using matrix norms to estimate the direction of arrival of planar waves on an ULA

SEAD method estimates the direction-of-arrival angles on an uniformly linear array based on the difference between the two largest singular values, what is called differential spectrum. Although it presented an outstanding performance, the ability to indicate the source positions was not elucidated yet. Inspired by the differential spectrum formulation we derived a total differential spectrum and found out that the matrix norm induced by the vector 2-norm of a modified spatial covariance matrix can be used to estimate the direction-of-arrival of multiple plane waves. Indeed we show that matrix norms are estimators and we propose their use instead of the singular value decomposition in SEAD-based methods. We present a general mathematical expression in order to explicit the operating principles of the proposed methods. Consequently, we were able to explain how the relation between the arriving and the search angles produces the larger peaks on the differential spectrum. To evaluate the important role played by matrix norms, a thousand experiments were carried out. They showed that the proposed approach proved to be as accurate as the previous SEAD-based methods, while providing a significant reduction on runtime. It also outperformed well-established methods like MODEX regarding the estimation error.     

Lessons for Managers: England's Human Resource Dilemmas

Educating the current and future workforce is an extremely important issue. Historically, the UK has not been concerned with educating and training the masses. In the 1990s, talent will be short in the UK and within the European Community (EC). By 1992, the trade barriers will be lifted for the 12 member nations of the EC. Companies that are creative and open to utilizing avenues to train present and potential workers are going to be more competitive in the EC. If the UK continues to produce an unskilled work force, it will not survive the competition. Business leaders realize the need to develop a work force that is equally or better equipped than the work force that is available to their competitors. core lessons learned from the international visit include (1) HRD is not a “perk,” (2) the changing work force is real, (3) quality is the key to competitiveness, and (4) managers need to stick to the basics of human resource management.