a bstract    background: one of the acutely fatal and prevalent crises in all societies is acute spinal cord injury. individuals with a spinal cord injury are prone to numerous challenges, perturbation, and acute mental distresses. one of their concerns, often expressed generally and in the form of a complaint, is how people deal with them.  the present study aims to analyze the experiences and...

LUCIA, a new Italian talking head based on a modified version of the Cohen-Massaro’s labial coarticulation model is described. A semi-automatic minimization technique, working on real cinematic data, acquired by the ELITE optoelectronic system, was used to train the dynamic characteristics of the model. LUCIA is an MPEG-4 standard facial animation system working on standard FAP visual parameter...

We examine the evidence of growing social media use among political elites in lowand middle-income countries, including in places where the propor‐ tion of actual voters on social media is small. We propose three ways to view this phenomenon of– first, as signaling, second, as a means for politicians to access elite populations, and third as a way to circumvent mainstream media and exercise dir...

We trace the evolving social positions of the people who found new enterprises over the course of industry history. Sociological theory suggests two opposing hypotheses. First, pioneering entrepreneurs are socially prominent individuals or those from related industries while later entrepreneurs are from an increasingly broad range of social positions. Second, the earliest entrepreneurs come fro...

! Abstract China’s economic growth and transition pose fascinating questions for social scientists. In the economic realm, proponents of the market-preserving federalism (MPF) model appear to have gone too far. In reality, China’s central leadership has retained the prerogative to appoint top provincial officials as well as the power to reconfigure central-provincial fiscal relations, thus defy...

Wikipedia has been a resounding success story as a collaborative system with a low cost of online participation. However, it is an open question whether the success of Wikipedia results from a “wisdom of crowds” type of effect in which a large number of people each make a small number of edits, or whether it is driven by a core group of “elite” users who do the lion’s share of the work. In this...

Since Zimbabwean independence in 1980, a small percentage of the black population has become wealthy. This paper and a companion video explore the consumption patterns of members of this new black elite in post-colonial Zimbabwe. Given the violent war of independence and the avowedly socialist objectives of the new government, one expectation might be that the new black elite would seek to dist...

During this period, four successive regimes in Bangladesh have felt reluctantly compelled to set up structures for local participation in government. Each found it had to reach out beyond the support of urban and rural elites and the military if it was to move beyond mere stability to real development of the country. Despite many problems. most notably local elite takeover at local level and mi...