This paper defines online communities and their constituent elements. It provides a framework in which online communities can be discussed and compared irrespective of topic or content. It explores the notions of core and peripheral membership and behaviour and provides a set of metrics for determining the activity profile of the community. Finally it presents a case study of an online communit...

This historical study utilizes annual insured bank data from 1936 through 1989 to empirically evaluate the impact of bank regulation on bank risk taking in a cross-country comparison of the United States and Canada. Risk is hypothesized to be determined, in part, by the regulatory environment in which a bank operates. The findings of this analysis contributes to the contemporary deregulation po...

Which actions does morality require of us? What does it forbid and what does it permit? In trying to fi nd some general answers to these questions, moral theorists typically start from commonsense morality, from what ordinary people think about moral issues. In deciding how to act, people often think about the consequences of their actions: they try to fi nd the action that leads to the best ov...

RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS—We used data from the Singapore Chinese Health Study, including 43,176 Chinese men and women (aged 45–74 years), free of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer at baseline (1993–1998) and followed up through 2004. Two major dietary patterns were identified using principal components analysis: a vegetable, fruit, and soy-rich pattern (VFS) and a dim sum and meat...

OBJECTIVES There is scarce information on violence against women in the Brazilian society. This fact is rarely reported in medical records as part of the diagnosis and case management, despite evidence showing the significant impact of violence on the population's health. The study aim was to estimate the occurrence of violence against women, and to determine the nature and magnitude of the vio...

BACKGROUND Mounting evidence suggests that lesbians and bisexual women may be at especially elevated risk for the harmful health effects of alcohol and tobacco use. METHODS We report findings from the California Women's Health Survey (1998-2000), a large, annual statewide health surveillance survey of California women that in 1998 began to include questions assessing same-gender sexual behavi...

BACKGROUND Cervical cancer is the sixth most common cause of cancer among Korean women and is one of the most preventable cancers in the world. This study aimed to investigate the change in cervical cancer screening rates, the level of socioeconomic disparities in cervical cancer screening participation, and whether there was a reduction in these disparities between 1998 and 2010. METHODS Usi...