This paper outlines the combination of two prominent theories of social life: 1) modernization theory and 2) W.I. Thomas’ theorem that people’s perceptions have real consequences. It then documents the extent to which the complex idea of modernization and development has cemented itself in the minds of ordinary people as a model of how the world works. I employ latent class analysis and use 200...

Given a set V of n elements we wish to linearly order them using pairwise preference labels which may be non-transitive (due to irrationality or arbitrary noise). The goal is to linearly order the elements while disagreeing with as few pairwise preference labels as possible. Our performance is measured by two parameters: The number of disagreements (loss) and the query complexity (number of pai...

As noted by Anscombe (1976), the disposition of a set of proposals by majority rule does not preclude the existence of a majority of voters, each of whom disagrees with the outcomes in a majority of cases. It is intuitively clear, however, that when proposals are adopted or rejected, on average, by a sufficiently strong consensus, such a state of affairs cannot materialize. Indeed, we show for ...

Though political theorists have emphasized the importance of political discussion in non-political spaces, past study of online political discussion has focused on primarily political websites. Using a random sample from Blogger.com, we find that 25% of all political posts are from blogs that post about politics less than 20% of the time, because the vast majority of blogs post about politics s...

In a critique of my views on Marcuse’s relation to phenomenology, John Abromeit claims that Marcuse’s borrowings from Heidegger and Husserl are limited to the notion that modern science and technology are not neutral but are biased toward the domination of nature.2Abromeit thinks I exaggerate the importance of phenomenology for Marcuse in claiming more than this. Rather than replying to the det...

Evidence suggesting that certain chemicals may bind to endogenous hormone receptors and disturb normal endocrine functioning, thereby increasing the risk of reproductive problems and cancer in humans, has led to international efforts to screen chemicals for endocrine activity and potential health effects. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that some 87,000 commercial...

The skills involved in argument as a social discourse activity presumably develop during the childhood and adolescent years, but little is known about the course of that development. As an initial step in examining this development, a coding system was developed for the purpose of analyzing multiple dialogues between peers on the topic of capital punishment. A comparison of the dialogues of you...

The relationship between the lower limit on the nuclear stability lifetime as derived from the non disappearance of ‘stable‘ nuclei (Td ∼ 5.4 × 10 31 yr), and the lower limit thus implied on the oscillation time (τnn̄) of a possibly underlying neutron-antineutron oscillation process, is clarified by studying the time evolution of the nuclear decay within a simple model which respects unitarity. ...

OBJECTIVE We sought to examine the nature and extent of agreement on cognitive symptoms reported by people aging with multiple sclerosis (MS) and their primary caregivers and the factors associated with disagreement. METHOD Data were generated from telephone interviews with 279 dyads of people with MS and their caregivers. RESULTS Eighty dyads (28.7%) disagreed about the presence of cogniti...

A wide array of natural dialogue discourse can be found on the internet. Previous attempts to automatically determine disagreement between interlocutors in such dialogue have mostly relied on n-gram and grammatical dependency features taken from respondent text. Agreement-disagreement classifiers built upon these baseline features tend to do poorly, yet have proven difficult to improve upon. Us...