Be who you are and be proud: Brittney Griner,intersectional invisibility and digital possibilities for lesbian sporting celebrity

Abstract

This article examines current professional basketball player, Brittney Griner, and the ways in which her personal and athletic lives are represented on social media. In particular, her visibility and posts on her public Instagram account allow for a consideration of the digital possibilities for social change by lesbian sporting celebrities. This analysis interrogates these possibilities through a close reading of several Instagram posts regarding Griner’s romantic relationship with fellow basketball star, Glory Johnson. This article ultimately argues that Griner’s Instagram profile helps challenge the intersectional invisibility of Black lesbian sporting celebrities and discusses the implications of this visibility for similarly positioned LGB youth.     

POST‐TRANSITION POVERTY TRENDS BASED ON AN ALTERNATIVE DATA SOURCE1

This paper analyses a previously unused source of data – the All Media and Product Survey (AMPS) – to arrive at alternative estimates of the post‐transition poverty path. The motivations for using this non‐official data source are twofold: concern over the comparability of the existing official post‐transition datasets – the Income and Expenditure Survey (IES) and Population Census – and a desire to extend analysis of poverty trends beyond 2001. While official data sources are generally preferred for purposes of poverty analysis, the IES and Census collect data at long (5 or 10 year) intervals, and additional years pass before these datasets become available to the public. In some cases there is also concern about data comparability between surveys. The expenditure data contained in the General Household Survey are available annually, although data are captured in a small number of categories that are not very conducive to analysis at the lower end of the income distribution. Analysis on AMPS data confirms the large decline in poverty implied by an increase of R18 billion (in 2000 Rand) in social grant payments between 2000 and 2004. The direction of this trend is consistent with recent research findings based on more frequently analysed data sources, including the work done by Agüero, Carter and May (2005), Seekings (2006 ) and Meth (2006 ).     

Profiling hospital utilization in a mixed public–private system

While there is an extensive body of literature on the demand for hospital services, little is known about the interaction between public and private hospitals in a mixed system. In this article, we (1) apply latent class analysis to identify distinct subgroups of patients who use the hospital market differently, (2) characterize each patient type by their personal characteristics and (3) link the patient type to future hospital admissions. We apply our analysis to individual-level longitudinal patient data from Australia, focusing on three popular procedures that are performed in both public and private hospitals. We find 4–5 patient types. The most common types use either a public or a private hospital almost exclusively and absorb a moderate level of hospital resources. The severe types represent 13–17% of patients. The type which uses both sectors makes up 10–20% and tends to have private health insurance coverage. The patient types are predictive of prospective utilizations as we find that patients tend to be admitted to the sector they have used in the past. By revealing how patients use coexisting public and private hospitals, our results have direct implications on health resource financing and allocations.     

Interactive visualization of 3D mantle convection

The current availability of thousands of processors at many high performance computing centers has made it feasible to carry out, in near real time, interactive visualization of 3D mantle convection temperature fields, using grid configurations having 10–100 million unknowns. We will describe the technical details involved in carrying out this endeavor, using the facilities available at the Laboratory of Computational Science and Engineering (LCSE) at the University of Minnesota. These technical details involve the modification of a parallel mantle convection program, ACuTEMan; the usage of client–server socket based programs to transfer upwards of a terabyte of time series scientific model data using a local network; a rendering system containing multiple nodes; a high resolution PowerWall display, and the interactive visualization software, DSCVR. We have found that working in an interactive visualizastion mode allows for fast and efficient analysis of mantle convection results.     

Fatal violence among children under 15 years in four cities of South Africa, 2001-2005

Homicide rates for South African children were estimated at double the global average in 2000. This article presents a secondary data analysis of the National Injury Mortality Surveillance System (NIMSS), with full coverage in four major metropolitan cities. Child homicide rates for 2001-2005 were calculated within the 0-4, 5-9 and 10-14 year age groups. The homicide rates were similar to the global pattern, with higher rates for boys, and among children aged 0-4 years than for older children. Poisson regression, accounting for city level clustering, was used to investigate age, sex and period effects in the homicide rate. The model indicated that the gender difference was more marked in the 10-14 year age groups (RR?=?2.17; 95% CI 1.97-2.38) than in the 5-9 year (RR?=?1.43; 95% CI 1.27-1.62) with the 0-4 year age group in-between (RR?=?1.80; 95% CI 1.55-2.10). These data confirm previous observations that fatal violence among children is a public health concern, but, given the high rates of homicide among South African adults and other competing public health problems, it is difficult to motivate for action to address the issue of violence against children. Nonetheless, there are sufficient indications that efforts to reduce childhood violence are urgently needed.     

When Social Infrastructure Deficits Create Displacement Pressures: Inner City Schools and the Suburbanization of Families in Melbourne

Under advanced capitalism, gentrification converges with the post‐Keynesian ‘unhinging' of the state from the project of social reproduction, including its responsibilities for collective consumption (e.g. housing, schools). Gentrification research scrutinizes this convergence through the ongoing assault on social/affordable housing, and yet anaemic housing welfare is not its endpoint. The social contract is further fractured through the ongoing discreditation and dismantling of the full gamut of legacies of the publicly regulated Keynesian inner city, including essential social infrastructure. Focusing on public schools, as an essential site for social reproduction, this article explores how the struggle for the city under neoliberal gentrification may be emerging along additional (non‐housing) vectors. Based on a qualitative study of families' experiences of poor public education provision in central Melbourne (Australia), this article argues that the exclusionary effects of gentrification likely exceed residential encroachment as state subsidization of residents continues to yield to the subsidization of capital. In particular, this article identifies life‐stage specific, infrastructure‐related displacement pressures wrought by a state failure to provide adequate public primary schools in the ‘regeneration' of central Melbourne, and it illustrates how these pressures prompt housing strategies that unevenly divest families of the locational advantages secured in the inner city. Highlighting the role of public school deficits in the reluctant suburbanization of lesser‐resourced families assists in foregrounding state complicity in displacement dynamics and the potential for these to magnify socio‐economic, gendered and socio‐spatial inequalities across the city.     

Cross-boundary information sharing in regulatory contexts: The case of financial markets

Most studies about cross-boundary information sharing (CBIS) focus on private or public sector organizations only. There is limited research within regulated environments, which often requires information to be shared among multiple public, private and nonprofit organizations. This paper explores CBIS in different regulatory contexts, with a focus on financial markets in the USA, and finds some unique characteristics in terms of information asymmetries, incentive and governance structures, and structural complexity.     

MEASURING THE ECONOMIC VALUE OF VOLUNTEER WORK GLOBALLY: CONCEPTS,ESTIMATES, AND A ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE

ABSTRACT: This article explores alternative approaches for measuring the economic value of volunteer work, develops a methodology for producing global estimates of this value using existing data sources, and identifies a new data source that promises to yield significantly improved data on which to base such estimates in the future at both the global and national levels. Both volunteering through organizations and directly for individuals are considered. Different approaches to valuation, including the replacement cost, opportunity cost, and social benefits approaches and both observed and reported market proxies, are examined. Based on a number of criteria, the replacement cost method using observed market wages is recommended. Using this method, the article estimates that ‘volunteerland,’ if it were its own country, would have the second largest adult population of any country in the world, and would be the world's seventh largest economy. The article concludes by discussing a new International Labour Organization Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work that adopts the basic method for defining and valuing volunteer work outlined here and promises to generate a much more robust and coherent body of data on volunteer work than has ever been available both globally and nationally.     

Fish consumption: efficacy among fishermen of a brochure developed for pregnant women

The risk to human consumers from contaminants in fish is often dealt with by issuing consumption advisories, or in some cases, information brochures. Normally advisories and brochures are developed and tested with anglers. We examine the efficacy of a fish consumption brochure that was developed for pregnant women on people engaged in fishing in the Newark Bay Complex. The brochures were in English and Spanish, and subjects could read and be interviewed in either language. Of the 151 people interviewed, 32% were women, 58% spoke only English, 22% spoke mainly Spanish and the rest felt comfortable with both languages. There were no differences in the percent that were present as a function of preferred language. There were significant differences in the understanding of the brochure, depending upon preferred language (and the language of the brochure). In general, anglers preferring Spanish and who read the brochure in Spanish obtained fewer of the messages correctly than those who preferred English (seven of seven questions). There were also gender differences in efficacy of the brochures; a higher percentage of female anglers thought that the fish were not safe to eat from the port and thought that eating contaminated fish from the port could harm their baby. Although the correct message was obtained by 34–100% of the anglers, depending upon the question, and 60–75% of the anglers believed the pamphlet, only 16% (Spanish‐speaking) to 47% (Bilingual) planned on changing the species of fish they eat or the method of cooking. These data suggest that a pamphlet designed for pregnant women is useful for anglers, and they can obtain the ‘correct’ message from it. However, a relatively small percentage of subjects were persuaded to change their cooking or consumption behavior. In addition to television, subjects felt that the direct approach of distributing brochures face‐to‐face was an important method of communication of fish consumers.     

Improving public health emergency preparedness through enhanced decision-making environments: A simulation and survey based evaluation

Public health emergency preparedness officials use several modes of education and training programs to improve their response capability, including tabletop exercises. Tabletop exercises allow participants to role-play during a health emergency in an experiential practice environment and evaluate performance using existing benchmarks. Although tabletop exercises are routinely used in public health to identify gaps in emergency planning, quantitative measures of the impact of participating in an exercise are less common. To this end, we have designed a state-of-the-art simulation-driven hybrid tabletop exercise which is informed by local leadership interests and options, and tied into a research platform that enables rigorous assessment and improvements. The exercise and assessment were used by the state of Arizona during the 2009 H1N1 influenza outbreak. The simulation allows participants to respond to a hypothetical pandemic influenza scenario and make iterative policy decisions in a group setting. The exercise provided a valuable forum reviewing and assessing emergency plans for schools to prepare for, respond to, and recover from an influenza pandemic. After the exercise, participants reported a significantly increased level of confidence in performing core public health functional capabilities around the five main topic areas.