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The aim was to determine the difference in intelligence between singletons and twins in young adulthood. Data from the Medical Birth Register of Norway were linked with register data from the Norwegian National Conscript Service. The study base consisted of data on the 445,463 males who were born alive in either single or twin births in Norway during 1967–1984 and who were examined at the time of the mandatory military conscription (age 18–20). Within this study base, there were data on 1,653 sibships of full brothers that included at least one man born in single birth and at least one man born in twin birth (4,307 persons, including 2,378 twins and 1,929 singletons). The intelligence scores of the singletons were 11% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 9–14%) of a standard deviation higher than those of the twins, after adjustment for birth year, birth order, parental ages at delivery, parental education levels, and other factors. The adjusted within-family difference was also 11% (95 % CI: 6–16%) of a standard deviation, indicating that unmeasured factors shared by siblings (e.g., maternal body height) have not influenced the estimate in important ways. When gestational age at birth was added to the model, the estimate for the difference in intelligence score was approximately the same. Including birth weight in the model strongly reduced the estimate. In conclusion, twins born in Norway during 1967–1984 had slightly lower intelligence in early adulthood compared with the singletons.

AbstractThe populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so‐called 'verrechtsing' (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen ascatalystsrather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition and failure in government. In fact, there are at least three reasons why PRRPs might increase their impact in the near future: the tabloidisation of political discourse; the aftermath of the economic crisis; and the learning curve of PRRPs. Even in the unlikely event that PRRPs will become major players in West European politics, it is unlikely that this will lead to a fundamental transformation of the political system. PRRPs are not a normal pathology of European democracy, unrelated to its basic values, but a pathological normalcy, which strives for the radicalisation of mainstream values.

The mass consumption of electric refrigerators in Argentina has been linked to several representations. On the one hand, it has occupied a central place in the rhetoric of 'welfare democratization' used by the Peronist government to present a 'new Argentina.' On the other hand, it took on a prominent role in the search for distinction by and within the growing middle class, and in the creation of social distance within the middle class. In both cases, the image of the housewife's 'liberation' from daily chores because of new appliances condensed the 'popularization of comfort', the success of the social model that fostered it and success of head of the household who could provide a better life for his family. The increase in refrigerator consumption changed the visibility of domestic work in a paradoxical way: as it became a frequent topic in several discursive spaces, it suggested that the housewife's work had been (or would be) replaced by new appliances. In this article, I examine the meanings ascribed to this appliance through its representation in 45 life narratives and the narratives' intertextual relationships with texts from the period. This analysis focuses on the ways in which the refrigerator became intertwined with the strategies of distinction used by those who could afford such a product. I also analyse the conditions that allowed the 'popularization' of refrigerators, as well as the discourses that made the product a 'must-have'.

SummaryThis qualitative study was conducted in May–June 2010 with women using post-abortion care (PAC) services provided by the Marie Stopes Society in Pakistan during the six month period preceding the study, more than 70% of whom had been referred to the clinics by reproductive health volunteers (RHVs). The aim of the study was to establish the socio-demographic profile of clients, determine their preferred method of treatment, explore their perceptions of the barriers to accessing post-abortion services and to understand the challenges faced by RHVs. The sample women were selected from six randomly selected districts of Sindh and Punjab. Eight focus group discussions were conducted with PAC clients and fifteen in-depth interviews with RHVs. In addition, a quantitative exit interview questionnaire was administered to 76 clients. Medical, rather than surgical, treatment for incomplete and unsafe abortions was preferred because it was perceived to 'cause less pain', was 'easy to employ' and 'having fewer complications'. Household economics influence women's decision-making on seeking post-abortion care. Other restraining factors include objection by husbands and in-laws, restrictions on female mobility, the views of religious clerics and a lack of transport. The involvement of all stakeholders could secure social approval and acceptance of the provision of safe post-abortion care services in Pakistan, and improve the quality of family planning services to the women who want to space their pregnancies.

This paper deals with the historical figure of Ravivarman Kulasekhara (c. 1266–1317 ce), a king of southern Kerala and for a while emperor of South India, who claims in his inscriptions to be a yadupati like his father, and at the same time appears to be genetically a Yadava by his mother, according to the matrilineal system of inheritance through the sister's son (marumakkattayam) that was prevalent in pre-modern Kerala among non-brahmins. Moreover, in taking over the Cera imperial heritage in accordance with the solar aspects of his kuladevata (Visnu Padmanabha), Ravivarman pretends to assume a solar dimension compatible with his lunar-family origin by claiming to be namantara-karna Karna being son of the solar god through the Yadavi Kunti). The Jaiminiyasamhita of the Brahmanda Purana, an epic probably composed in Kerala under the reign of the same Kulasekhara (there is an obvious reference to this text in one of his inscriptions), tells a unique story about the brahmin (first) wife of King Sagara, and also emphasizes the role of Sagara's mother who is a Yadavi queen, as if the famous solar king Sagara served as a model for Ravivarman. The paper compares and discusses the genealogical narratives of the epigraphic testimonies and the Puranic accounts, and analyses their symbolic value in order to understand the royal ideology expressed according to the Brahmanical tradition within the peculiar socio-cultural context of Kerala.

AbstractThe growing flow of migrants' remittances has generated much interest in understanding the socio‐economic consequences of household migration for individuals and families in migrant‐sending areas. In this paper, I examine the effect of household migration on health status, as measured by nutritional status, of adults who have remained behind in rural Indonesia, a setting with a high rate of out‐migration and poor nutritional profiles. Assuming that remittances may improve household economic resources and thus change dietary intake and health‐related investment, household migration may be associated with the risks of both undernutrition and overnutrition. The analyses use longitudinal data from the Indonesian Family Life Survey and fixed‐effect regressions. The results show that adults in emigrant households were significantly less susceptible to being underweight than those in non‐migrant households, but that they did not have an increased risk of being overweight. The improved nutritional status was restricted to people in households with labour migrants, highlighting the role of remittances in improving nutritional intake. The health gain was also concentrated among women, increased with the number of out‐migrants and was revealed over time as remittances arrived. Overall, this study demonstrates the beneficial role of household migration, and especially the resulting remittances, in the health status of household members in resource‐constrained settings. Improving transfers of remittances would be helpful in reducing the problem of undernutrition in poor migrant‐sending areas.

Official sanctioning of students by the criminal justice system is a long-hypothesized source of educational disadvantage, but its explanatory status remains unresolved. Few studies of the educational consequences of a criminal record account for alternative explanations such as low self-control, lack of parental supervision, deviant peers, and neighborhood disadvantage. Moreover, virtually no research on the effect of a criminal record has examined the ''black box'' of mediating mechanisms or the consequence of arrest for postsecondary educational attainment. Analyzing longitudinal data with multiple and independent assessments of theoretically relevant domains, the authors estimate the direct effect of arrest on later high school dropout and college enrollment for adolescents with otherwise equivalent neighborhood, school, family, peer, and individual characteristics as well as similar frequency of criminal offending. The authors present evidence that arrest has a substantively large and robust impact on dropping out of high school among Chicago public school students. They also find a significant gap in four-year college enrollment between arrested and otherwise similar youth without a criminal record. The authors also assess intervening mechanisms hypothesized to explain the process by which arrest disrupts the schooling process and, in turn, produces collateral educational damage. The results imply that institutional responses and disruptions in students' educational trajectories, rather than social-psychological factors, are responsible for the arrest–education link.

Abstract
There is a major trade-off between improvements in longevity, general health, fitness and quality of life due to regular intense physical activity on the one hand and possible cardiac risks on the other hand, whether for participants in leisure time sports activities or for highly trained athletes. Cardiac complications and sudden death in sports, even though rare, but dramatic, events, are mainly observed in those suffering from inherited, often latent diseases with a strong genetic background, unknown to the subjects. Sedentary lifestyle together with more than one risk factor may also contribute to cardiac events in persons beginning to exercise for the first time or recommencing intense physical activities after a long pause.
Manifestations of inherited cardiac diseases with a typical genetic component may occur in children or adolescents, but also in adults. For many inherited cardiac diseases there is a large body of knowledge on the genetic origin, therefore, genetic testing may be a valuable tool for diagnosis and prevention of underlying diseases, especially as genetic testing has become much cheaper over the last few years.
The present paper describes cardiac diseases with genetic disposition and related genetic testing and presents recommendations for genetic examinations. Testing should be of benefit for sportsmen and women but also for family members to prevent fatal cardiac events. These recommendations will consider benefits for the sports person, and ethical reflections as well.

Given that an employee's personal responsibilities can have an effect on their work, one method increasingly used by government agencies to improve performance has been to offer programs that assist workers in balancing work and personal obligations. Employee demand for such work-life programs is also increasing due to the growing amount of women in the workplace, two-career families, and workers wanting a greater ability to manage work and life. Yet despite the increase in supply and demand for work-life programs, empirical examinations regarding the benefits of these programs in government agencies are scarce. As a result, this article examines the association between employee satisfaction with work-life programs and two important factors that drive work motivation: organizational commitment and job involvement. Data was obtained from the 2010 Federal Employee Viewpoint survey, and the results from the analysis extended previous literature in several important ways. First, work motivation was not consistently affected by employee levels of satisfaction with work-life benefits in federal agencies. More specifically, employee satisfaction with most work-life benefits (i.e., telework, health and wellness programs, child care, and older adult care) were positively associated to organizational commitment, and none were associated to job involvement. Next, organizational commitment was influenced more by family-friendly programs and health and wellness programs than by flexible working arrangements. The implications of these findings are detailed in the study.

Most cities in developing countries experience unprecedented changes in their physical and social structures during the process of modernization. This article investigates daily life in a modern neighborhood of Tehran, Narmak, designed in 1951 based on Western ideas, through the application of qualitative research methods to examine the transformation of this neighborhood from a Gemeinschaft community to a more urban community. This article uses the public spaces of the neighborhood as a tool to monitor daily life and the changes that have emerged in the neighborhood. It considers the social interactions in the public spaces of the neighborhood as a synthesis between the new norms stemming from the modern culture and the traditional cultural and religious norms reflected in gender, family, and neighborhood relations. The findings reveal that despite Narmak's modern design and planning, a synthesis between traditional and modern culture can be observed in this neighborhood. Five decades after its design, the original low-density residential neighborhood has been transformed into a mixed-use, medium-density neighborhood with new migrants consisting of half of its population. Observations suggest differences both with the old mahallehs (neighborhoods), such as the blur of the previously more clear-cut public-private boundaries and the use of public spaces by youths and women, and with qualities inherited from traditional mahallehs, such as a sense of community, the exclusion of strangers, cul-de-sacs, and so forth.

Addressing the ways in which etiology, the science of causes, has come to dominate discussions of gay and lesbian politics, this essay examines traces of evolutionary theory in recent right-wing rhetoric against gay marriage from such organizations as the Family Research Council, as well as in ostensibly pro-gay claims that homosexuality is not acquired but biologically determined. Invoking Darwin, antigay groups claim that same-sex marriage will lead to human extinction because it does not serve the propagation of the species. However, this insistence on homosexual sterility is in fact driven by a fear of queer increase. This essay proposes that antigay rhetoric tacitly construes same-sex desire as a meme, a unit of cultural meaning believed to recur and mutate like a gene. In this phobic view of gay etiology, then, homosexuality is a dangerous idea that proliferates more successfully than heterosexual reproduction. In response, queer communities increasingly claim that homosexuality is immutable and essential, citing scientists' theories of biological determinism to support the more colloquial notion that they are born gay. Many such theories, however, share the evolutionary and reproductive language used by the religious Right, seeking to prove homosexuality both memetically and genetically sterile. Reading popular publications on biological causes of homosexuality, this article shows how "born gay" and "gay gene" discourses produce their own vulgar Darwinism, echoing the voices they would oppose.

This paper presents an analysis of the connectedness of older people in two sample areas, one urban and one rural, in Ireland. The paper is based on a study of the communal participation of older people in two geographic localities; Rathmore, a suburban area of Dublin, and Rathbeg, a rural area in County Donegal, conducted between 2000 and 2005. A multi-stage study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods examined significant communal in teractions of older people across a range of arenas, including leisure interests, involvement in clubs, religious practices, voluntary work, relationships with kin, friends and neighbours, helping activities, use of social services and informal interactions in neighbourhoods and other communal settings. The paper describes their experiences of connectedness, explains how older people co-create and sustain communal ties and explores the significance of social practices and social groupings involved. The study demonstrated that among a diverse group of older adults engagement with others outside one's immediate family was a significant source of satisfaction and meaning in life. It provided evidence that place-based friendships are important contexts for the development of collective solidarities and transformative relationships. The paper underlines the contribution of older people to the lives of others, and argues that community should be understood as involving both place and type of relationship instead of a symbolic attachment to identities. The policy implications of the findings are also briefly considered.

Background  The aim of this study was to explore parents' experiences and strategies used when meeting the needs of all their children, including an adolescent with disabilities.Materials and methods  A qualitative study design was employed. The study was conducted in two phases. (i) Secondary analysis of ecocultural interviews with 12 parent‐carers of more than one child, including an adolescent (10–21 years) with intellectual disabilities. (ii) In‐depth, semi‐structured interviews with a sub‐sample (n = 4) of parent‐carers. Data was analysed using Strauss & Corbin's (1998) constant comparative method.Results  Parents balanced their children's needs through a combination of strategies driven by their goals, beliefs and values. Parents found this very challenging. They were always conscious of the needs of all of their children, although they could not necessarily meet all their children's needs equally. Strategies that attended to all children simultaneously were preferred by most parents, but could not always be used. Parents, at times, used strategies that prioritized the needs of the adolescent with disabilities or siblings.Conclusions  Findings add to knowledge on what families of adolescents with disabilities do day to day and specifically reveal how these parents meet the needs of their children. Practitioners, together with disability and mainstream services and systems, need to recognize parents' goals, beliefs and values and the needs of the adolescent with disabilities. This will effectively aid the adolescent with disabilities, their siblings, parents and the whole of family life.

Current practice relies on surrogates to enroll incapacitated adults in research. Yet, it is unclear to what extent this practice protects adults who have lost the ability to consent for themselves. To address this question, we conducted two literature searches to identify articles which report empirical data on three issues central to protecting adults who have lost the ability to consent: (1) adults' willingness to participate in research should they lose the ability to consent; (2) adults' willingness to allow a surrogate to make research decisions for them; and (3) the extent to which surrogates' enrollment decisions are consistent with their charges' preferences and values. These searches identified 21 articles, representing 20 distinct datasets. The data indicate that many adults are willing to participate in research should they lose the ability to consent, and many are willing to allow their family members to make research decisions for them if they become incapacitated. The data also raise concern that surrogates may be making research enrollment decisions that, in some cases, are inconsistent with their charges' preferences and values. These findings suggest that modifications to current practice should be considered to better protect adults who have lost the ability to consent. One option would be to require, in addition to surrogate permission and subject assent, sufficient evidence that enrollment is consistent with the individual's preferences and values.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how women entrepreneurs experience entrepreneurship in the Canadian technology sector and the types of obstacles posed by the field's male‐dominated character.Design/methodology/approachThe authors' research purpose called for an inductive approach. Interviews with a sample of women technology entrepreneurs allowed for in‐depth exploration of their subjective experiences and the contexts in which these were situated.FindingsThe research subjects encountered persistent gender stereotypes, a paucity of female role models, resistance from associates within and outside of their organizations, and societal pressures to maintain appropriate levels of work‐family balance.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough exploratory and preliminary in nature, the findings indicate that women entrepreneurs do not experience "glass ceilings" as much as they experience "labyrinth walls" and what the authors identify as "thorny floors", meaning opposition and sabotage from male subordinates.Social implicationsWomen considering entrepreneurship should expect to encounter resistance to their leadership, albeit manifested in different forms than in corporate settings. Male‐dominated fields such as technology involve industry‐level resistance as well as opposition from within the organization. Nevertheless, women perceived the field as merit‐driven whereby they gained acceptance once they had established themselves as credible competitors.Originality/valueThis study is one of few to elucidate the multiple levels of opposition to women's entrepreneurship in male‐dominated settings and introduces the concept of "thorny floors" to research on women's advancement and entrepreneurship.