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Benefits from an array of social programs may accrue to family members, but the programs were not designed to ensure the viability of the family as a social system

Taken as a whole, this paper is an exercise in critical sociology. The history of the sociology of housing is briefly assessed. It is then argued that to make sense of the subject matter a conception of domestic property is needed. Domestic property is defined by the ownership and control of the means and relations of life-support. Sketches of hierarchical aspects of the phenomenon are given. Neo-feudalism is said to be the cultural characteristic of domestic property and it indicates initial weaknesses in the concept. Further the concept is judged to be poor in the light of alternative perspectives on its features: income sources; property extensiveness and property rights. Nevertheless the concept is held to be useful because it cuts across the politics of self interest to which housing is currently subject. Finally the concept suggests an alternative approach to such politics, advocating that there be a guaranteed right to life-support.

Online debating forums are important social media for people to voice their opinions and engage in debates with each other. Measuring user relevance on these forums can be useful to identify different user profiles or behaviors in online debates, for example, users that tend to participate at the beginning of a debate and whose comments trigger participation, or users that post relevant comments but are not replied too much. To help users to distinguish such different user profiles, we propose graded measures based on users' influence, the controversy that they generate throughout the debates, their contribution to the polarization of the debates, and their social acceptance, that we extract by analyzing the debates in which the users participate. Our approach is based on an argumentation-based analysis that represents a debate as a valued argumentation framework, in which comments of a debate are arguments, the attack relation between arguments models disagreement between comments, and values for arguments represent the overall support of users for comments. Finally, we test our measures with a sample of users from Reddit debates, identifying four main groups of users, from users with almost no impact on the debate to very active ones with decisive comments for the outcome of the debate. ; This work was partially funded by Spanish Project TIN2015-71799-C2-2-P (MINECO/FEDER), by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program under Grant Agreements 723596, 768824, 764025 and 814945, and by 2017 SGR 1537. The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments.

"The empirical relevance of models of competitive storage arbitrage in explaining commodity price behavior has been seriously challenged in a series of pathbreaking papers by Deaton and Laroque (1992, 1995, 1996). Here we address their major criticism, that the model is in general unable to explain the degree of serial correlation observed in prices of twelve major commodities. First, we present a simple numerical version of their model which, contrary to Deaton and Laroque (1992), can generate the high levels of serial correlation observed in commodity prices, if it is parameterized to generate realistic levels of price variation. Then, after estimating the Deaton and Laroque (1995, 1996) model using their data set, model specification and econometric approach, we show that use of a much finer grid to approximate the equilibrium price function yields quite different estimates for most commodities. Results are obtained for coffee, copper, jute, maize, palm oil, sugar and tin that support the specifications of the storage model with positive constant marginal storage cost and no deterioration as in Gustafson (1958a). Consumption demand has low response to price and, except for sugar, there are infrequent stockouts. Observed magnitudes of serial correlation of price match those implied by the estimated model." [author's abstract]

Since its initial formulation in 1988, the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model (PM) has become one of the most widely tested models of media performance in the social sciences. This is largely due to the combined efforts of a loose group of international scholars as well as an increasing number of students who have produced studies in the US, UK, Canadian, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, German, and Dutch contexts, amongst others. Yet, the PM has also been marginalised in media and communication scholarship, largely due to the fact that the PM"s radical scholarly outlook challenges the liberal and conservative underpinnings of mainstream schools of thought in capitalist democracies. This paper brings together, for the first time, leading scholars to discuss important questions pertaining to the PM"s origins, public relevance, connections to other approaches within Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, applicability in the social media age, as well as impact and influence. The paper aligns with the 30th anniversary of the PM and the publication of the collected volume, The Propaganda Model Today, and highlights the PM"s continued relevance at a time of unprecedented corporate consolidation of the media, extreme levels of inequality and class conflict as well as emergence of new forms of authoritarianism.