Ethnic intermarriage in Britain

Hebrewism, Globalized Israeliness and Mizrakhiut are examined as three major variants of Israeliness that struggle between them over dominance in the Israeli field of national culture. By discussing typical styles of literature and popular music associated with each variant, it is demonstrated how each is committed, albeit in a different way, to the belief in the idea of 'one nation - one culture', and to the construction of one, unique 'Israeli Culture'. Israel serves as a case to support a general argument about contemporary national cultures being a 'Bourdieusian' field in which invented tradition, global culture and sub-national / 'ethnic' culture are the major types of positions, struggling between them to define the dominant national cultural capital.     

Changing patterns of teenage pregnancy: population based study of small areas

ObjectivesTo measure the impact of socioeconomic deprivation on rates of teenage pregnancy and the extent of local variation in pregnancy rates in Scotland, and to examine how both have changed over time.Design Population study using routine data from hospital records, aggregated for small areas.Subjects Female teenagers resident in Scotland who were treated for pregnancy in an NHS hospital in either 1981-5 (62 338 teenagers) or 1991-5 (48 514) and who were aged 13-19 at the time of conception.Results From the 1980s to the 1990s pregnancy rates increased differentially according to levels of local deprivation, as measured by the Carstairs index. Among teenagers aged less than 18 the annual pregnancy rate increased in the most deprived areas (from 7.0 to 12.5 pregnancies per 1000 13-15 year olds and from 67.6 to 84.6 per 1000 16-17 year olds), but there was no change, on average, among teenagers in the most affluent areas (3.8 per 1000 13-15 year olds and 28.9 per 1000 16-17 year olds). Among 18-19 year olds the pregnancy rate decreased in the most affluent areas (from 60.0 to 46.3 per 1000) and increased in the most deprived areas (from 112.4 to 116.0 per 1000). The amount of local variation explained by deprivation more than doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s. The proportion of pregnancies resulting in a maternity was positively associated with level of deprivation, but the effect remained similar over time.Conclusion From the 1980s to the 1990s the difference in rates of teenage pregnancy between more affluent and more deprived areas widened. This has implications for allocating resources to achieve government targets and points to important social processes behind the general increase in the number of teenage pregnancies in Scotland.

What is already known on this topic

Rates of teenage pregnancy are considerably higher in the United Kingdom than in other western European countriesIn the United Kingdom rates of teenage pregnancy are known to be higher in areas of greater socioeconomic deprivation, although local variation may also reflect differential access to family planning services

What this study adds

From 1981-5 to 1991-5 rates of teenage pregnancy in Scotland increased more rapidly in areas of greater socioeconomic deprivationIn the 1990s socioeconomic deprivation explained more than 50% of local variation in rates of teenage pregnancy, more than double the amount explained by it in the 1980s     

How Safe Do Teenagers Behave on Facebook? An Observational Study

The substantial use of social network sites by teenagers has raised concerns about privacy and security. Previous research about behavior on social network sites was mostly based on surveys and interviews. Observational research overcomes problems inherent to this research method, for example social desirability. However, existing observational research mostly focuses on public profiles of young adults. Therefore, the current observation-study includes 1050 public and non-public Facebook-profiles of teenagers (13–18) to investigate (1) what kind of information teenagers post on their profile, (2) to what extent they protect this information using privacy-settings and (3) how much risky information they have on their profile. It was found that young people mostly post pictures, interests and some basic personal information on their profile. Some of them manage their privacy-settings as such that this information is reserved for friends'' eyes only, but a lot of information is accessible on the friends-of-friends'' pages. Although general risk scores are rather low, more detailed analyses show that teenagers nevertheless post a significant amount of risky information. Moreover, older teenagers and girls post more (risky) information while there are no differences in applying privacy settings. We found no differences in the Facebook behavior of teenagers enrolled in different education forms. Implications of these results are discussed.     

Consultation patterns and provision of contraception in general practice before teenage pregnancy: case-control study

In western Europe, UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rate among 15-19 year olds. Although general practice is one source of provision of contraception, it has been suggested that teenagers are reluctant to seek advice because of difficulty in gaining access and fears about confidentiality. This case-control study determined patterns of consultation in general practice and provision of contraception before teenage pregnancy. A total of 240 cases with a recorded conception before age 20 and 719 matched controls were identified. Overall, results show that most teenagers who became pregnant attended a general practice in the year before pregnancy, and many had sought contraceptive advice. Cases were more likely to have consulted a doctor in the year before conception than controls (odds ratio, 2.70; 95% confidence interval, 1.56-4.66). An association between provision of emergency contraception and pregnancy ending in termination was found. This finding emphasizes the need for continuing follow-up of teenagers consulting for this form of contraception.     

Racialization: the genealogy and critique of a concept

Recently sociological analysis of what used to be identified as 'race' and 'race relations' has shifted to racism as an ideology and racialization as a process that ascribes physical and cultural differences to individuals and groups. While scholars have critically examined 'race' and 'race relations', the concept of racialization has received insufficient systematic attention. The purpose of this article is to trace the genealogy of concepts of racialization and deracialization and to demonstrate that the meaning of these designations has changed since their appearance in the late-nineteenth century to the emergence of racialization in contemporary debates on effects of racism; and to trace the different trajectories of racialization from the centre and from the periphery.     

Association between teenage pregnancy rates and the age and sex of general practitioners: cross sectional survey in Trent 1994-7

This cross-sectional study examined variations in teenage pregnancy rates in the Trent region, UK, and determined possible associations with local general practice characteristics such as the age and sex of the doctors. The study sample included all pregnancies of teenagers, aged 13-19 years, between 1994 and 1997 that resulted in a hospital admission. It also included all 826 general practices in the Trent region between 1994 and 1997. Upon a multivariate analysis, lower teenage pregnancy rates were associated with the presence of a female or young doctor and more nurse time. Practices in deprived areas had higher teenage pregnancy rates. Overall, general practices with female doctors, young doctors, or more nurse time had lower teenage pregnancy rates. These findings may have implications for the mix of health professionals within primary care.     

Teenage pregnancy in the Bahamas: trends and characteristics

This survey of 99 pregnant teenagers in clinics on the island of New Providence, Bahamas, produced data suggesting that they are similar to their counterparts in urban clinics in the U.S.A. The pregnancies usually came from relationships of many months' standing, which were meaningful to the young mothers, rather than from "promiscuous" sexual behavior. Few of the young mothers had been using birth control before they became pregnant, sometimes because of a lack of expectation of needing it or from fear or ignorance about birth control, and sometimes due to an inability to organize their lives sufficiently to find, purchase, and use regularly the contraception that would have prevented the pregnancy. Most of the young mothers felt that abortion was sinful and would not have used it at any time. It is suggested that these general characteristics of teenage pregnancy are common in Western societies and are related to the perceived loneliness and uselessness of the teenage period. The pregnancies often may be seen as an attempt by teenagers, who see relatively little future for themselves in traditional education and employment, to strive for a creative life rooted in loving relationships.     

Are we failing our teenagers? Value of a family planning service for teenagers within the sexually transmitted disease clinic.

Out of 100 teenage girls attending a sexually transmitted disease clinic for the first time, 77 were found to be using a reliable method of contraception and had similar characteristics to teenage girls attending a family planning clinic. The 23 girls not using any reliable contraception exhibited a different pattern of sexual behaviour and were at high risk of unplanned pregnancy. Subsequently, another group of 23 girls not using contraception when seen at the sexually transmitted disease clinic were actively encouraged to attend a family planning clinic. Their risk of unplanned pregnancy was much reduced, although their pattern of sexual activity was unchanged. Ready availability of contraceptive advice for unprotected teenagers in sexually transmitted disease clinics would reduce their high risk of unplanned pregnancy.     

Emergence of Small-World Anatomical Networks in Self-Organizing Clustered Neuronal Cultures

In vitro primary cultures of dissociated invertebrate neurons from locust ganglia are used to experimentally investigate the morphological evolution of assemblies of living neurons, as they self-organize from collections of separated cells into elaborated, clustered, networks. At all the different stages of the culture''s development, identification of neurons'' and neurites'' location by means of a dedicated software allows to ultimately extract an adjacency matrix from each image of the culture. In turn, a systematic statistical analysis of a group of topological observables grants us the possibility of quantifying and tracking the progression of the main network''s characteristics during the self-organization process of the culture. Our results point to the existence of a particular state corresponding to a small-world network configuration, in which several relevant graph''s micro- and meso-scale properties emerge. Finally, we identify the main physical processes ruling the culture''s morphological transformations, and embed them into a simplified growth model qualitatively reproducing the overall set of experimental observations.     

Contraceptive experience and attitudes to motherhood of teenage mothers

Sexual experience is increasingly common among teenagers. Evidence suggests that while many teenage pregnancies are unintended, teenagers remain less than totally effective users of contraception. This study examines a sample of 102 teenage mothers (under age 20 at delivery) presented at antenatal booking clinics in Bristol Health District England. Of these, 25% were married at time of conception; 31 of them had been pregnant previously; 2/3 had used contraception previously. Contraceptive users were older than nonusers, more likely to be married, and more likely to be white. Most of the older users had been using the pill, and gave varied accounts of why they stopped. Just over 25% of the pregnancies were considered "planned" and about 1/2 the teenagers were upset on hearing the news of the pregnancy. 9 of the study pregnancies failed due to miscarriage (3), stillbirth (4), and neonatal death (2). Most of the girls who lost their babies came from parts of Bristol where infant mortality is high. 28.4% of the sample had previously used contraception but became pregnant without desiring to and were upset at the news. Many had given up a reliable technique (such as the pill) without substituting any alternative. This group presents a challenge for those providing contraceptive services, especially in view of the restricted opportunities available to working class girls.     

Beyond black: re-thinking the colour/culture divide

This article is an exploration of theoretical approaches to 'difference' in relation to black and Asian communities in Britain. It argues that, in the wake of the splintering of 'black' as a politically inclusive term, two opposed versions of difference have emerged to dominate understandings of race and ethnicity, and have been applied differentially to African-Caribbean and Asian identities. Black/African-Caribbean identities have been theorized through the 'politics of difference', whereas Asian groups have been transfixed through attributions of 'cultural difference'. The essay is a challenge to this theoretical dichotomy, and calls for a reworking of notions of difference to fully account for the intersection of culture and structure, and the application of theory to empirical accounts of identity creation.     

Race and place at the city limits: imaginative geographies of South Central Los Angeles

In the early 1990s, a new cycle of films emerged that depicted complex portrayals of the lives of African-Americans in the neighbourhoods in which they lived. This so-called ‘hood genre was quite radical in its foregrounding of structural racism and police violence. But Hollywood's marketing of these films muted this radical content by directly contradicting explicit signifiers in the films’ story worlds. While many of the ‘hood films take place on the urban fringe and in suburbs, their promotional materials worked to confine the action, to a mythic ‘inner city'.

This essay studies the two most popular films of the genre, Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, to illustrate how ‘paratexts' redistricted 'hood films. Through a comparative analysis of the films and their promotional materials, this essay argues Hollywood marketed a racialized ‘imaginative geography' for this important genre of African-American cinema.     

Phage and bacteria support mutual diversity in a narrowing staircase of coexistence

The competitive exclusion principle states that phage diversity M should not exceed bacterial diversity N. By analyzing the steady-state solutions of multistrain equations, we find a new constraint: the diversity N of bacteria living on the same resources is constrained to be M or M+1 in terms of the diversity of their phage predators. We quantify how the parameter space of coexistence exponentially decreases with diversity. For diversity to grow, an open or evolving ecosystem needs to climb a narrowing ‘diversity staircase'' by alternatingly adding new bacteria and phages. The unfolding coevolutionary arms race will typically favor high growth rate, but a phage that infects two bacterial strains differently can occasionally eliminate the fastest growing bacteria. This context-dependent fitness allows abrupt resetting of the ‘Red-Queen''s race'' and constrains the local diversity.     

A polyethnic London carnival as a contested cultural performance*

This article argues that the theoretical problem of the new racism thesis, as originally formulated in the 1980s, was the account of the discursive change it proposed and the role and significance of Powellism in this process. In offering a modification of the thesis I highlight the significance of the use of anecdotal accounts of the plight of ordinary English people in areas of black settlement as central to the re-articulation of racialized common sense in Powellism. I go on to argue that the particular discursive form of the racialized anecdote is one that is developed within Parliamentary debates from at least the mid-1950s onwards and that Enoch Powell is not the author but the elite beneficiary of this ideological work. I suggest that this Commons' sense informs and makes possible the success of the campaign for exclusion of black Commonwealth migrants prior to Powellism, and that Powell fashions his own elite/populist version of such narratives in 1968. Offering an account of racism as a discursive fiction, I argue that the anecdotal form of political racism in post-war Britain is a political and ideological response to the public prohibition on 'race' talk in public space. In offering a tentative theory of post-'race' signification which is consistent with empirical evidence, I argue that the 'moment' of re-articulation of racism in post-war politics is one consistent with the evacuated space of the prohibited notion of 'old' racism.     

Black noise and population persistence

Biological populations are susceptible to random variation in environmental influences such as temperature and moisture. This variability (or noise) can determine population size and, ultimately, cause extinctions. Extinction risk depends on noise colour or the amount of short- and long-term variation. Most environmental noise is reddened: the variation is dominated by long-term fluctuations. Recent modelling has shown that moderately reddened noise affects populations differently from the white noise used in earlier studies. However, some geophysical phenomena, such as temperature and river height, can have deeply reddened ''brown'' or even ''black'' spectra. We find that, compared to environments characterized by red noise, very long population persistence times are more likely for black noise. Unlike previous work incorporating a simple autoregressive model of reddened noise, our model suggests that the large variation associated with persistence in a red-noise environment limits our ability to predict the fate of particular populations subject to this noise colour. Thus, we identify the colour of noise experienced by a population (red or black) as a crucial factor in any attempt to manage or conserve that population.     

Mental health in primary care for adolescent parents

Mental health care is important for everyone, especially teenagers. However, seeking mental health services may be challenging for teenagers, particularly when they are also parents. Offering mental health care in a safe, attractive and easily accessible manner, such as primary care, increases the chances that teenage parents will receive help. Comprehensive care models need to be established to address the many needs that at-risk young mothers and their children face. There are a number of programmes available to teenage mothers that either address healthcare and psychosocial needs or focus primarily on improvements in parenting skills; yet an integrated model that delivers medical, psychiatric and psychosocial care and facilitates positive parenting skills seems to be missing. Through a university–community partnership we have recently developed a model curriculum – the Mom Power (MP) group programme – at the University of Michigan which aims to close this gap in service delivery. We elaborate on core elements and key features of this 10-week group intervention programme for high-risk teenage mothers and their children, and present preliminary outcomes data. Analyses on the first 24 MP group graduates suggest that despite ongoing life trauma during the intervention period, teenage mothers show improvements in depression and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms post intervention, and also self-rate as less guilty and shameful regarding their parenting skills after programme completion. Although preliminary, due to design and statistical limitations, these results show promise regarding feasibility and effectiveness of this integrated approach for teenage mothers with young children delivered through primary care.     

Distribution of Calcium, Iron, Copper, and Zinc in Two Portions of Placenta of Teenager and Adult Women

The placenta is fundamental for fetal development. The aim of this study was to determine Ca, Fe, Cu, and Zn content in the fetal and maternal portions of the placentas of teenage and adult women. Measurement of the minerals was conducted using Synchrotron radiation total reflection X-ray fluorescence. Forty samples from the fetal portion of teenagers and adults and 40 samples from the maternal portion of teenagers and adults were analyzed. There were significant differences in the Ca and Cu concentrations of the placenta's maternal portion when compared to the fetal portion, for both teenagers and adults. There were differences in Fe and Zn concentrations only when comparing the maternal portion of placenta with the fetal portion of the adults. These results suggest important differences in mineral content based on the placental portion. No significant difference was observed between the minerals studied of the maternal portion of teenagers and adults; however, in the fetal portion, mineral concentrations were greater in adults than in teenagers. Therefore, the mineral concentration of the fetal portion of the placenta is influenced by the mother's age. If there is mineral's competition between the mother and fetus during pregnancy in adolescence due to the importance of these minerals in growth and development, then the mechanism and reason for it should be elucidated in future research. In addition, we believe that further research should be carried out on transporters of these minerals in the same portions of the placentas analyzed by our group, in teenagers and adults.     

Procreation,Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.     

Elevated germline mutation rate in teenage fathers

Men age and die, while cells in their germline are programmed to be immortal. To elucidate how germ cells maintain viable DNA despite increasing parental age, we analysed DNA from 24 097 parents and their children, from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We chose repetitive microsatellite DNA that mutates (unlike point mutations) only as a result of cellular replication, providing us with a natural ‘cell-cycle counter’. We observe, as expected, that the overall mutation rate for fathers is seven times higher than for mothers. Also as expected, mothers have a low and lifelong constant DNA mutation rate. Surprisingly, however, we discover that (i) teenage fathers already set out from a much higher mutation rate than teenage mothers (potentially equivalent to 77–196 male germline cell divisions by puberty); and (ii) ageing men maintain sperm DNA quality similar to that of teenagers, presumably by using fresh batches of stem cells known as ‘A-dark spermatogonia’.     

Caucasian infants scan own- and other-race faces differently

Young infants are known to prefer own-race faces to other race faces and recognize own-race faces better than other-race faces. However, it is entirely unclear as to whether infants also attend to different parts of own- and other-race faces differently, which may provide an important clue as to how and why the own-race face recognition advantage emerges so early. The present study used eye tracking methodology to investigate whether 6- to 10-month-old Caucasian infants (N = 37) have differential scanning patterns for dynamically displayed own- and other-race faces. We found that even though infants spent a similar amount of time looking at own- and other-race faces, with increased age, infants increasingly looked longer at the eyes of own-race faces and less at the mouths of own-race faces. These findings suggest experience-based tuning of the infant''s face processing system to optimally process own-race faces that are different in physiognomy from other-race faces. In addition, the present results, taken together with recent own- and other-race eye tracking findings with infants and adults, provide strong support for an enculturation hypothesis that East Asians and Westerners may be socialized to scan faces differently due to each culture''s conventions regarding mutual gaze during interpersonal communication.