Next-door Neighbors Research Articles

The anatomy of a population-scale social network

Large-scale human social network structure is typically inferred from digital trace samples of online social media platforms or mobile communication data. Instead, here we investigate the social network structure of a complete population, where people are connected by high-quality links sourced from administrative registers of family, household, work, school, and next-door neighbors. We examine this multilayer social opportunity structure through three common concepts in network analysis: degree, closure, and distance. Findings present how particular network layers contribute to presumably universal scale-free and small-world properties of networks. Furthermore, we suggest a novel measure of excess closure and apply this in a life-course perspective to show how the social opportunity structure of individuals varies along age, socio-economic status, and education level.

Death of a Salesman

Death of a Salesman

The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

The August Trials: The Holocaust and Postwar Justice in Poland

Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone (review)

Reviewed by: Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone Hartman H. Deetz (bio) Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast by Patricia E. Rubertone University of Nebraska Press, 2020 IN 1943 IN PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND, Chief Sunrise shocked the city, making headlines simply by walking out into the street dressed in his traditional regalia. He was a Narragansett Indian, in Narragansett Territory, where Narragansett people have always been. Native people in New England are first contact people: we had no rumor, no experience, no expectation of how history with European settlers would unfold. My people, the Wampanoag, along with Nipmuc and Massachusett were among the first graduates of Harvard, and Narragansetts were among the first residents of Providence, when Roger Williams had to broker a deal to allow colonists to move in among them. Between the bark-covered wigwams, English mud and sticks, wattle and daub were being built. We have been here from the beginning. We are a part of the fabric of this place, and our history is American history. When the city of Providence was created Native hands were among those creating it. As the world modernized, Indigenous people modernized and urbanized with it. We work as house cleaners and laborers but also have become champion checkers players or marketed the "Indian Tonic" remedy of the Narragansett "Indian Doctress" for sale to the masses. Patricia Rubertone explores the interconnection—of kinship, of family moving back and forth from reservation to city, of intermarriages—that taps into the Indigenous underground of New England that still thrives today. Given these networks of families and kin I can hopscotch from one Native community to the next—with many of my cousins among them—all the way to New York. Many of the family names mentioned throughout this book—Noka, Brown, Mitchel, Helm, and Thomas—are still present today. Native Providence challenges the concept of the Monolithic Indian, one that is always rural, past tense, and pushed aside by the arrival of the modern world. Rubertone shows how Native people were adapting to and taking part in the modernization of the world along with their next-door neighbors, while at the same time holding a continuous occupancy that stretches into precolonial times. They did not come to the city; the city came to them. Almost every new shift in "Indian Policy" has been tested here on the [End Page 152] East Coast before being brought to the national scale, including war, boarding schools, subdividing then taxing and selling land, relocation, and detribalization. For some tribes their experience with colonization is not yet 150 years old: how are they adapting, and what lessons can they take from what we in the northeast have and are continuing to experience? Rubertone shows some of the ways that Native people in the northeast have survived the centuries. Rubertone manages to capture many important parts of what it is to be Indigenous in the northeast: continuity, connection, kinship, adaptability, resilience. As Indigenous people in New England, we are four hundred years into this grand experiment of colonization. What does that look like for people who have watched the cities grow around them? The concrete interstate laid over old trade paths, whose dirt was packed by millions of moccasin prints over thousands of years. Indigenous neighborhoods and homesteads stand like the groves of old growth, ancient oaks among invasive regrowth. To the casual observer we may seem to blend in, but we remain plain as day for those who know what they are looking at. Rubertone has produced an important work for Natives and non-Natives alike, one that challenges preconceived notions of who we are as Native people as well as what we can be. [End Page 153] Hartman H. Deetz HARTMAN H. DEETZ is an enrolled member of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe. Copyright © 2022 Regents of the University of Minnesota

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

Introduction: Representing the Jewish American Woman in Popular Culture

The Golgi Apparatus and its Next-Door Neighbors.

The Golgi apparatus represents a central compartment of membrane traffic. Its apparent architecture, however, differs considerably among species, from unstacked and scattered cisternae in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to beautiful ministacks in plants and further to gigantic ribbon structures typically seen in mammals. Considering the well-conserved functions of the Golgi, its fundamental structure must have been optimized despite seemingly different architectures. In addition to the core layers of cisternae, the Golgi is usually accompanied by next-door compartments on its cis and trans sides. The trans-Golgi network (TGN) can be now considered as a compartment independent from the Golgi stack. On the cis side, the intermediate compartment between the ER and the Golgi (ERGIC) has been known in mammalian cells, and its functional equivalent is now suggested for yeast and plant cells. High-resolution live imaging is extremely powerful for elucidating the dynamics of these compartments and has revealed amazing similarities in their behaviors, indicating common mechanisms conserved along the long course of evolution. From these new findings, I would like to propose reconsideration of compartments and suggest a new concept to describe their roles comprehensively around the Golgi and in the post-Golgi trafficking.

Review: Annoying Music in Everyday Life, by Felipe Trotta

Review: <i>Annoying Music in Everyday Life</i>, by Felipe Trotta

Consensus building on trust in government

Abstract This study contrasts the effects of news media to those of neighborhood in building consensus regarding trust in government. Consensus building is a consequence of agenda setting at a societal level. It conducts a secondary data analysis from an online survey with a panel of 983 older Texans from November/December 2015. We found significant correlation between trust and following the news, accessing TV news, using digital media, online news and newspapers. We found that news media in general and online news increased consensus both within education and location; radio and television increased consensus for education and digital media for income. Our spatial auto-correlation test found a minimal tendency of similar values of trust to be clustered. We cannot infer that neighborhood contributes in the formation of trust. We found evidence, in a case study of older Texans, that the news media may bring us closer together than next-door neighbors

Russia’s diversification prospects

The Russian economy heavily relies on exports of its natural resources. However, the resource-based status quo does not seem to be the route towards Russia’s long-run prosperity. To improve its position in the global income ranking, Russia needs to diversify its exports and make them more complex. Using highly detailed data on trade flows and applying network theory apparatus, we evaluate the level of export complexity in Russia from 1995 to 2016 and compare it with that of its BRICS fellow members. We find that Russia is stagnant with respects to its relative level of export complexity. This sluggishness embraced the entire period between 1995 and 2016, much longer than the stage of anemic growth that started there a decade ago. We also conclude that the current stock of know-how in Russia is relatively low and fragmented, thus not letting Russia diversify into a broad range of more complex products. Russia might also need to export a wider variety of products to richer economies. Today, on a par with Brazil and South Africa, it supplies a broader range of goods to its slowly growing next-door neighbors.

The Babysitter

The Babysitter Anton DiSclafani (bio) Our son is five months old, and it is time to hire a babysitter. Pete doesn’t crawl, doesn’t talk, doesn’t even sit up unassisted yet, but he requires all of our attention. We have just moved to the South. We know no one. My husband, adopted from Korea as an infant and reared in a taciturn, Lutheran Minnesota, does not understand the chatty grocery store cashiers, the next-door neighbors who cut a path through our front yard as part of their morning walk, the owner of the roadside peach stand who talks to me for ten minutes while Mat and Pete wait in the car. “A lot to say about peaches?” he asks, when I slide into the driver’s seat, which has been baked by the sun in my brief absence. Pete is fussing; he hates the car seat. Mat sits behind me. Usually it is the mothers who ride in the back, distracting the baby with a stuffed animal, a rattle, but I am prone to motion sickness. And anyway, I like to drive. “Just the South,” I say. The peaches are warm in their plastic bag. They will be disappointing, later—mealy, flavorless—but for now they are something to look forward to. “Pete’s a tyrant,” I announce to Mat, later that night, after Pete has gone to bed. “A very sweet tyrant.” [End Page 49] The red well of his mouth, his pulsing fontanelle, his hands so fat they appear swollen: he is a tyrant I love beyond measure. Before Pete was born, I expected to be scared by him, by what might happen to him. He could contract any number of illnesses—meningitis, strep, herpes—and die. I could drop him. I could leave him in the bathtub for a split second, just long enough to drown. If I lay him on his stomach, I’d read, over and over, he could smother himself with the weight of his own head. Yet when we take him home he weighs eight pounds and one ounce, and he surprises me with his sturdiness. Also, I am too exhausted to worry about all the horrible things that might befall us. Still, at night when we are sleeping, Pete in a bassinet beside our bed, I graze his head with my palm to make sure it is warm. I feel, if not exactly careless, cavalier. I let our cats remain in the bed with us at night, a thing I never thought I’d do. I surprise myself in another way, too: I don’t worry about his safety with a babysitter. I worry about what the babysitter—still nameless, now, still a young woman yet to be invited into our house—will make of us. I post an ad on the university’s student job site and wait. Must have experience with infants, I write. Must be a non-smoker. Must like animals. Must be certified in infant CPR, though neither Mat nor I are. There are barely any responses, at first, and I wonder if I have done something wrong. I wonder if the college girls—I picture them lounging on colorfully clad dorm beds, laptops propped up on knees, scrolling through ads late at night—sense something about our family. If they can read between the lines. It’s what good babysitters do, after all: they know how to manage controlling mothers, vaguely inappropriate fathers. They know how to disappear from a room, quietly, taking the child with them. They know how to become indispensable without calling attention to the family’s need in the first place. [End Page 50] What exists between the lines for us? My son isn’t white. My husband isn’t white. We aren’t religious, in a place where half the people we encounter have decorated themselves with crosses: dangling from necks, embroidered on shirts, stamped on license plates. We are driving to get barbeque for lunch, Mat and Pete in the backseat, and Mat asks, of a large building, “Is that a bank?” “No,” I say. “That’s a mega-church.” “Jesus,” Mat says, and we laugh. He was...

Neighborhood Dynamics in UN Peacekeeping Operations, 1990–2017

The last decade has seen more UN peacekeepers than ever before coming from countries neighboring the host state. This report uses the IPI Peacekeeping Database to explore this increase in neighborhood contributions between 1990 and 2017. While less than 3 percent of all UN peacekeepers came from next-door neighbors in the early 1990s, this number had increased to about 20 percent by 2017. This trend runs counter to a longstanding, if unwritten, principle that UN peacekeeping missions should seek to avoid deployment of troops or police from neighbors in order to mitigate the risks associated with these countries’ national interests in the host countries. It also means there would be significant implications if policymakers wished to reverse this trend, which would put major additional pressure on the UN’s force generation process.

Segregation and mortality over time and space

Few studies have been able to measure the evolution of segregation on health disparities or assess whether those disparities existed in rural communities prior to the Great Migration of African Americans to urban centers. We use a newly developed measure of historical racial residential segregation based on individual-level data. The measure exploits complete census manuscript files to identify the races of next-door neighbors. This measure is the first and only measure of historical segregation for rural communities, allowing us to greatly extend the empirical analysis of the effects of racial segregation on health over space and time. Using this comprehensive measure of racial residential segregation, we estimate the historical relationship between racial segregation and mortality. We find that conditional on racial composition, racially segregated environments had higher mortality rates and it was not always the case that the outcomes for blacks were worse than those of whites. These effects of segregation on health differed between urban and rural locations. We conclude by noting how comprehensive measures of segregation can extend the analysis of structural factors in racial health disparities to rural residents and to the historical evolution of health disparities.

Good reasons to study technetium chemistry

A hole remained in the periodic table where element 43 should have been until 1937, when the invention of the cyclotron facilitated the discovery of technetium as the first and lightest artificially produced element. At the ACS meeting, Alfred P. Sattelberger of Argonne National Laboratory described a decade’s worth of new research on this “hot element.” Working with Kenneth R. Czerwinski, Frederic Poineau, and their students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Sattelberger has produced some 40 research papers on various aspects of technetium chemistry, including one recently that discussed how technetium’s nuclear makeup causes it to be radioactive (J. Chem. Educ. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00343). “There are three good reasons to study technetium,” Sattelberger said. First, researchers need to know how Tc compares with its next-door neighbors regarding its synthetic and structural chemistry. Second, the radioisotope 99mTc, with a half-life of six hours, is a workhorse in diagnostic medicine

The National Rise in Residential Segregation

Exploiting complete census manuscript files, we derive a new segregation measure using the racial similarity of next-door neighbors. The fineness of our measure reveals new facts not captured by traditional segregation indices. First, segregation doubled nationally from 1880 to 1940. Second, contrary to prior estimates, Southern urban areas were the most segregated in the country and remained so over time. Third, increasing segregation in the twentieth century was not strictly driven by urbanization, black migration, or white flight: it resulted from increasing racial sorting at the household level. In all areas—North and South, urban and rural—segregation increased dramatically.

To Come Full Circle

This story is a reflection on the concept of friendship and forgiveness, on belief in change and the difficulty in letting go. It is presented through the story of two elderly patients, sisters-in-law, next-door neighbors and friends, treated by the same family physician. A trivial argument causes a rift between the two, severing a 60-year friendship. Five years later, as one lays dying in her home, the physician, accompanied by her nurse, attempts to reconcile between the two. The article includes the physician's reflections on this process, her role as a “multi-system” physician in these patient's lives and its impact on her work.

Why are Walmart and Target Next-Door neighbors?

One of the most notable changes in the U.S. retail market over the past twenty years has been the rise of Big Box stores, retail chains characterized by physically large stores selling a wide range of consumer goods at discount prices. A growing literature has examined the impacts of Big Box stores on other retailers and consumers, but relatively little is known about how Big Box stores choose locations. Because Big Box stores offer highly standardized products and compete primarily on price, it is likely that they will seek to establish spatial monopolies, far from competitor stores. In this paper, I examine where new Big Box stores locate with respect to three types of existing establishments: own-firm stores, other retailers in the same product space (competitors), and retailers in other product spaces (complements). Results indicate that new Big Box stores tend to avoid existing own-firm stores and locate near complementary Big Box stores. However, there is little evidence that new Big Boxes seek to avoid competitors. Firms in the same product space may not be perfect substitutes, or firms may prefer to share consumers in a desirable location rather than cede the entire market to competitor firms.

From Grandmother to Grandson—Judeo-Spanish Anecdotes in Israel Today: Emigration, Cultural Accommodation and Language Preservation

I examine processes of cultural accommodation and maintenance of the Sephardic tradition as reflected in anecdotes of the generation who immigrated to Israel. The anecdotes reflect traditions and beliefs of Ladino speakers; I study their folkloric and linguistic aspects, while exposing the elements that create humor and reflect dominant social norms. The anecdotes present the obvious and the concealed tensions in Israeli society, yet they have a universal dimension: social conflicts in contacts between cultures, between ethnic groups, between the generation of the parents and that of the children and grandchildren, between next-door neighbors and between diasporas which converge in one social habitat. The article examines elements of performance, including the place of the storyteller in the storytelling situation and the techniques that generate laughter and identification with a marginal group: the group of Ladino speakers in Israel, as they clash with the hegemonic power in the Israeli society.

Worshiping the Black Sun

Worshiping the Black Sun

No Dogs Allowed by Stephanie Calmenson (review)

Reviewed by: No Dogs Allowed by Stephanie Calmenson Jeannette Hulick Calmenson, Stephanie. No Dogs Allowed; by Stephanie Calmenson and Joanna Cole; illus. by Heather Ross. Ottaviano/Holt, 2013. 114p (Ready, Set, Dogs!) ISBN 978-0-8050-9645-3 $14.99 Ad Gr. 2-3. Lucie and Kate are best friends, next-door neighbors, and dog lovers, but neither of their mothers will allow them to have a pet, so they focus on supporting the local shelter via a songwriting contest. When they acquire identical thrift-store necklaces with pink, bone-shaped pendants, they discover that the jewelry can magically turn them into dogs. Entertained by their newfound transformational abilities, Kate and Lucie alternate between doggy pursuits, such as eating new foods and teasing a pair of annoying neighborhood boys, and working on their song as human girls. The light tone, playful premise, and canine connection will appeal to many youngsters, and the clear writing, quick pace, and large font will all help support chapter-book newbies. The characters are pretty two-dimensional, however, and the plot is utterly predictable—not only do the girls win the songwriting contest but they do so after teaming up with the annoying boys. Ross’s frequent black and white illustrations, featuring a multicultural cast, are lighthearted and comic; the dog versions of Kate and Lucie even goofily resemble their human counterparts. Despite its shortcomings, this will appeal to pet lovers, especially those looking for a breezy chapter book. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Perceived Financial Costs and Neighborhood Effect of Foreclosures by Next-Door Neighbors in USDA Rural Areas

Many studies on foreclosures have collected information on individuals or families who experience foreclosure. Other studies have computed actual costs of foreclosure instead of the perception of foreclosure costs. Others have used aggregate data on foreclosed homes, as their unit of analysis. But no single study found has looked at the perceived financial cost and neighborhood effect of a foreclosed home in rural areas, neither have they used the next-door neighbors as the unit of analysis. This study fills this gap in knowledge by investigating how the next-door homeowners perceive financial and neighborhood changes because of their adjacent foreclosed home. The study used a financial and social scale as well as perceptions of foreclosures in general and about their neighbors’ foreclosure in particular to answer the research questions. An additional uniqueness of this study is that it was conducted in USDA rural designated areas.