Chinese preschoolers’ ownership reasoning based on first possession heuristic

First possession is a common heuristic people use to solve property conflicts. Previous studies examined whether young children judged ownership based on the first possession heuristic and its stability when conflicting with other cues such as labor, but few focused on the effects in the discovery context. In this study, we used two discovery stories which indicate the discovered object was not owned by anyone beforehand and investigated ownership reasoning with the first possession heuristic in Chinese 3- to 6-year-old preschoolers. By pitting the first possession cue against the labor cue, we investigated the stability of the first possession heuristic in young children’s ownership reasoning. The results showed that in the condition where there was only the first possession cue, both the younger and older groups used the first possession heuristic to reason about ownership. However, in the labor condition, 5- and 6-year-olds ceased to support the first possessor and turned to assign objects to the laborer, whereas 3-year-old children still insisted on the first possession heuristic (Study 1 and Study 2). Children across four age groups did not assign ownership to the person who just played with the object but did not modify it (Study 2). The results demonstrate that Chinese preschoolers understand the role of first possession in ownership assignment at an early age in the discovery context but the elderly preschoolers do not rely on the first possession cue when there are conflicting cues such as labor.

Determinants of Smart City Commitment among Citizens from a Middle City in Argentina

This paper aims to examine the determinants of smart-city commitment across individuals from Bahía Blanca, Argentina. Literature has identified different factors explaining citizens’ commitment to smart cities, such as education, age, labor condition, and other more subjective factors, such as trust and awareness about the smart-city concept. A mediator factor of smart commitment is e-readiness or digital readiness, that is, the level of preparedness to properly exploit internet opportunities such as e-government and e-commerce. To achieve this goal, we used a survey conducted on 97 citizens (followers of the Moderniza Bahía Facebook) from the city of Bahía Blanca, Argentina. By estimating a structural equation model, we found that higher levels of ICT use are associated with higher levels of smart-city commitment and that higher awareness of the smart-city concept is related to higher levels of smart-city commitment. Sociodemographic factors such as age and labor condition also explain ICT use.

The influence of wage, age and experience to labor productivity in construction works in Kota Langsa, Aceh

Construction work, as well as other production process depends on how people work towards it. The success of the work is determined by labor productivity. Labor productivity is affected by many factors such as human factors, environment, labor condition, leadership, type of work, level of difficulty etc. This article will discuss how these aspects influence the value of labor productivity. We limit our research on wage, age and experience from 15 to 30 workers in the brick work. The research is held in 4 construction sites in Kota Langsa, Aceh, Indonesia in late 2016 until early 2017. We observe the effective time, time of contribution, ineffective time work and the work volume. Productivity is obtained by dividing the work volume and the effective time work. The result shows that the amount of wage influences the labor productivity. Nonetheless, we found that age and experience do not affect labor productivity. Interestingly, the experience workers in any ages will increase the value of labor productivity.

The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

This article explores the relationship between precarity as a labor condition and precarity as an ontological experience in the lives of urban poor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The focus is on a garbage dump on the outskirts of the city where thousands of Rio’s poor, known as catadores, reclaim recyclables for a living. Attending to cyclic moments in which these workers leave the dump for other jobs and then return, I explore how everyday emergencies in Rio’s periphery often clash with the rigid conditions of regular, wage-labor employment. These comings and goings of catadores result from a tension between the desire for “real” work and the desire for what I describe as relational autonomy, made possible by the conditions of wageless work. The article considers how specific histories and experiences of capitalism in the global South differentially shape the articulation of precarious labor with precarious life. I conclude by suggesting that the returns of catadores to the dump do not signal an end for Rio’s poor, but rather constitute a politics of detachment that enables life to be lived in fragile times.