This article contributes to the growing research field investigating intensive intervention programmes aimed at families with complex needs, focusing on the experiences of long-term poor families in Norway. There is a growing public concern about social inequalities in Norway, especially regarding child poverty and the negative effects of social and economic exclusion. The innovation project New Patterns is a means to compensate for the present silo-organised social welfare system, opting to develop holistic services targeting poor families with diverse challenges. Based on interviews and observation, the article examines how parents experience being subjected to extensive but voluntary family intervention by a designated family coordinator. We analyse what forms of change they are identifying as happening after working with the family coordinator. We find that the changes they identify can be labelled both as small moments and turning points and argue that small moments can instigate decisive changes.

We examine the start date of the Great Recession across OECD countries. The Sahm Rule identifies the start of recession in the US to the beginning of 2008 but in most other OECD countries it identifies the start after that identified by two successive falls in quarterly GDP. We establish our own rule for predicting recession using the fear of unemployment series to predict recession. We show a 10-point rise in the series compared to its previous 12 month low predicted the onset of the Great Recession in both the United States and Europe.

In 1913, a new generation of Indonesians asserted their agency by publicly demanding equality in colonial society. Through four case studies—the prohibition of traditional forms of deference, the sudden popularity of Western dress, the adoption of new legal assimilation guidelines for Indonesians, and the discussion of employee rights at a railway company—we argue that this new assertiveness reflected a broad change in mentality that we consider a turning point in Indonesian history. By focusing on Indonesian agency, we challenge the Eurocentric periodization of the Indonesian past that emphasized WWI as a trigger of change.

We present a general recurrence model which provides a conceptual framework for well-known problems such as ascents, peaks, turning points, Bernstein's urn model, the Eggenberger–Pólya urn model and the hypergeometric distribution. Moreover, we show that the Frobenius-Harper technique, based on real roots of a generating function, can be applied to this general recurrence model (under simple conditions), and so a Berry–Esséen bound and local limit theorems can be found. This provides a simple and unified approach to asymptotic theory for diverse problems hitherto treated separately.