An Empirical Investigation Of The Concept Of “Pornography”

“Pornography” as a concept remains unclear. The lack of consensus about the meaning of pornography is particularly problematic for empirical enterprises where inconsistent conceptualizations of pornography undermine the reliability and validity of research findings, impede the integration of knowledge across studies, and contribute to the miscommunication of research findings to the general public. With this in mind, the goal of this dissertation was to explore the concept of pornography, particularly as it was understood by lay individuals, with the hope of uncovering insights that would strengthen research practices in this field. To this end, seven studies were conducted using both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore the meaning and use of pornography as a construct. This research found that while 14 different conceptual elements were used to define pornography among academics, open-ended responses provided by lay persons tended to describe pornography as the depiction of sexual content, particularly sexual behaviour and nudity. Further, closed-ended quantitative measures confirmed the importance of sexual behaviour and nudity for understanding pornography, and also indicated the importance of the sexually arousing properties of such materials for lay persons. When decisions about the extent to which various images could be considered pornographic or not pornographic were examined, pornography judgments were found to be very reliable and did not differ by gender, experience with sexually explicit materials, or extent of erotophobia or right-wing authoritarianism. Finally, 26 unique content-based features of photographic images were found to account for 69-72% of the variance in pornography judgments made in response to sexual images. In sum, across studies, there was evidence of surprising consistency in the ways that lay undergraduate respondents understood and employed the concept of pornography. For most individuals studied, pornography was simply about the depiction of sexual behaviour and nudity, and empirical researchers in this area would do well to align their conceptual and operational definitions of pornography accordingly

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

Methodology of study of corruption in higher education

Higher education in the U.S. may be characterized by complexity and plurality of forms. The Ivy League universities and those trying to replicate them, or so-called “wanna be” universities, coexist with numerous large public institutions, four-year colleges and community colleges. While the former are actively involved in business-driven projects in research and services, the latter are quite distant from these processes. Nevertheless, all of them serve the industries, first of all by training professionals for these industries. In this sense community colleges are not less linked to businesses than major research universities. Curriculum in community colleges is tailored to meet the demands of specific industries and more so often local labor markets. Woshburn (2005) presents the negative sides of the impact of industries on the academia in the book titled University Incorporated: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education. This book would be of high interest for policymakers, managers, and theorists. While policymakers, university administrators, and business managers will appreciate good description of forms of cooperation of industries and universities as well as problems that such cooperation creates or exacerbates and some of the prescriptions, offered by the author, theorists will find wealth of material on which to build some concepts and theories of social and ethical responsibility versus commercialization and perhaps even some interesting niches for possible corrupt activities in higher education.corruption, education, methodology, university

Against the Tide. A Critical Review by Scientists of How Physics and Astronomy Get Done

Nobody should have a monopoly of the truth in this universe. The censorship and suppression of challenging ideas against the tide of mainstream research, the blacklisting of scientists, for instance, is neither the best way to do and filter science, nor to promote progress in the human knowledge. The removal of good and novel ideas from the scientific stage is very detrimental to the pursuit of the truth. There are instances in which a mere unqualified belief can occasionally be converted into a generally accepted scientific theory through the screening action of refereed literature and meetings planned by the scientific organizing committees and through the distribution of funds controlled by "club opinions". It leads to unitary paradigms and unitary thinking not necessarily associated to the unique truth. This is the topic of this book: to critically analyze the problems of the official (and sometimes illicit) mechanisms under which current science (physics and astronomy in particular) is being administered and filtered today, along with the onerous consequences these mechanisms have on all of us.\ud \ud The authors, all of them professional researchers, reveal a pessimistic view of the miseries of the actual system, while a glimmer of hope remains in the "leitmotiv" claim towards the freedom in doing research and attaining an acceptable level of ethics in science

An interdisciplinary, cross-lingual perspective

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, German

The role of constituents in multiword expressions

Multiword expressions (MWEs), such as noun compounds (e.g. nickname in English, and Ohrwurm in German), complex verbs (e.g. give up in English, and aufgeben in German) and idioms (e.g. break the ice in English, and das Eis brechen in German), may be interpreted literally but often undergo meaning shifts with respect to their constituents. Theoretical, psycholinguistic as well as computational linguistic research remain puzzled by when and how MWEs receive literal vs. meaning-shifted interpretations, what the contributions of the MWE constituents are to the degree of semantic transparency (i.e., meaning compositionality) of the MWE, and how literal vs. meaning-shifted MWEs are processed and computed. This edited volume presents an interdisciplinary selection of seven papers on recent findings across linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational research fields and perspectives, discussing the interaction of constituent properties and MWE meanings, and how MWE constituents contribute to the processing and representation of MWEs. The collection is based on a workshop at the 2017 annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) that took place at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany

Methods of Assessing the Quality of Public Service and Outreach in Institutions of Higher Education: What's the State of the Art?

Provides a literature review summary that explores the changing nature of outreach and public service at institutions of higher education and the criteria used to assess its effectiveness