2,064 research outputs found

    Introduction: Legal Form and Cultural Symbol – Music, Copyright and Information Studies

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    Writers in information and communication studies often assume the stability of objects under investigation: network nodes, databases, information. Legal writers in the intellectual property tradition often assume that cultural artefacts exist as objects prior to being governed by copyright law. Both assumptions are fallacious. This introduction conceptualises the relationship of legal form and cultural symbol. Starting from an understanding of copyright law as part of systems of production (in the sense of Peterson 1976), it is argued that copyright law constructs the artefacts it seeks to regulate as objects that can be bought and sold. In doing so, the legal and aesthetic logic of cultural symbols may clash, as in the case of digital music (the central focus of this special issue)

    The evolution of a citation network topology: The development of the journal Scientometrics

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    By mapping the electronic database containing all papers in Scientometrics for a 26-year period (1978-2004), we uncover the topological measures that characterize the network at a given moment, as well as the time evolution of these quantities. The citation network of the journal displays the characteristic features of a “small-world” network of local dense clusters of highly specialized literature. These clusters, however, are efficiently connected into a large single component by a small number of “hub” papers that allow short-distance connection among increasingly large numbers of papers. The patterns of evolution of the network toward this “small-world” are also explored

    Employee voice and human resource management: an empirical analysis using British data

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    The definition of formal employee voice employed in this paper is a variant of the definition developed by Hirschman (1970) in his seminal monograph and later elaborated and appropriated to unions in the labour market by Freeman and Medoff (1984). What we refer to as formal voice is any institutionalised form of two-way communication between management and employees. This is not the same as information sharing or other types of one-way consultation. Meaningful two-way dialogue, as that found typically in union collective bargained voice, is what formal employee voice refers to. As we endeavour to show in this paper, these forms of two-way communication typically extend beyond union voice to non-union forms of representation and direct forms of two-way dialogue, such as problem-solving groups and the statutory systems of works council voice developed as part of deeper European Union (EU) integration. Broader definitions of voice can also be invoked for the labour market as a whole or even for society more generally. In this context see recent work by Adrian Wilkinson and his colleagues (Dundon et al., 2004) and also John Budd’s Employment with a Human Face (2004). Some may take our definition of voice above and simply state that a formal voice system is 'the way workers communicate with management'. For us that would not be a poor workable definition. But how does that play out when we talk about Human Resource Management (HRM) techniques and their role in either abetting or inhibiting voice at work? HRM is not a voice system. Instead we assert that it has a different purpose altogether but may employ voice alongside in order to achieve the end goal of improving worker performance. This assertion flies against most received wisdom and evidence from the US, where union voice (the only real form permitted by the Wagner Act) often sits uncomfortably with HR. In England, up to now, the only thorough evidence by Wood and Machin (2005) suggested no correlation between voice (union) and HRM adoption. In this paper, however, we offer a new explanation for these findings above and in the process contribute some important new findings of our own. The principal source of formal employee voice has typically been provided by trade unions. However, in Britain, where our empirical analysis resides, unions have not been the sole, or even main, conduit for worker-management voice relations for more than three decades. Since the 1960s, firms in Britain have been combining traditional collective bargaining over wages and working conditions with independent non-union channels of two-way communication. Practically, this means things like having a non-union employee-employer committee to handle health-safety issues, promotion criteria or disability concerns. In my own university, a traditional collective bargaining process has neatly resided alongside a plethora of non-union administration and staff committees that discuss nearly every aspect of day-to-day work life and even strategic university planning goals. How these varying types and intensity of voice systems at work can (and do) sit alongside certain managerial innovations for the improvement of employee productivity, is the subject matter of our paper

    Kinematics of massive star ejecta in the Milky Way as traced by 26^26Al

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    Context. Massive stars form in groups and their winds and supernova explosions create superbubbles up to kpc in size. The fate of their ejecta is of vital importance for the dynamics of the interstellar medium, for chemical evolution models, and the chemical enrichment of galactic halos and the intergalactic medium. However, ejecta kinematics and the characteristic scales in space and time have not been explored in great detail beyond ~10 Ka. Aims: Through measurement of radioactive 26Al with its decay time constant at ~106 years, we aim to trace the kinematics of cumulative massive-star and supernova ejecta independent of the uncertain gas parameters over million-year time scales. Our goal is to identify the mixing time scale and the spatio-kinematics of such ejecta from the pc to kpc scale in our Milky Way. Methods: We use the SPI spectrometer on the INTEGRAL observatory and its observations along the Galactic ridge to trace the detailed line shape systematics of the 1808.63 keV gamma-ray line from 26Al decay. We determine line centroids and compare these to Doppler shift expectations from large-scale systematic rotation around the Galaxy centre, as observed in other Galactic objects. Results: We measure the radial velocities of gas traced by 26Al, averaged over the line of sight, as a function of Galactic longitude. We find substantially higher velocities than expected from Galactic rotation, the average bulk velocity being ~200 km s-1 larger than predicted from Galactic rotation. The observed radial velocity spread implies a Doppler broadening of the gamma-ray line that is consistent with our measurements of the overall line width. We can reproduce the observed characteristics with 26Al sources located along the inner spiral arms, when we add a global blow-out preference into the forward direction away from arms into the inter-arm region, as is expected when massive stars are offset towards the spiral-arm leading edge. With the known connection of superbubbles to the gaseous halo, this implies angular-momentum transfer in the disk-halo system and consequently also radial gas flows. The structure of the interstellar gas above the disk affects how ionizing radiation may escape and ionize intergalactic gas.Peer reviewe

    187^{187}Re(\gamm,n) cross section close to and above the neutron threshold

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    The neutron capture cross section of the unstable nucleus 186^{186}Re is studied by investigating the inverse photodisintegration reaction 187^{187}Re(Îł\gamma,n). The special interest of the {\it s}-process branching point 186^{186}Re is related to the question of possible {\it s}-process contributions to the abundance of the {\it r}-process chronometer nucleus ^{187}Re.Weusethephotoactivationtechniquetomeasurephotodisintegrationrates.Ourexperimentalresultsareingoodagreementwithtwodifferentstatisticalmodelcalculations.AlthoughthecrosssectionspredictedbybothmodelsfortheinversereactionRe. We use the photoactivation technique to measure photodisintegration rates. Our experimental results are in good agreement with two different statistical model calculations. Although the cross sections predicted by both models for the inverse reaction ^{186}Re(n,Re(n,\gamma)istoolowtoremovetheoverproductionof) is too low to remove the overproduction of ^{186}$Os; the two predicted neutron-capture cross sections differ by a factor of 2.4; this calls for future theoretical study.Comment: Phys. Rev. C, in pres

    MAD HATTER Correctly Annotates 98% of Small Molecule Tandem Mass Spectra Searching in PubChem

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    Metabolites provide a direct functional signature of cellular state. Untargeted metabolomics usually relies on mass spectrometry, a technology capable of detecting thousands of compounds in a biological sample. Metabolite annotation is executed using tandem mass spectrometry. Spectral library search is far from comprehensive, and numerous compounds remain unannotated. So-called in silico methods allow us to overcome the restrictions of spectral libraries, by searching in much larger molecular structure databases. Yet, after more than a decade of method development, in silico methods still do not reach the correct annotation rates that users would wish for. Here, we present a novel computational method called Mad Hatter for this task. Mad Hatter combines CSI:FingerID results with information from the searched structure database via a metascore. Compound information includes the melting point, and the number of words in the compound description starting with the letter ‘u’. We then show that Mad Hatter reaches a stunning 97.6% correct annotations when searching PubChem, one of the largest and most comprehensive molecular structure databases. Unfortunately, Mad Hatter is not a real method. Rather, we developed Mad Hatter solely for the purpose of demonstrating common issues in computational method development and evaluation. We explain what evaluation glitches were necessary for Mad Hatter to reach this annotation level, what is wrong with similar metascores in general, and why metascores may screw up not only method evaluations but also the analysis of biological experiments. This paper may serve as an example of problems in the development and evaluation of machine learning models for metabolite annotation

    High precision 89^{89}Y(α\alpha,α\alpha)89^{89}Y scattering at low energies

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    Elastic scattering cross sections of the 89^{89}Y(α\alpha,α\alpha)89^{89}Y reaction have been measured at energies Ec.m._{c.m.} = 15.51 and 18.63 MeV. The high precision data for the semi-magic N=50N = 50 nucleus 89^{89}Y are used to derive a local potential and to evaluate the predictions of global and regional α\alpha-nucleus potentials. The variation of the elastic alpha scattering cross sections along the N=50N = 50 isotonic chain is investigated by a study of the ratios of angular distributions for 89^{89}Y(α\alpha,α\alpha)89^{89}Y and 92^{92}Mo(α\alpha,α\alpha)92^{92}Mo at Ec.m.≈_{c.m.} \approx 15.51 and 18.63 MeV. This ratio is a very sensitive probe at energies close to the Coulomb barrier, where scattering data alone is usually not enough to characterize the different potentials. Furthermore, α\alpha-cluster states in 93^{93}Nb = 89^{89}Y ⊗\otimes α\alpha are investigated

    Juventudes y espacio pĂșblico : las demandas de la Juventud Campesina de ASAGRAPA y Estudiantil de la FENAES en el Paraguay

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    Durante el año 2007, seis países sudamericanos se unieron para llevar a cabo una inusual y desafiante investigación regional Juventud e Integración Sudamericana: caracterización de situaciones tipo y organizaciones juveniles. En Paraguay, la investigación fue coordinada por BASE Investigaciones Sociales, que formó parte de una red de investigación con otras siete instituciones de la región, bajo la supervisión general de Instituto Brasileño de Anålisis Sociales y Económicos, IBASE y el Instituto de Estudios y Asesoría en Políticas Sociales, POLIS, ambos de Brasil, con el apoyo de la agencia del parlamento canadiense, International Development Research Center (IDRC). El conjunto de estas investigaciones sobre juventudes sudamericanas tiene varias improntas, que lo presentan como un emprendimiento innovador en este campo en las ciencias sociales de la región
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