2,457 research outputs found
Introduction: Legal Form and Cultural Symbol â Music, Copyright and Information Studies
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
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 âsmall-worldâ 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 âhubâ papers that allow short-distance connection among increasingly large numbers of papers. The patterns of evolution of the network toward this âsmall-worldâ are also explored
Employee voice and human resource management: an empirical analysis using British data
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 Buddâs 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 Al
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
Re(\gamm,n) cross section close to and above the neutron threshold
The neutron capture cross section of the unstable nucleus Re is
studied by investigating the inverse photodisintegration reaction
Re(,n). The special interest of the {\it s}-process branching
point Re is related to the question of possible {\it s}-process
contributions to the abundance of the {\it r}-process chronometer nucleus
^{187}^{186}\gamma^{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
INTEGRAL/SPI Îł -ray line spectroscopy : Response and background characteristics
© 2018 ESO. Reproduced with permission from Astronomy & Astrophysics. Content in the UH Research Archive is made available for personal research, educational, and non-commercial purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, all content is protected by copyright, and in the absence of an open license, permissions for further re-use should be sought from the publisher, the author, or other copyright holder.Context. The space based γ-ray observatory INTEGRAL of the European Space Agency (ESA) includes the spectrometer instrument "SPI". This is a coded mask telescope featuring a 19-element Germanium detector array for high-resolution γ-ray spectroscopy, encapsulated in a scintillation detector assembly that provides a veto for background from charged particles. In space, cosmic rays irradiate spacecraft and instruments, which, in spite of the vetoing detectors, results in a large instrumental background from activation of those materials, and leads to deterioration of the charge collection properties of the Ge detectors.Aim. We aim to determine the measurement characteristics of our detectors and their evolution with time, that is, their spectral response and instrumental background. These incur systematic variations in the SPI signal from celestial photons, hence their determination from a broad empirical database enables a reduction of underlying systematics in data analysis. For this, we explore compromises balancing temporal and spectral resolution within statistical limitations. Our goal is to enable modelling of background applicable to spectroscopic studies of the sky, accounting separately for changes of the spectral response and of instrumental background.Methods. We use 13.5 years of INTEGRAL/SPI data, which consist of spectra for each detector and for each pointing of the satellite. Spectral fits to each such spectrum, with independent but coherent treatment of continuum and line backgrounds, provides us with details about separated background components. From the strongest background lines, we first determine how the spectral response changes with time. Applying symmetry and long-term stability tests, we eliminate degeneracies and reduce statistical fluctuations of background parameters, with the aim of providing a self-consistent description of the spectral response for each individual detector. Accounting for this, we then determine how the instrumental background components change in intensities and other characteristics, most-importantly their relative distribution among detectors.Results. Spectral resolution of Ge detectors in space degrades with time, up to 15% within half a year, consistently for all detectors, and across the SPI energy range. Semi-annual annealing operations recover these losses, yet there is a small long-term degradation. The intensity of instrumental background varies anti-correlated to solar activity, in general. There are significant differences among different lines and with respect to continuum. Background lines are found to have a characteristic, well-defined and long-term consistent intensity ratio among detectors. We use this to categorise lines in groups of similar behaviour. The dataset of spectral-response and background parameters as fitted across the INTEGRAL mission allows studies of SPI spectral response and background behaviour in a broad perspective, and efficiently supports precision modelling of instrumental background.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
MAD HATTER Correctly Annotates 98% of Small Molecule Tandem Mass Spectra Searching in PubChem
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 âuâ. 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 Y(,)Y scattering at low energies
Elastic scattering cross sections of the Y(,)Y
reaction have been measured at energies E = 15.51 and 18.63 MeV. The
high precision data for the semi-magic nucleus Y are used to
derive a local potential and to evaluate the predictions of global and regional
-nucleus potentials. The variation of the elastic alpha scattering
cross sections along the isotonic chain is investigated by a study of
the ratios of angular distributions for Y(,)Y and
Mo(,)Mo at E 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, -cluster states in Nb =
Y are investigated
Juventudes y espacio pĂșblico : las demandas de la Juventud Campesina de ASAGRAPA y Estudiantil de la FENAES en el Paraguay
Durante el año 2007, seis paĂses sudamericanos se unieron para llevar a cabo una inusual y desafiante investigaciĂłn regional Juventud e IntegraciĂłn Sudamericana: caracterizaciĂłn de situaciones tipo y organizaciones juveniles. En Paraguay, la investigaciĂłn fue coordinada por BASE Investigaciones Sociales, que formĂł parte de una red de investigaciĂłn con otras siete instituciones de la regiĂłn, bajo la supervisiĂłn general de Instituto Brasileño de AnĂĄlisis Sociales y EconĂłmicos, IBASE y el Instituto de Estudios y AsesorĂa en PolĂticas 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 regiĂłn
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