1,003 research outputs found

    Authors Losing Control: The European Transformations of Henry Neville’s 'The Isle of Pines' (1668)

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    Henry Neville’s utopian travel narrative The Isle of Pines, first published in London in June 1668, became an instant bestseller on the European market. Within a few months more than twenty foreign editions were printed in five western European languages, and numerous responses, commentaries, and adaptations followed over the years, leaving the reader wondering whether the story was fact, fiction, or something else entirely. This essay traces the complex transformations of this successful pamphlet as it traveled across the Continent in an attempt to shed new light on its contemporary impact and significance outside of England. In an attempt to shed new light on its contemporary impact and significance outside of England

    Alter-identity work via Social Media in Professional Service Contexts

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    This study examines the emerging use of social media in complex social phenomenon, natural disasters. By adopting an affordance perspective, we focus on how local communities harness the power of social media in disaster response. Using an interpretive approach, we identify different affordances of social media and examine how these affordances enable local communities in performing crisis response activities and achieving social outcomes in the case of 2015 Myanmar flood. The lack of theoretical development in research on societal consequences of emerging technologies (e.g. social media) makes this study timely, relevant, and worthwhile. Our findings demonstrate that social media transformed the way citizens, organizations, emergency responders, and government think and act creatively, improvising new means of addressing the challenges posted by a disaster. The study generates theoretical and practical implications for understanding the role of social media in addressing societal challenges in developing counties

    Dickens, the suspended quotation and the corpus

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    This article presents a computer-assisted approach to the study of character discourse in Dickens. It focuses on the concept of the ‘suspended quotation’ – the interruption of a character’s speech by at least five words of narrator text. After an outline of the concept of the suspended quotation as introduced by Lambert (1981), the article compares manually derived counts for suspensions in Dickens with automatically generated figures. This comparison shows how corpus methods can help to increase the scale at which the phenomenon is studied. It highlights that quantitative information for selected sections of a novel does not necessarily represent the patterns that are found across the whole text. The article also includes a qualitative analysis of suspensions. With the help of the new tool CLiC, it investigates interruptions of the speech of Mrs Sparsit in Hard Times and illustrates how suspensions can be useful places for the presentation of character information. CLiC is further used to find patterns of the word pause that provide insights into how suspensions contribute to the representation of pauses in character speech

    An Examination of the Influence of Formative Self-Assessment on College Student Mastery Orientation in College Courses

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    This study examined the hypothesis that mastery orientation would increase for college students enrolled in courses that incorporated self-assessment. Early in the spring 2013 semester, 216 community college students enrolled in 16 different general education and developmental courses volunteered to participate and completed a demographic/goal orientation questionnaire. During the semester, 10 of the courses implemented self-assessment and 6 did not. At the conclusion of the semester, 143 of the original sample completed the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ) which provided post-test goal orientation scores along with measures of additional motivational and self-regulatory variables. Results indicated a trend in the direction hypothesized only for students enrolled in general education, not developmental courses. Further, retention was significantly higher for students enrolled in self-assessment courses. Additional motivational and self-regulatory variables were correlated with achievement outcomes such as final grades

    Remeasuring the HDI by Data Envelopement Analysis

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    The measurement of human development has a potentially strong impact on how the development gap is viewed and on the formulation of new policies. Therefore correct and fair measurement is of great importance. In this paper, we develop an algorithm to compute comprehensive differentiation rules suitable for measuring human development. We used models from Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) literature to compare performance in a multiple output setting. The models were evaluated by empirically re-estimating the human development index (HDI). The most notable advantages of DEA models are that they endogenously construct a non-linearly arranged set of best practice countries and the weights of each indicator entering the HDI is endogenously determined based on an optimization calculus. These weights are allowed to vary thereby accounting for cross-sectional heterogeneity. While country clusters are identified by their similarity, some interesting outliers can also be singled out using DEA. Such outliers are either best practice frontier countries or countries that are locked in underdevelopment trap

    Vacancy assisted diffusion on single‐atom surface alloys

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    Bimetallic surfaces can exhibit an improved catalytic activity through tailoring the concentration and/or the arrangement of the two metallic components. However, in order to be catalytically active, the active bimetallic surface structure has to be stable under operating conditions. Typically, structural changes in metals occur via vacancy diffusion. Based on the first‐principles determination of formation energies and diffusion barriers we have performed kinetic Monte‐Carlo (kMC) simulations to analyse the (meta‐)stability of PtRu/Ru(0001), AgPd/Pd(111), PtAu/Au(111) and InCu/Cu(100) surface alloys. In a first step, here we consider single‐atom alloys together with one vacancy per simulation cell. We will present results of the time evolution of these structures and analyse them in terms of the interaction between the constituents of the bimetallic surface

    Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and one of its Italian translations

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    In this paper, we explore the potential of a corpus approach to study trans-lated cohesion. We use key words as starting points for identifying cohesive networks in Lovecraft\u2019s At the Mountains of Madness and discuss how these networks contribute to the construction of literary meanings in the text. We fo-cus on the role of repetition as a key element in establishing cohesive networks between lexical items. We specifically discuss the implications of our method for the analysis of cohesion in translated texts. A comparison of Lovecraft\u2019s original novel and a translation into Italian provides us with a nuanced un-derstanding of the complex nature of cohesive networks. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of applying models and methods from corpus linguistics to corpus stylistic analysis

    Actigraphy in agitated patients with dementia : Monitoring treatment outcomes

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    Especially in pharmacotherapeutic research, a variety of methods to monitor behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are currently being discussed. To date, the most frequently used of these are clinical scales, which, however, are subjective and highly dependent on personnel resources. In our study, we tested the usefulness of actigraphy as a more direct and objective way to measure day-night rhythm disturbances and agitated behaviour.After a baseline assessment, 24 patients with probable dementia of the Alzheimer type (NINCDS-ADRDA) and agitated behaviour received either 3 mg melatonin (n=7), 2.5 mg dronabinol (n=7), or placebo (n=10) for two weeks. In addition, 10 young and 10 elderly healthy subjects were examined as a control group. Motor activity levels were assessed using an actigraph worn continuously on the wrist of the non-dominant hand. At the beginning and the end of the study, patients' Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI) scores were also assessed.In the verum group, actigraphic nocturnal activity (P=0.001), NPI total score (P=0.043), and NPI agitation subscale score (P=0.032) showed significant reductions compared to baseline. The treatment-baseline ratio of nocturnal activity (P=0.021) and treatment-baseline difference of the nocturnal portion of 24 h activity (P=0.012) were reduced. Patients' baseline activity levels were similar to those seen in healthy elderly subjects. Younger healthy subjects exhibited higher motor activity even at night. There was no correlation between actigraphy and NPI.Both actigraphic measures and the gold standard clinical scale were able to distinguish between the verum and placebo groups. However, because they did not correlate with each other, they clearly represent different aspects of BPSD, each of which reacts differently to therapy. As a result, actigraphy may well come to play an important role in monitoring treatment success in BPSD
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