Analytes Of Interest Research Articles

"Like a porn movie": Notes on boundaries and bodies that matter in male sex clubs

This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in male sex clubs in São Paulo between 2006 and 2008. Drawing on interviews conducted with club-goers and club owners, it discusses the recent segmentation of the sexual leisure market for men in the city, and the processes by which stereotypes and characteristics associated with virility are valued and performed. The possible effects of these processes on subjectivity constitution are also investigated. In sex clubs, sexual practices considered borderline, such as fist-fucking and other practices associated with BDSM, are material for specific and refined learning. The data gathered from interviews show that condom use and drug and alcohol consumption are subject to a sort of surveillance and control, especially when it comes to their questions of 'excess'. This control provides sex clubs with a sense of legitimacy, making them part of a viable erotic market. The intention here is to demonstrate the analytical interest of this control in the context of the construction of subjects and bodies that matter in these venues. Like practices which evoke control or loss thereof, bodies and clubs need to have their excesses checked so that they are intelligible and desirable.

THE PRIMACY OF THE POLITICAL AND THE TROPE OF THE ‘PEOPLE’ IN ERNESTO LACLAU'S ON POPULIST REASON

If the proliferation of new social movements thematized in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was the key conjectural feature on the horizon of radical democratic politics in Euro-America in 1980s, the eruptions of the people in the streets and slums all over the world, and especially in the global south, is hauntingly present in the background of On Populist Reason. With the democratic imaginary now gone global, Laclau's positing of the people as the political subject par excellence and populism as the paradigmatic logic of the political acquires new pertinence. This double privileging is accompanied by a series of shifts in emphasis in the conceptual architecture of Laclau's theory of hegemony. Aside from the further radicalization two pivotal terms in Laclau's social ontology – heterogeneity and contingency – one can observe three other noticeable shifts in emphasis: First, on the plane of discursivity (or in the differential field of the meaningful) the articulatory practices are increasingly characterized in terms of their rhetoricity (i.e. the mode of braiding the rhetorical form with its function); and, furthermore, the tropological characterization of the articulatory practices progressively yields to an analysis of their performative emergence by way of ‘naming’. Second, there is a corresponding shift in the analytic interest from the discursive production of the nodal points (such as ‘free market’ or ‘law and order’) to the discursive production of empty signifiers (especially, of the ‘people’). Third, the conflictual social field is configured not only in terms of antagonisms but also in terms of dislocations.

Life-Guilt vs. Death-Guilt: Reply to Commentary

Ghislaine Boulanger's personal disclosure of self-disbelief brought back vividly a half-forgotten memory of my own while visiting a faraway cemetery. My memory perhaps presaged my analytic interest in dehumanization and, specifically, the distinction on which my article culminates: between humanizing guilt and civilizing guilt or, equivalently, between life-guilt and death-guilt. Boulanger's commentary allows me to elaborate this distinction. My reply is meant to cover not only the therapy cases I presented but perhaps Boulanger's own humanizing treatment of the severely traumatized.

Identifying the “Players” in Sports Analytics Research

Despite a sports analytics research history that goes back more than 50 years and a recent dramatic rise in the level of scholarly interest in sports analytics, no prior research has attempted to identify its scope, scale, and growth in terms of the body of published refereed articles in the literature. Prior research has also not identified the “players” in the field: the journals and institutions that most commonly publish sports analytics research and are most commonly cited. To answer these questions, I examined 140 journals in operations research, statistics, applied mathematics, and applied economics, and identified 1,146 articles that address the application of analytics in sports. The results provide a picture of the size and nature of sports analytics research and its purveyors, and offer some perspective on the parameters of the field.

A reference model for learning analytics

Recently, there is an increasing interest in learning analytics in Technology-Enhanced Learning TEL. Generally, learning analytics deals with the development of methods that harness educational datasets to support the learning process. Learning analytics LA is a multi-disciplinary field involving machine learning, artificial intelligence, information retrieval, statistics and visualisation. LA is also a field in which several related areas of research in TEL converge. These include academic analytics, action analytics and educational data mining. In this paper, we investigate the connections between LA and these related fields. We describe a reference model for LA based on four dimensions, namely data and environments what?, stakeholders who?, objectives why? and methods how?. We then review recent publications on LA and its related fields and map them to the four dimensions of the reference model. Furthermore, we identify various challenges and research opportunities in the area of LA in relation to each dimension.

Croatia on the threshold of the European Union: A challenge or a problem competitiveness or how to be better

For the last decade the Republic of Croatia has been preparing to enter and become a full member of the European Union (EU). The negotiations began in the context of political and social issues (the degree of democratization of society, respect for human freedoms and rights, etc.). Then in the framework of 35 negotiating chapters the focus shifted to economic factors. The freedom of market competition, the example of shipbuilding, stimulus and protection of agriculture production, trade relations and a preferential relationship compared to the neighboring countries outside the EU became the dominant questions in the continued process of negotiation and harmonization. At the same time, Croatia first began to understand and then the media set out to treat more significantly and consider the question of our (national) competitiveness. In this context and at that time (the past decade) the National Competitiveness Council was established. In the past decade the Council has played a crucial role in creating public awareness of why competitiveness is important in achieving the (ultimate) goal - creation of national prosperity as a permanently sustainable condition. This is a goal that can be achieved only through economic success, within national boundaries, within the EU, and increasingly within a stronger global economy. All of these questions, and the search for (correct) responses, are more strongly present in the conditions of the global economic crisis on one hand, and the impending accession (measured in months) of the Republic of Croatia to full membership in the EU. Following from the above, the research and analytical interest of the work is to see how one transition country can succeed on this path; what it must and must not do; what are the specific conditions and limits; and what are the requirements and limiting values of those successful countries to whom the Croatian economy must draw closer and which is must respect in the long term.

Seeking policy-relevant knowledge: a comparative study of the contextualisation of participatory scenarios for the Narew River and Lake Peipsi

► We compare two participatory scenario-making processes in the field of water management. ► We ask what kind of policy-relevant knowledge these kinds of experiments could provide for the use and management of water resources. ► We conclude that, at its best, they can assist in the articulation of issues of public concern that the responsible institutions are unable to address. ► Such a take on policy-relevant knowledge requires reorientation from scenario-making methodologies. Using participatory scenario-making has become increasingly common in environmental assessments that aim for policy impact. In this development, ‘social work’ – i.e., construction and usage of the scenarios – has received only a little analytical interest. In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap of knowledge by focusing on the construction of scenarios and asking what kind of policy relevant knowledge these kinds of participatory experiments can provide for the resolution of environmental problems. We draw on experiences gained from a SCENES scenario-making experiment wherein a comprehensive set of scenarios for the future management of European freshwater resources was developed in a highly participatory manner. The SCENES work aimed at providing policy-relevant knowledge for implementation of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD). In this paper, we analyse and compare how issues were formulated and articulated as public concerns during the scenario-making process for the Narew River Basin, in Poland, and Lake Peipsi, in Estonia. The empirical narratives highlight that scenario-making assisted in articulation of the critical entanglements between the water systems and regional socio economic development. The implementation of the WFD has been largely unable to address these issues. In this sense, SCENES engaged in the articulation of public concerns. In SCENES there was, however, a latent tension in seeing scenario-making as either informing or forming social choices for water management. The epistemic principle of informing guided many of the methodological choices made during SCENES, whilst attempts aimed at issue formation characterised the panellists’ way of developing scenarios. Resolving this tension is decisive for the future governance of European freshwater resources. We close the paper by discussing why.

Removal of Heavy Metals from Synthetic Mixture as well as Pharmaceutical Sample Via Cation Exchange Resin Modified with Rhodamine B: Its Thermodynamic and Kinetic Studies

AbstractA new sorbent was prepared by loading rhodamine B on Amberlite IR‐120. Various physico‐chemical parameters such as effects of adsorbate concentration, contact time, pH, and temperature on the sorption of the dye have been studied. Thermodynamic parameters (ΔH° and ΔS°) were also evaluated for the sorption of dye. Kinetic studies revealed that the sorption of the dye was best fit for pseudo‐second‐order kinetic. The metal ion uptake in different solvent systems has been explored through column studies. On the basis of distribution coefficient (Kd), some heavy metal ions of analytical interest from binary mixtures have been separated. The limit of detection (LOD) for the Ni2+ and Fe3+ metal ions was 0.81 and 0.60 µg L−1, and the limit of quantification (LOQ) was found to be 2.72 and 2.0 µg L−1. This sorbent has also been successfully applied in the analysis of multivitamin formulation. The applicability of the modified resin in the separation of heavy metals constituting real and synthetic samples has been explored.

An Analytical Hybrid Equity and Interest Rate Model

In this article, we introduce a new pricing model for equity and interest rate hybrids that can capture the effects of implied volatility skews and stochastic interest rates simultaneously. The proposed model is a simple modification of an existing hybrid model often used by market practitioners. While both models can be calibrated efficiently and accurately along the lines of Piterbarg (2005), it is shown that the proposed model is analytically solvable leading to an explicit equity price expression. Using this expression, we manage to establish an exact Monte Carlo simulation scheme for generic pricing purposes. In addition, it is shown that a path wise approach along the lines of Glasserman (1996) can be applied to the proposed model in a straightforward manner for the calculation of equity deltas and gammas. For illustration purposes, we apply the results developed in this article to the pricing of conditional trigger swaps or Enmansai structures. Numerical results indicate that the exact simulation scheme developed in this article is both efficient and robust. Moreover, both the proposed model and the existing model lead to similar prices, equity deltas, and equity gammas. However, owing to the exact simulation scheme, the proposed model compares favorably to the existing model due to its superior computational efficiency and robustness in pricing. As a benchmark, with a simulation size of 100K, calculation of price, equity deltas, and equity gammas of a 30-year Enmansai trade with semi-annual coupons typically takes less than 5 seconds under the proposed model, while the existing model can take nearly 100 seconds to achieve a comparable accuracy.

Categorising YouTube

This article provides a genre analytical approach to creating a typology of the User Generated Content (UGC) of YouTube. The article investigates the construction of navigationprocesses on the YouTube website. It suggests a pragmatic genre approach that is expanded through a focus on YouTube’s technological affordances. Through an analysis of the different pragmatic contexts of YouTube, it is argued that a taxonomic understanding of YouTube must be analysed in regards to the vacillation of a user-driven bottom-up folksonomy and a hierarchical browsing system that emphasises a culture of competition and which favours the already popular content of YouTube. With this taxonomic approach, the UGC videos are registered and analysed in terms of empirically based observations. The article identifies various UGC categories and their principal characteristics. Furthermore, general tendencies of the UGC within the interacting relationship of new and old genres are discussed. It is argued that the utility of a conventional categorical system is primarily of analytical and theoretical interest rather than as a practical instrument.

National lenses on a global news event: determinants of the politicization and domestication of the prelude to the Beijing Olympics

This article utilizes a 14-country comparative data set and analyzes how different countries' television news has covered the events and controversies surrounding the Beijing Olympics in the months before the Summer Games. Conceptually, the focus is on the notions of domestication and politicization. However, rather than simply illustrating the presence of these phenomena, the analytical interest resides mainly in uncovering their “determinants”. More specifically, following the arguments that the mainstream news media are generally power dependent on the one hand and have a strong local orientation on the other, it was hypothesized that a number of relationships exist between degrees of domestication and politicization in television news in different countries and the countries' social, cultural, and political characteristics. The empirical results show that the degree of domestication can be explained by a country's level of participation in the Olympic Games and the size of the country's ethnic Chinese population. The degree of politicization, meanwhile, can be explained by the type of political regime and the country's economic relationship with China. The implications of the findings are discussed.

The Gendered Division of Paid and Unpaid Work in Different Institutional Regimes: Comparing West Germany, East Germany and Bulgaria

The division of paid and unpaid work between spouses is essential for the placement of women within paid work, and hence implies several consequences—for the returns, which women receive for their education, for women's employment status in the active age, for women's horizontal and vertical labour segregation, and for their amount of pensions after retirement. Previous findings suggest that there exist systematic relationships between a country's institutional background and the division of family tasks and employment between men and women. Few previous studies, however, have attempted a thorough analysis of the cross-nationally different ‘typical strategies’ of simultaneously dividing both paid and unpaid work between spouses, and its individual determinants. Our paper intends to fill this gap by identifying the type of strategies that women develop for combining paid and unpaid work in Bulgaria, West Germany, and East Germany, with specific emphasis on a more detailed task-oriented analysis of unpaid housework in the three different institutional contexts. Our analytical interest on the one hand lies on identifying nation-specific peculiarities as well as cross-national differences in the choice of specific reconciliation strategies. At the same time, we aim to identify the micro-level determinants that influence or shape a specific choice of strategies. Empirically, we draw back to the West German, East German, and Bulgarian data of the first wave (2006) of the Gender and Generations Programme (GGP), a newly available data set by the UN that allows for a detailed consideration of the above mentioned aspects. Descriptive statistics as well as logistic regression will be used to test for the hypothesized relationships.

Reformulation: a verbal display of interlanguage awareness in instructional interactions

Reformulation is mostly considered as an important verbal mechanism for coping with non-native speakers’ speech production problem in second language acquisition. Drawing on interlanguage pragmatics and conversation analysis, the present study examines the specific ways in which reformulation is used to achieve mutual understanding in the instructional interaction between US college students and foreign-born instructors. The data under examination consist of 10 dyadic interactions that naturally occurred during office hours. The matter of analytic interest is the communicative functions of reformulation as a strategy to display and cope with American college students’ comprehension difficulties that may be related to the foreign-born instructors’ limited language proficiency. Both self-reformulation and other-reformulation are found in the data to deal with the foreign-born instructors’ difficulties in speech production and reception. The close analysis of the linguistic features and interactional procedures of reformulation in the data here may have some implications for language awareness development in instructional interactions across linguistic and cultural boundaries.

Analytical Methods to Determine Anti-Influenza Drugs

Analytical techniques employed in anti-influenza drugs analysis are summarized. The literature reviewed covers the papers of analytical interest that have appeared in approximately the last 10 years. Specific applications to Amantadine, Rimantadine, Oseltamivir, Zanamivir, and Peramivir are included. Possibilities and limitation of various analytical methods are evaluated.

Prolegomena zu einer Rechtsgeschichte Südosteuropas

This article tries to outline the history of law in South Eastern Europe – a subject that currently is being researched in an international project at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History. It reflects on some historical aspects and theoretical issues which may help to identify the analytical approach and interest in that case. The history of law in Southeast Europe bears the hallmarks of the general history of the region. National politics has often dominated and still dominates historical thinking. On the other hand, legal history has been part of the traditional discourse of modernization. Since the 19th century the Ottoman Empire and its successor states looked upon Western Europe as the universal model of social and political organization which they have made efforts to adopt. The article tries to overcome the implications of both nationalism and modernization starting from a general idea of modernity. It also aims at integrating the Ottoman history in the study of legal history of the post-Ottoman states. Finally, it discusses the problem of legal transfer which played a crucial role in the formation of national legal systems in the successor states.

Changes in the miRNA profile under the influence of anabolic steroids in bovine liver

miRNAs are regulatory RNA molecules. The analytical interest rose over the past 10 years especially in clinical diagnostics as miRNAs show specific expression patterns in several human diseases like diabetes or cancer. Therefore, it is expected that miRNA profiles might be used as biomarkers in early diagnosis. The idea of establishing biomarkers is also present in veterinary drug analysis, e.g. in the surveillance of illegal use of anabolics. Transcriptomics is a promising approach in the detection of anabolics misuse. However, miRNA expression patterns have shown their superiority over mRNA patterns in clinical diagnostics. Thus, the influence of anabolic steroids on miRNA expression in bovine liver should be investigated and an expression pattern should be validated, which might be used as a treatment biomarker. An animal experiment was conducted with 18 heifers equally allocated to a control and a treatment group, which was implanted with TBA plus E2. Liver samples were screened for miRNA expression using PCR arrays. Expression of 11 prominent miRNAs was validated via single assay qPCR. Herein, the following expression pattern could be found with an up-regulation of miR-29c and miR-103 and a down-regulation of miR-34a, miR-181c, miR-20a and miR-15a (p<0.05 each). Using principal components analysis (PCA), the control group could clearly be distinguished from the treatment group, when integrating gene expression results from both miRNA and mRNA. So, the combination of different transcribed targets (mRNA plus miRNA) might be a promising approach to find a valid expression pattern to be used for anabolic treatment screening.

The Semiotics of Brand

Approaches to the semiotics of brand are troubled by the lack of any accepted analytic definition of the phenomenon, as well as capacious, almost metaphysical, extensions in which brand becomes identified with semiosis as such, and thus everything is a brand. In addition, studies of brand tend to focus on highly visible or successful brands, as often as not as a proxy for a real object of analytic interest that lies elsewhere. Brand discourse defines brand in opposition to the material properties of the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, which erases the messy materialities, contingencies, and hybrids that continually arise in the material semiosis of brand. Rather than attempt a definition of brand, the recent literature on brand semiotics is explored along several material and semiotic dimensions of the variousness of its relationship to its universes of circulation and in different professional discourses and historical and cultural contexts.

A new sensitive method of dissociation constants determination based on the isohydric solutions principle

The paper provides a new formulation and analytical proposals based on the isohydric solutions concept. It is particularly stated that a mixture formed, according to titrimetric mode, from a weak acid (HX, C 0 mol/L) and a strong acid (HB, C mol/L) solutions, assumes constant pH, independently on the volumes of the solutions mixed, provided that the relation C 0 = C + C 2 · 10 p K 1 is valid, where p K 1 = −log K 1, K 1 the dissociation constant for HX. The generalized formulation, referred to the isohydric solutions thus obtained, was extended also to more complex acid–base systems. Particularly in the (HX, HB) system, the titration occurs at constant ionic strength ( I) value, not resulting from presence of a basal electrolyte. This very advantageous conjunction of the properties provides, among others, a new, very sensitive method for verification of p K 1 value. The new method is particularly useful for weak acids HX characterized by low p K 1 values. The method was tested experimentally on four acid–base systems (HX, HB), in aqueous and mixed-solvent media and compared with the literature data. Some useful (linear and hyperbolic) correlations were stated and applied for validation of p K 1 values. Finally, some practical applications of analytical interest of the isohydricity (pH constancy) principle as one formulated in this paper were enumerated, proving the usefulness of such a property which has its remote roots in the Arrhenius concept.

The Analytics Movement: Implications for Operations Research

The movement toward the increased use of analytics in organizations has generated much discussion by academics and professionals about the impacts and opportunities that analytics offers. Although operations research (OR) has been a driving force in applying quantitative and analytical models for organizational decision making, it is less clear how we as OR practitioners can take advantage of the surging interest in analytics to promote the OR profession and expand its reach. In this paper, we discuss the drivers of the analytics movement, an example of an analytics project, and the opportunities and implications for OR, i.e., the problem scope, models and methods, implementation issues, organizational role, professional skills, and education.

Chemometric interpretation of digital image colorimetry. Application for titanium determination in plastics

Basic color data (RGB) obtained from digital images were studied by Factorial Analysis. The results demonstrated that individual RGB data represent different contributions. On the other hand, the total intensity of colors is proposed like a fourth variable in digital colorimetry and can be interpreted as complementary information related to the conditions of image capture in digital cameras. The chemometric study evidences that the analytical information, for quantitative applications, is formed by two parts: deterministic, with valuable analytical interest, and undeterministic or unvaluable analytical information. These results were revealed after variable reduction and data compression, using Principal Component Analysis and Fourier Transform, respectively. The digital colorimetric study was applied to the reaction of Ti(IV) with hydrogen peroxide at 0.09 M sulfuric acid media. They produce a yellow–orange complex solution. And their RGB intensities could be linearly correlated with Ti(IV) concentration in the range of 2.0 to 30.0 mg l − 1 . In the best conditions, using the intensity of the blue color, a simple and fast method for Ti(IV) determination could be developed. Its detection limit was found to be (criterion 3 s) 0.6 mg l − 1 and the rsd for 10.0 mg l − 1 of Ti(V) was 4.8%. Calibration by artificial neural nets represents an option that improves the answer to low concentration. Applications of the colorimetric method to the analysis of Ti in representative plastics, with content in mg g − 1 level, are presented. Its validity was assessed by ICP-AES with standard addition. Results were in satisfactory agreement. The method is fast and reduces the analysis time.