Set Of Contexts Research Articles

Revisiting cultural approaches to Chinese tourists

Scholarship on Chinese tourists has stressed the influence of collectivism, Confucianism, and other traditional values. While significant, these approaches assume a singular, holistic view of culture that is at odds with recent approaches in the sociology of culture that stress the domain-specific, situational, and flexible nature of cultural scripts. Using fresh empirical evidence of Chinese tourists to non-mainstream destinations, this article demonstrates that tourism frequently disembeds tourists from traditional sources of cultural authority. I suggest viewing culture in tourism as a contextual set of repertoires used to (1) draw symbolic boundaries, (2) perform situational, diverse scripts, and (3) self-reflect on personal and collective identities. These results counter the idea that Chinese tourists have internalised one master set of cultural responses.

Development of an environmental contextual factor item set relevant to global functioning and health in patients with axial spondyloarthritis.

To describe the development of an Environmental contextual factors (EF) Item Set (EFIS) accompanying the disease specific Assessment of SpondyloArthritis international Society Health Index (ASAS HI). First, a candidate item pool was developed by linking items from existing questionnaires to 13 EF previously selected for the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) /ASAS Core Set. Second, using data from two international surveys, which contained the EF item pool as well as the items from the ASAS HI, the number of EF items was reduced based on the correlation between the item and the ASAS HI sum score combined with expert opinion. Third, the final English EFIS was translated into 15 languages and cross-culturally validated. The initial item pool contained 53 EF addressing four ICF EF chapters: products and technology (e1), support and relationship (e3), attitudes (e4) and health services (e5). Based on 1754 responses of axial spondyloarthritis patients in an international survey, 44 of 53 initial items were removed based on low correlations to the ASAS HI or redundancy combined with expert opinion. Nine items of the initial item pool (range correlation 0.21-0.49) form the final EFIS. The EFIS was translated into 15 languages and field tested in 24 countries. An EFIS is available complementing the ASAS HI and helps to interpret the ASAS HI results by gaining an understanding of the interaction between a health condition and contextual factors. The EFIS emphasizes the importance of support and relationships, as well as attitudes of the patient and health services in relation to self-reported health.

A Class of Three-Qubit Contextual Configurations Located in Fano Pentads

Given the symplectic polar space of type W(5,2), let us call a set of five Fano planes sharing pairwise a single point a Fano pentad. Once 63 points of W(5,2) are appropriately labeled by 63 non-trivial three-qubit observables, any such Fano pentad gives rise to a quantum contextual set known as a Mermin pentagram. Here, it is shown that a Fano pentad also hosts another, closely related, contextual set, which features 25 observables and 30 three-element contexts. Out of 25 observables, ten are such that each of them is on six contexts, while each of the remaining 15 observables belongs to two contexts only. Making use of the recent classification of Mermin pentagrams (Saniga et al., Symmetry 12 (2020) 534), it was found that 12,096 such contextual sets comprise 47 distinct types, falling into eight families according to the number (3,5,7,…,17) of negative contexts.

Contextual Conditions and Constraints in Chinese Dangling Topics

This present study verifies the aboutness condition proposed by Chao, 1968; Chafe, 1976; Li and Thompson, 1981; Xu and Langendoen, 1985 and many others as a relation that holds between sentence-initial NPs and comment clauses of alleged gapless topic-comment constructions in Mandarin Chinese. Four often-cited types of dangling topics in Chinese are re-visited and the arguments from both the semantic (Pan and Hu 2002; 2008; 2009) and syntactic (Shi 2000; Huang and Ting 2006) views are examined. A critical scrutiny from contextual perspective, in particular Nomi Erteschik-Shir’s (2007) notions of topic, reveals that there exist dangling topics in Chinese where the sentence-initial NPs at issue are either contrastive or old topics which need not be syntactically or semantically licensed. The contextual contrast set and commentative conditions are proposed as the licensing conditions with constraints dictating that proper selection and relevance must be observed. At the end the study raises a hypothesis regarding language typology. It is proposed that discourse configurational languages exhibit phenomena of dangling NP topics which are properly licensed by the aboutness relation under which either one of the contextual conditions is satisfied.

Welfare Reform and the Logic of Financial Responsibility: Creating the ‘Value-able’ Subject

ABSTRACT Financialisation has driven many transformations across advanced capitalist economies and their welfare systems have not been immune from such change. Finance works both as structural force in society, and as a more contingent and contextual set of practices that place demands on the conduct of individuals and the welfare system lies at the intersection of these tendencies. Financial markets have long played a role in the provision of housing or pensions, but are also becoming increasingly visible in benefit systems targeting the poor and economically excluded. Given the exclusionary nature of finance and the marginal assistance it provides to those on low incomes, tensions and contradictions emerge that demand further investigation. This article takes as a case study the recent reform of UK welfare known as Universal Credit and the specific discourse of ‘financial responsibility’ that has emerged around it. This has brought the disciplinary toolkit of the welfare state to bear on ensuring the population meets the demands of financial valuation. Yet the difficulties these reforms have faced suggest that the logics of finance and welfare will always be pulling in different directions.

Going local – innovating resource estimates to improve investment decisions

ABSTRACTA mineral company’s resource models are a measure of its foundational assets that provide the basis for forward looking statements of corporate value and cash-flow estimates. Accuracy of the estimation process underpins corporate legitimacy. Importantly, local improvements in estimation process can translate into improvements in mine planning, and ultimately better-informed investment decisions. Traditionally, resource models use estimation parameters that are based on statistical patterns and spatial variability within a geologically informed volume constraint (‘the domain’). The variogram, block size analysis and determination of search parameters are assessed from the data within the geologically delineated domain. The set of parameters so determined are then applied to every estimation block within the domain, and the block model is then provided to the mine planner for optimisation. The mine planning optimisation process responds to each block grades. The focus of the mine planning process is to minimise ore loss and mining dilution and so provide the best possible opportunity for the orebody and its value to be realised. However, overly smooth grade models restrict a mine planner’s ability to achieve the best outcome for the project and for the asset owners. Despite the estimation of every block in a resource model being conducted independently of every other block in the model, Resource Geologists continue to generalise parameters across a domain of blocks. This paper challenges the global parameter approach, and instead seeks a more locally contextual set of parameters. This challenge is in keeping with innovations across industries and around the globe that seek real time bespoke responsiveness built on big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence. There are many steps ‘going local’ in estimation. This paper focusses on two aspects: firstly, optimising sample selection or search neighbourhood parameters (Local Kriging Neighbourhood Optimisation), and, secondly, addressing topcuts in response to those samples selected. A case study is presented to illustrate the process and demonstrate the improvements. The paper closes with a call for Resource Geologists to improve local as well as global accuracy of their resource models so that mine planners can respond to the knowledge and information available at a local scale in the grade estimation block model in their planning processes.

Contextual Level-Set Method for Breast Tumor Segmentation

Breast ultrasound image segmentation is the foundation of the diagnosis and treatment of breast cancer. The level set method is widely used for medical image segmentation. However, it remained a challenge for traditional level set methods because they cannot fully understand the tumor regions with complex characteristics by only low-level features. Considering that contextual features can provide complementary discriminative information to low-level features, this paper proposed a contextual level set method for breast tumor segmentation. Firstly, an encoder-decoder architecture network such as UNet is developed to learn high-level contextual features with semantic information. After that, the contextual level set method has been proposed to incorporate the novel contextual energy term. The proposed term has the ability to embed the high-level contextual knowledge into the level set framework. The learned contextual features with semantic information can provide more discriminative information, which has been directly associated with category labels, instead of the original intensity. Therefore, it is robust to serious intensity inhomogeneity, which is helpful to improve segmentation performance. The experiments had taken place with the help of three databases, which indicates that the proposed method outperformed traditional methods.

Evaluation of speaker-dependent and average-voice Vietnamese statistical speech synthesis systems

This paper describes the development and evaluation of a Vietnamese statistical speech synthesis system using the average voice approach. Although speaker-dependent systems have been applied extensively, no average voice based system has been developed for Vietnamese so far. We have collected speech data from several Vietnamese native speakers and employed state-of-the-art speech analysis, model training and speaker adaptation techniques to develop the system. Besides, we have performed perceptual experiments to compare the quality of speaker-adapted (SA) voices built on the average voice model and speaker-dependent (SD) voices built on SD models, and to confirm the effects of contextual features including word boundary (WB) and part-of-speech (POS) on the quality of synthetic speech. Evaluation results show that SA voices have significantly higher naturalness than SD voices when the same limited contextual feature set excluding WB and POS is used. In addition, SA voices trained with limited contextual features excluding WB and POS still have better quality than SD voices trained with full contextual features including WB and POS. These results show the robustness of the average voice method over the speaker-dependent approach for Vietnamese statistical speech synthesis.

National renewal in the discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile

ABSTRACTThe term neoliberalism became associated with processes of economic and social restructuring in various parts of the world during the latter years of the twentieth century. While the importance of these processes is undisputed, the extent to which neoliberalism constitutes a coherent and consistent ideology, or merely a contingent and contextual set of broadly related policies, remains a source of contention. In this article, we explore this question through a comparative analysis of the political discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile. Drawing on the model of historical comparison developed by Antonio Gramsci, we argue that these two countries represent paradigm cases of the constitutional and authoritarian routes to neoliberalism. However, by focusing on the discourses of national renewal in the speeches and writings of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, we argue that both cases rest on a particular articulation of the themes of coercion and consent. As such, we suggest that while each paradigm articulates these themes in distinct ways, it is the relationship between the two that is essential to the political ideology of neoliberalism, as the coercive construction of consensus in Chile and the consensual construction of coercion in Britain.

Investigating the drivers of railway performance: Evidence from selected Asian countries

Although efficiency measurement has become relevant for logistics infrastructure planning, research on railway efficiency still remain scarce and rather focused on discussing rankings to the detriment of possible improvement paths. In fact, while the use of multi-activity models is increasing in railway efficiency research, previous studies fail short to assess their drivers at each operational stage. Here, we develop a novel super-efficiency Multi-activity Network DEA (MNDEA) model - based on directional distance functions (DDFs) and capable of handling undesirable outputs - to assess how different contextual variables impact railway efficiency levels in Asia. Two case studies are provided: one focused on six different countries, taken in aggregate (Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Indonesia). The other, on major state-owned Chinese railways. Differently from previous research, Generalized Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape (GAMLSS) are used for the first time to regress super-efficiency scores on the contextual variable set. Findings reveal that the Asian railways are strongly marked by heterogeneity, the Chinese railways need to improve passenger-operation efficiency, while the other countries need to increase the cargo-operation efficiency. It also sheds lights on the design of policies for efficiency improvement in several different areas for the Asian railway system.

Targeted and contextual redescription set exploration

One important problem occurring in redescription mining is a very large number of produced redescriptions. This makes analyses time consuming and generally difficult. We present the targeted and contextual redescription set exploration, realized through the tool InterSet. The main purpose of the tool is to derive additional knowledge from the redescription set which allows exploring parts of redescription set of interest and examining redescriptions individually or in the broader context, with the aim of increasing overall understandability. InterSet allows relating, grouping redescriptions, observing distributions of various redescription properties and selecting the appropriate subsets for further, detailed study. This allows gaining knowledge about the underlying data, help in forming, understanding, supporting research hypothesis or assists in understanding one or more redescriptions of interest. The tool provides three different, fully connected interaction modes based on: (1) similarity of entity occurrence in redescription support sets, (2) attribute co-occurrence in redescriptions and (3) redescription quality measures. Additionally, it allows exploration of relations between different redescriptions by creating a graph visualization that includes the top k-shortest paths containing selected redescriptions. On the individual redescription level, it allows studying value distributions of described entities, for a given set of attributes.

Similar Vague Concepts Selection Using Their Euclidean Distance at Different Granulation

Recently, the calculus of fuzzy concept lattice is extensively studied with interval-valued and bipolar fuzzy set for the precise representation of vagueness in cognitive concept learning. In this process, selecting some of the semantic similar (or interesting) vague concept at user required granulation is addressed as one of the major issues. To conquer this problem, current paper aims at analyzing the cognitive concept learning based on the properties of vague graph, concept lattice and granular computing within (m × m) computational time. To mimic with the cognitive computing and its contextual data sets, two methods are proposed for the precise representation of human cognition based on the evidence to accept or reject the attributes using the calculus of vague set. The hierarchical order visualization among the extracted cognitive vague concept is shown through calculus of concept lattice for adequate description of their textual syntax analysis. In addition, another method is proposed to improve the quality of sentic (or cognitive) reasoning using semantics relationship among the discovered vague concepts at user defined information granulation. The obtained results from the proposed methods approve that the vague concept lattice and its reduction at user defined granulation provides an alternative way to analyze the cognitive contextual data set with an improved description of vague attributes “tall” and “young.” Euclidean distance provides a way to select some of the interesting vague concepts based on their semantic similarity. The obtained results from both of the proposed methods correspond to each other which validate the results. This paper establishes that cognitive contextual data set can be processed through the calculus of vague concept lattice, and granular computing. This gives an alternative and compact visualization of discovered patterns from the cognitive data set when compared to its numerical representation. In this way, the proposed method provides an adequate analysis for cognitive concept learning when compared to any of the available approaches. In addition, the proposed method provides various ways to select some of the interesting cognitive vague concepts at user defined granulation for their Euclidean distance within (m × m) computational time. However, the proposed method is unable to measure the fluctuation in uncertainty for the cognitive context at given phase of time. In the future, the author will focus on conquering this research problem with an illustrative example.

Crossing the appositive / at-issue meaning boundary

Our goal is to provide systematic evidence from anaphora, presupposition and ellipsis that appositive meaning and at-issue meaning, e.g. as contributed by the relative appositive and the main clause in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited HER in the hospital, have to be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. While previous literature has provided partial arguments to this effect (Nouwen 2007 for anaphora, Amaral et al 2007 and Potts 2009 for both anaphora and presupposition), the systematic nature of this evidence – in particular, the evidence from ellipsis we will introduce – has been previously unnoticed. We propose an analysis of these phenomena that integrates the dynamic account of anaphora and ellipsis as discourse reference to individuals and properties (respectively) with an account of at-issue meaning as a proposed update of the input Context Set (CS) that is to be negotiated and of appositive meaning as an actual / imposed update of the CS that is not up for negotiation.

¿Eres Amigo o Enemigo? Contextual Determinants of Latinos’ Perceived Competition with African-Americans

Prior research has examined how racial and socioeconomic environments influence the racial attitudes of Whites and Blacks. We extend this line of research to explore how local context influences Latinos’ perceived competition with African-Americans. We use the 2006 Latino National Survey and a newly appended contextual data set. We find that having more Black neighbors heightens Latinos’ perceived competition with Blacks, but only when Latinos are economically vulnerable. The presence of African-Americans within Latinos’ neighborhoods is a necessary but insufficient condition for increasing their perceived competition with Blacks; Latinos’ perceived threat is shaped by the combined effect of the neighborhood racial composition and their group’s economic status.

A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization by Dora A. Hanninen (review)

Reviewed by: A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization by Dora A. Hanninen Dimitris Exarchos A Theory of Music Analysis: On Segmentation and Associative Organization. By Dora A. Hanninen . ( Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 92 .) Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press , 2012 . [ xii, 530 p. ISBN 9781580461948 . $82 .] Music examples, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. Comprising research spanning over a decade, A Theory of Music Analysis constitutes a comprehensive account and a culmination of Dora A. Hanninen’s work to date. To the extent that no theory of music is independent of analysis, this work is indispensable as a theory of analysis. The main (philosophical) concern of the book is how to create a precise analytical language, one that can secure a credible interpretation; intertwined with this is a (practical) concern with how to employ this language in a way that reflects the individual analyst’s flair. Analytical applications are not set against theory as singular instances of ready-made methods; on the contrary, by negating the usual rhetoric of theory and analysis, Hanninen sets out to provide a kind of metatheory, independent of the particular existing music-theoretic tools that it aims to encompass. This level of interaction between Hanninen’s overarching metatheory (or simply “theory”) and particular, or what she calls orienting theories is, I think, most intriguing and—although at times not easy to ascertain—promising. From the outset, the author wishes to safeguard the “interpretive autonomy and imagination of the individual analysts” who use the theory (p. 4). In this spirit, the book addresses music theorists, analysts, and musicologists. It is ideal for a postgraduate and academic readership and it could serve as a main reference item in analysis courses. Analysis scholars will appreciate its focus on segmentation. From atonal-theoretic to semiotic methods, segmentation relies on interpretation of the music score. Hanninen endeavors to formalize segmentation protocols by constructing three basic types of criteria; although she provides comprehensive lists for the three types, these lists are left open-ended. The book encompasses a wide range of Western music traditions from the baroque onward. This feature is one among its several qualities of methodological flexibility, afforded precisely by the relation between metatheory and orienting theory. From Bach to Brahms and from Varèse to Babbitt, the first half of the book abounds in examples and indicative applications of analytical tools and concepts. The second half comprises a set of six detailed analyses of mostly piano-based music, two European (Beethoven and Debussy), and four American (Nancarrow, Riley, Feldman, and Morris). Analytically, the book employs, and thus presupposes, a firm knowledge of common-practice tonality, serial systems, atonal theory, and Schenkerian analysis. These four approaches suffice to cover the repertoire with which Hanninen engages. Having said that, the flexibility just mentioned should provide enough space for one to apply new orienting theories to analysis (e.g., the often-idiosyncratic approaches by Iannis Xenakis, who is mentioned briefly). Orientations and criteria for segmentation form the theory’s conceptual part, while associative sets and organization lie on the objective end, segments being the interface. The schematic of the theory is a synoptic representation of these five levels, which interact within three domains: sonic (psychoacoustic), contextual (associative), structural (theoretical). Thus, orientations refer respectively to disjunction, association, theory; and criteria can be sonic, contextual, structural, or linked as structural–sonic, structural–contextual. Any analyst of the post-tonal repertoire will appreciate the difficulties around segmentation strategies. Allen Forte’s distinction between primary and composite segments, or the practice of imbrication, can be useful, but his reference to contextual criteria for segmentation was left un-systematized. In practice, this was counter-balanced by a refining of the segmentation process according to both those contextual criteria and set relations (The Structure of [End Page 320] Atonal Music [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973], 91). Such practices point to a conundrum of theory and analysis: to what extent should we allow (the orienting) theory to affect our interpretation? Such problematics are usually confronted in analysis classes, where students are required to provide a convincing (as opposed to convenient) segmentation. The three types of criteria that Hanninen’s theory provides refer...

At-issue Proposals and Appositive Impositions in Discourse

Potts (2005) and many subsequent works have argued that the semantic content of appositive (non-restrictive) relative clauses, e.g., the underlined material in John, who nearly killed a woman with his car, visited her in the hospital, must be in some way separate from the content of the rest of the sentence, i.e., from at-issue content. At the same time, there is mounting evidence from various anaphoric processes that the two kinds of content must be integrated into a single, incrementally evolving semantic representation. The challenge is how to reconcile this informational separation with these pervasive anaphoric connections. We propose a dynamic semantic account that accomplishes this by taking appositive and at-issue content to involve two different kinds of updates to the Context Set (CS). Treating the context set as a distinguished propositional variable, p cs , we argue that appositives directly impose their content on the CS by eliminating possible values assigned to p cs . In contrast, we treat at-issue assertions as introducing a new propositional dref and proposing that p cs be updated with its content, subject to addressee’s response. In addition to capturing the behavior of appositives in discourse, we show that the account can be extended to capture the projection of appositive content past various sentential operators.

Learning contextual gene set interaction networks of cancer with condition specificity

BackgroundIdentifying similarities and differences in the molecular constitutions of various types of cancer is one of the key challenges in cancer research. The appearances of a cancer depend on complex molecular interactions, including gene regulatory networks and gene-environment interactions. This complexity makes it challenging to decipher the molecular origin of the cancer. In recent years, many studies reported methods to uncover heterogeneous depictions of complex cancers, which are often categorized into different subtypes. The challenge is to identify diverse molecular contexts within a cancer, to relate them to different subtypes, and to learn underlying molecular interactions specific to molecular contexts so that we can recommend context-specific treatment to patients.ResultsIn this study, we describe a novel method to discern molecular interactions specific to certain molecular contexts. Unlike conventional approaches to build modular networks of individual genes, our focus is to identify cancer-generic and subtype-specific interactions between contextual gene sets, of which each gene set share coherent transcriptional patterns across a subset of samples, termed contextual gene set. We then apply a novel formulation for quantitating the effect of the samples from each subtype on the calculated strength of interactions observed. Two cancer data sets were analyzed to support the validity of condition-specificity of identified interactions. When compared to an existing approach, the proposed method was much more sensitive in identifying condition-specific interactions even in heterogeneous data set. The results also revealed that network components specific to different types of cancer are related to different biological functions than cancer-generic network components. We found not only the results that are consistent with previous studies, but also new hypotheses on the biological mechanisms specific to certain cancer types that warrant further investigations.ConclusionsThe analysis on the contextual gene sets and characterization of networks of interaction composed of these sets discovered distinct functional differences underlying various types of cancer. The results show that our method successfully reveals many subtype-specific regions in the identified maps of biological contexts, which well represent biological functions that can be connected to specific subtypes.

Dopamine, Affordance and Active Inference

The role of dopamine in behaviour and decision-making is often cast in terms of reinforcement learning and optimal decision theory. Here, we present an alternative view that frames the physiology of dopamine in terms of Bayes-optimal behaviour. In this account, dopamine controls the precision or salience of (external or internal) cues that engender action. In other words, dopamine balances bottom-up sensory information and top-down prior beliefs when making hierarchical inferences (predictions) about cues that have affordance. In this paper, we focus on the consequences of changing tonic levels of dopamine firing using simulations of cued sequential movements. Crucially, the predictions driving movements are based upon a hierarchical generative model that infers the context in which movements are made. This means that we can confuse agents by changing the context (order) in which cues are presented. These simulations provide a (Bayes-optimal) model of contextual uncertainty and set switching that can be quantified in terms of behavioural and electrophysiological responses. Furthermore, one can simulate dopaminergic lesions (by changing the precision of prediction errors) to produce pathological behaviours that are reminiscent of those seen in neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease. We use these simulations to demonstrate how a single functional role for dopamine at the synaptic level can manifest in different ways at the behavioural level.

On the relevance of the concept of entrepreneurial capabilities

The essay builds the relevance of the concept of entrepreneurial capabilities on a corpus of theoretical inputs starting with the ‘effectual entrepreneur’ model of S. Sarasvathy and appealing to scholarly work in various fields of interest. Two groups of capabilities are distinguished: individuals’ anchored capabilities and context related capabilities. Identity and knowledge are presented as distinct capability components of the first group; networks, legitimacy and localness as the components of the second group. The presentation aims at bringing out the vision of a dynamic contextual set of interdependent distinct capabilities that underpin the entrepreneur’s proactivity. It also suggests new ways to approach the challenging issue of sustainable entrepreneurship.

The importance of context in delivering effective EIA: Case studies from East Africa

This paper reviews and compares the condition of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) system in three countries in the East Africa region: Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. The criteria used for the evaluation and the comparison of each system are based on the elements of the legal, administrative and procedural frameworks, as well as the context in which they operate. These criteria are adapted from the evaluation and quality control criteria derived from a number of literature sources. The study reveals that the EIA systems of Kenya and Tanzania are at a similar stage in their development. The two countries, the first to introduce the EIA concept into their jurisdiction in this part of Africa, therefore have more experience than Rwanda in the practice of environmental impact assessment, where the legislation and process requires more time to mature both from the governmental and societal perspective. The analysis of the administrative and procedural frameworks highlights the weakness in the autonomy of the competent authority, in all three countries. Finally a major finding of this study is that the contextual set up i.e. the socio-economic and political situation plays an important role in the performance of an EIA system. The context in developing countries is very different from developed countries where the EIA concept originates. Interpreting EIA conditions in countries like Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania requires that the analysis for determining the effectiveness of their systems should be undertaken within a relevant framework, taking into account the specific requirements of those countries.