Different Degrees Of Interest Research Articles

Building multi-system nexuses in low-carbon transitions: Conflicts and asymmetric adjustments in Norwegian ferry electrification.

While nexus research in sustainability science has investigated the consequences of connected systems, it has paid less attention to the processes of building nexuses which is becoming increasingly important in low-carbon transitions because these often require the creation of new connections between multiple consumption-production systems. Building on multi-system research in the sustainability transitions literature, this paper introduces a conceptual system interface perspective on nexus-building which considers four dimensions (technology, actors, institutions, and resources) that are useful for analyzing nexus-building dynamics. We apply our framework to the case of electrification of ferries in Norway which requires the building of a new interface between the electricity system and the maritime transport system. The case study shows that the system interface was initially characterized by conflicts and tensions in all dimensions, which actors then attempted to resolve through cross-system intermediation and adjustment activities. These activities were asymmetrical because of differences in external pressures, urgency, unequal power relationships, and different degrees of interest in cross-system nexus building. Because important tensions remained unresolved, ferry actors started implementing sub-optimal workaround solutions in the diffusion phase.

Students’ interests in discussion topics in culture learning class

Abstract Culture study is highly interdisciplinary, and thus a culture learning class in an educational institution often deals with many different cultural aspects. Accordingly, on different cultural topics to discuss in the class, it cannot be helped that students exhibit different degrees of interest on each topic. The current paper reports research on what kind of topics interest students based on gender and country of origin. The survey results showed great variation among students. Asian and female students relatively prefer less serious topics while male and European students tend to prefer serious and controversial topics to discuss with peers.

Recognition of coal and gangue based on multi-dimensional gray gradient feature fusion

ABSTRACT Aiming at the problem that the identification of coal and gangue is easily affected by external factors, a coal gangue identification method based on multi-dimensional gradient features and gray texture features is proposed. Research shows that Sobel operators with different window sizes have different degrees of interest in image textures. The larger the window, the more interested they are in fine textures. The characteristic curves obtained by different Sobel operators are quite different, and the optimal gradient features can be obtained by using various Sobel operators. The separability of gradient features is higher than that of gray texture features, and the gradient features are less affected by light. The classification model established in this paper has a recognition rate of over 97% for different mining areas, and the detection time of a single image is less than 20.5 ms. When the light intensity changes from 600 lux to 1800 lux, the fluctuation range of the F 1-score in this method is only 0.26%. The fusion of multi-dimensional gradient features and gray texture features can significantly reduce the influence of external factors on the recognition model, and improve the recognition accuracy and anti-interference ability of the model.

Research on developing environmental ethics in pharmacists\u2019 activities

BackgroundAuthors of various backgrounds are preoccupied with the meaning of environmental ethics, which refers to specific values, norms, attitudes, and practices with respect to all beings and elements of nature. Many international organizations have adopted important documents proclaiming the ethical obligation to protect the environment in all professional activities. At the national level, professional associations should include and develop this obligation in their codes of conduct. This study aimed to analyze and compare elements of environmental protection included in codes of conduct for pharmacists, to find ways to integrate environmental ethics into their activities.MethodsSeven codes of conduct for pharmacists were analyzed using the comparative method and methods of legal interpretation. Based on acknowledged values and principles of environmental ethics, a framework model for developing environmental protection in pharmacists’ activities was created via an iterative process of reflection and discussion.ResultsExplicit provisions for environmental ethics were found in codes in force in three countries and in a Romanian project. These provisions refer, in general, to an ethical duty of environmental protection in pharmacists’ activities. Regarding the other codes, the study could only interpret stipulations of public health ethics to deduce an ethical environmental obligation. Considering the need for developing such provisions, an ethical framework was proposed as a model for professional associations of pharmacists.ConclusionsThe studied codes demonstrate a preoccupation of the professional associations with environmental protection in pharmacists’ activities, with different degrees of interest in developing environmental ethics. To this end, the codes of conduct for pharmacists should include environmental values, principles, and ethics guidelines. Those guidelines should indicate the ethical attitude in relation to the environment for each activity. Further research is needed to stimulate, shape, and develop an environmental ethical behavior in pharmacists’ practice.

CSIP: Enhanced Link Prediction with Context of Social Influence Propagation

Data mining in social networks brings an indispensable role for the construction of smart cities from the perspective of social development. Link prediction is an important task of data mining, especially in the knowledge graph, which is also called knowledge graph completion. Link prediction aims to find missing links or predict potential links according to the current social network. The most existing link prediction methods focus on static information in social networks, such as topology and node attributes, which are partly provided by users. When users are unwilling to provide or intentionally hide these static features, traditional link prediction methods cannot achieve ideal performance. The dynamic information of social influence propagation in social networks can avoid the user's subjective impact and better reflect the relationship between users. In addition, users show different degrees of interest and authority on various topics in the real world, leading to different influence propagation patterns. Therefore, we use context of social influence to optimize the topic-aware influence propagation model to improve the performance of link prediction. In this paper, we propose a new multi-output graph neural network framework to capture influence propagation in social networks and model the influence of users in different roles. In this way, the underlying information of influence between users can be used to construct new features to improve the performance of link prediction. Our experiments conduct the method on multiple benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that the modeling of context is effective, and our model outperforms the compared state-of-the-art link prediction methods.

Consideration of Users’ Needs in Regard to Planning of Intelligent Transport Solutions in an African Metropolis

Population growth rates in the least industrialized countries are the highest and will add pressure to transport systems in the future, making travel unimaginably more difficult, especially in locations where road infrastructure is already inadequate or dilapidated. It is, therefore, imperative to plan and deploy intelligent solutions that can intuitively adapt to future traffic demands and inclusively improve transport efficiency and safety. By considering modernization theory and technology transfer, the authors weigh transport system users’ perspectives on the desirability of deployable intelligent transport systems (ITSs) in an African metropolis. The study shows that users recognize the benefits of technology in improving transport performance and travel experience in the metropolis with regard to the precursory ITS solutions already in existence. Although, at different degrees of interest, the participants expressed their desire for deployable solutions in all categories and applications of ITS surveyed. For example, an advanced public transport system (APTS) and advanced traffic management system (ATMS) are more desired. An advanced vehicle communication system (AVCS) tied for the third spot with an advanced travelers’ information system (ATIS). An intelligent transport pricing system (ITPS) was rated as least desirable for a probable reason that the supply and maintenance of road infrastructure are believed to be the government’s responsibility. Differential opinions were recorded, depending on respondents’ age group, profession and most-used means of transport. The authors conclude that the metropolis, and indeed, countries, could develop user-oriented, context-specific and evidence-based ITS policies toward the goal of deploying solutions for a more efficient transport system and pleasing travel experience. The paper also provides a conceptual ITS policy framework that considers transport users’ needs in the metropolis.

Motivations of the Culinary Tourist in the City of Trapani, Italy

Culinary tourism is a popular practice and the resulting economic activity has great potential to enhance the attractiveness of a tourist destination. When visitors search for unique and genuine gastronomic experiences in a visited area, gastronomy becomes a germane motivation for selecting a travel destination. This study addresses culinary tourism through segmentation of visitors to Trapani, Italy, concerning the importance of gastronomy in their choice of travel destinations. This study identifies three types of tourists with different degrees of interest in local gastronomy: survivors, enjoyers, and experiencers. According to the results of statistical analysis, experiencers (tourists with a great interest in local gastronomy) show the greatest appreciation for local food as well as being the group that makes the greatest economic impact in the area.

Optimizing Quality of Experience for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming via Viewer Interest Inference

Rate adaptation is widely adopted in video streaming to improve the quality of experience (QoE). However, most of the existing rate adaptation approaches neglect the underlying video semantic information. In fact, influenced by video semantics and viewer preferences, the viewer may have different degrees of interest on different parts of a video. The interesting parts of a video can draw more visual attention from the viewer and have higher visual importance. As such, delivering the parts of a video that are interesting to the viewer in a higher quality can improve the perceptual video quality, compared with the semantics-agnostic approaches that treat each part of a video equally. Thus, it is natural to wonder: how to allocate bitrate budgets temporally over a video session under time-varying bandwidth while considering viewer interest? As an exploratory study, we propose an interest-aware rate adaptation approach for improving QoE by inferring viewer interest based on video semantics. We adopt the deep learning method to recognize the scenes of video frames and leverage the term frequency-inverse document frequency method to analyze the degrees of an individual viewer's interest on different types of scenes. The bandwidth, buffer occupancy, and viewer interest are jointly considered under the model predictive control framework for selecting appropriate bitrates for maximizing QoE. The objective and subjective evaluations measured in a real environment show that our method can achieve a higher QoE compared with the semantics-agnostic approaches.

Contextual Video Recommendation by Multimodal Relevance and User Feedback

With Internet delivery of video content surging to an unprecedented level, video recommendation, which suggests relevant videos to targeted users according to their historical and current viewings or preferences, has become one of most pervasive online video services. This article presents a novel contextual video recommendation system, called VideoReach, based on multimodal content relevance and user feedback. We consider an online video usually consists of different modalities (i.e., visual and audio track, as well as associated texts such as query, keywords, and surrounding text). Therefore, the recommended videos should be relevant to current viewing in terms of multimodal relevance. We also consider that different parts of videos are with different degrees of interest to a user, as well as different features and modalities have different contributions to the overall relevance. As a result, the recommended videos should also be relevant to current users in terms of user feedback (i.e., user click-through). We then design a unified framework for VideoReach which can seamlessly integrate both multimodal relevance and user feedback by relevance feedback and attention fusion. VideoReach represents one of the first attempts toward contextual recommendation driven by video content and user click-through, without assuming a sufficient collection of user profiles available. We conducted experiments over a large-scale real-world video data and reported the effectiveness of VideoReach.

Citizen Attitudes Toward Transparency in Local Government

The proper balance between governmental secrecy and open government is at the forefront of contemporary public debate. Citizens have different degrees of interest in and demand for governmental transparency. Using data from a national online survey of more than 1,800 respondents, we develop several indices to measure citizens' demand for transparency at the local level and explore its correlates. We also examine the correlates of citizens' reported requests for information from local government. The data and analysis suggest that there are several dimensions to the public's demand for transparency, including fiscal, safety, and government concerns, and principled openness. Age, political ideology, confidence in government leaders, frequency of contacting government, and especially the perception that there is currently not enough access to government appear to drive the public's demand for transparency, although determinants differ for each dimension. Some, although not all, of these factors also predict citizens' actual requests for government information.

Resource influence on the form of fur rubbing behaviour in white-faced capuchins

Self-medicative behaviours have been largely documented in vertebrates and, in particular, the use of plants for pharmacological purposes has been mainly reported in primates. White-faced capuchins are known to rub specifically chosen plants and other substances on their fur. To better understand the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon and investigate the influence of different plant resources on the form of fur rubbing activity, we conducted experiments using different randomly selected plant items: oranges and onions. We found that (1) capuchins showed different degrees of interest in the materials used to fur rub; (2) the mean group dynamics differ drastically according to the resource supplied; and (3) individuals present strong differences in their social behaviour, i.e. they spent more or less time fur rubbing in spatial proximity of conspecifics according to the material used for fur rubbing. We propose hypotheses on possible proximal causes for these differences and highlight that some precautions have to be taken in behavioural studies including only one resource type.

Program Evaluation in Libraries: Relating Operations and Clients

Evaluators of library programs have different perspectives on why to conduct an evaluation and also how to do so. The author suggests that a minimal approach to conducting a library program evaluation is to prove that the program exists. But this perspective has expanded to include different degrees of interest in the client and operations, culminating in a combined focus that leads evaluators to conduct outcome assessments. The chapter includes speculation on what motivates managers to undertake an evaluation, a review of some ways that library evaluations are conducted, and a discussion of several examples of program evaluations. Though there are no single directives for undertaking a library program evaluation, there are a variety of tools and advice to entice librarians to do more of them as a way to improve understanding the value of a library to its clientele and in society.

A new JPEG2000 region-of-interest image coding method: partial significant bitplanes shift

We propose a new region-of-interest (ROI) coding method called partial significant bitplanes shift (PSBShift) that combines the advantages of the two standard ROI coding methods defined in JPEG2000. The PSBShift method not only supports arbitrarily shaped ROI coding without coding the shape, but also enables the flexible adjustment of compression quality in ROI and background. Additionally, the new method can efficiently code multiple ROIs with different degrees of interest in an image.

Upward Persistence and Downward Desistence: Some Reactions to Social-Comparison Deprivation after a Threat

Laboratory and field research has shown that people prefer either downward or upward comparison after a threatening experience. Downward comparison is generally used to protect self-esteem immediately after a threat. It can be regarded as a short-term self-protection strategy. Upward comparison is often used to see whether it is possible to improve a situation by finding similarities with more fortunate people. It can be regarded as a long-term self-improvement strategy. It was assumed here that deprivation of downward and upward comparison after a threat would generate different degrees of interest and persistence in making social comparisons. More specifically, we expected social comparison persistence to be greater after upward-comparison deprivation than after downward-comparison deprivation or no deprivation at all, especially with superior others. The results of two studies supported our predictions and are discussed in several theoretical frameworks.

A retrospective analysis of peer review at Physiologia Plantarum

An analysis of 134 reviews of manuscripts submitted to the North American Editorial Office of Physiologia Plantarum in 1993 compared personal/professional characteristics of the reviewers and the specificity of the interest and experience of the reviewers, relative to the reviewed paper, to the depth and tone of the reviews, the presence of constructive suggestions, and the recommendations for or against publication. There was no significant difference between the reviews from the reviewers of different ranks or degrees of seniority, of different employment sectors, of different degrees of interest and experience in the subject of the paper, or of other subgroups, except that reviewers whose interest and experience were very specific to the topic of the paper tended to give more constructive suggestions, and assistant professors tended to be less accepting of papers than editors more frequently than did reviewers in general. Recommendations regarding a manuscript were more similar than could be accounted for by chance, providing a positive indication of the reliability of the review‐system. Editors in their decisions tended to follow the recommendations of reviewers, but when reviewers took an extreme tone, either positive or negative, the editors tended to provide a balancing function. The data provide support for the reliability and lack of bias in a commonly used peer‐review system.

Landscape preferences and behaviour of visitors to Spanish national parks

During the last decade recreational use of Spanish national parks has grown considerably, and is now posing a threat to nature conservation and the possibility of offering a satisfactory recreational service. There is a great variety of landscapes in Spain's national parks and this is one of the most attractive aspects for visitors to these unique areas. In this article we look at the preferences visitors have for the landscape of the park they are visiting, compared with the landscapes of other parks. Four Spanish national parks were compared. Different visitor types were distinguished by cluster analysis of 50 items relating to behaviour, expectations and attitudes. Landscape preference factors were obtained from a survey composed of random pairs of photographs of landscapes from the four national parks. Visitors expressed different degrees of interest, knowledge and dedication to their visits. Landscape preferences were significantly different amongst visitors to different national parks and, within each park, amongst groups of users. The results show that the landscape preferences of more casual visitors do not correspond to the features of the park they visit when these landscapes do not conform to those generally thought of as ‘beautiful’ (mountains, water and vegetation). The implications of the massive influx of visitors on the state of conservation of valuable areas such as national parks leads us to contemplate the importance of visitor management. Special attention should be paid to those visitors who are more casual and less sensitive to the landscape of the areas they visit.

Paternalism, the Magistracy and Poor Relief in England, 1795–1834

When men in the early nineteenth century appealed to the landed proprietors of England to accept their “paternal responsibilities”, they gave voice to the conviction that gentry behavior had special relevance for the question of social discipline. Conservatives, especially, adhered to the view that subordination and the hierarchy of ranks resting upon it constituted the fountainhead of social cohesion. But at the same time, reliance on this concept of social organization involved the governors in various commitments to their subordinates, for ultimately the cohesiveness of the social order seemed dependent upon the operation of reciprocal obligations. The place of these imperatives in rural relationships arose from, and contributed to, a tradition that saw the subsistence and well-being of the entire community to be dependent upon the social responsibilities of and the connections between the different degrees of interest within the agricultural economy. A characteristic anxiety of the conservative of the period was that the economic individualism of a rising urban and industrial society promised to undermine the social accountability of each component of the social order; this presaged the disintegration of society because the “chain of connexion” between the rich and the poor would thereby be broken. The implication was that the intrusion of self-interest, economic or otherwise, threatened a structure of interdependency and mutual respect and concern between ranks. It appeared, then, that the most serious danger to society would certainly come at that point when the landowners of England — the rulers of what still seemed an essentially rural world — abandoned their paternalist traditions and opted for indolence, indifference, or the allures of commercial farming.

Allocation of Total Sample Size When Only the Stratum Means Are of Interest

In a recent stratified sample survey of telephone switchboards, the total sample size n was limited in advance to a certain small number. Associated with the ith switchboard of type k was the number Yki of telephone sets behind it. The main items to be estimated were the means y k , of five designated strata. It was proposed that the sample means y k should have sampling variances as nearly as possible in a given ratio, so as to reflect different degrees of interest in the various strata. The basic problem considered here is to find an appropriate integer valued allocation of n among the strata. The problem can be tackled in several ways. We present two graphical procedures, two nonlinear integer programming algorithms, and a dynamic programming technique. All but the first two guarantee optimum solutions. The methods appear in increasing order of complexity and in increasing order of generality.

Allocation of Total Sample Size When Only the Stratum Means are of Interest

In a recent stratified sample survey of telephone switchboards, the total sample size n was limited in advance to a certain small number. Associated with the ith switchboard of type k was the number Yki of telephone sets behind it. The main items to be estimated were the means y k , of five designated strata. It was proposed that the sample means y k should have sampling variances as nearly as possible in a given ratio, so as to reflect different degrees of interest in the various strata. The basic problem considered here is to find an appropriate integer valued allocation of n among the strata. The problem can be tackled in several ways. We present two graphical procedures, two nonlinear integer programming algorithms, and a dynamic programming technique. All but the first two guarantee optimum solutions. The methods appear in increasing order of complexity and in increasing order of generality.

Forms of Modern Drama

play is projected and inevitably transmuted by the performance and how the audience responds to it. In considering changes in dramatic style and form-and sensibility is obviously involved in such changesthe total experience is of paramount importance, and this is to be derived from the theater rather than from the printed plays alone. Concerning that experience, so immense in its totality that even the detailed chronicles of the stage barely do it justice, we may generalize only to a limited extent. We may observe, first of all, that the relationship of the modern drama and the theater has been a fluctuating one. Sometimes, as in the case of Becque, Ibsen, and Tolstoy when he composed The Power of Darkness in 1886, the playwright was in advance of the theater, which failed to realize his intentions. The Comedie Frangaise, for example, clung to an antiquated tradition of romantic posturing when it gave its first production of Becque's realistic masterpiece, La Parisienne, as late as 1890; and The Sea-Gull was staged so disastrously in 1896 before the advent of the Moscow Art Theatre that Chekhov intended to give up playwriting. And Strindberg wrote expressionist drama at least a dozen years before there was any expressionist theater anywhere in Europe. Sometimes, on the contrary, the real pioneers have been the stage directors and designers; Antoine, Stanislavsky, and Gordon Craig were at first well in advance of most of the playwrights of their time. Still, an adjustment between the drama and the stage occurred soon enough in most instances for us to discuss changes in perspective as though they affected playwriting and play production more or less equally and simultaneously. Notice may also be taken of the relativity of public response. Different audiences in different countries reacted with different degrees of interest and antipathy to such works as A Doll's House and Ghosts; and the same public that considered plays such as these too venturesome was likely to find them too staid within a decade or two. Even so, however, distinctions can be validly drawn between dominant public attitudes