Relative Dissimilarity Research Articles

Commentary on Vangeli et al. (2011): Towards an improved understanding of smoking relapse predictors – recipe for success?

Commentary on Vangeli <i>et al</i>. (2011): Towards an improved understanding of smoking relapse predictors – recipe for success?

Foreign direct investment and business cycle co-movements: The panel data evidence

The previous literature has largely overlooked the possible channels through which foreign direct investment (FDI) might influence business cycle synchronization. In this study we analyze the linkages that exist among FDI, trade and industrial dissimilarity in relation to business cycle co-movements using a panel data set taken from 77 pairs of developed countries. The error component three-stage least squares (EC3SLS) estimates from a simultaneous equations model with panel data are shown to be superior to the estimates obtained from single equation models or simultaneous equations models with cross-sectional data. Our results indicate that FDI serves as a channel of international business cycle transmission that is equally important as the channels of trade and monetary policy. On the contrary, industrial dissimilarity is identified as having an indirect impact on the business cycle correlation through trade and FDI. Furthermore, our findings suggest that in our sample FDI is of the horizontal type and tends to substitute for trade.

Macrobenthic community changes due to dystrophic events and freshwater inflow: Changes in space and time in a Mediterranean lagoon (Gialova lagoon, SW Greece)

This paper considers the hypothesis that changes in community structure through the control of the larvae maintenance and of the biological traits of the species mostly contribute to the spatio-temporal community pattern. This is supported by the results of the study, the changes to the macrobenthic community pattern deriving from two sampling periods in Gialova lagoon (SW Greece), carried out on a seasonal basis for two yearly periods: 1994–95 and 1998–99. Cognetti’s hypothesis that populations of the tolerant species occupying coastal marine habitats may belong to different species is another alternative hypothesis still to be tested. The importance of alternative management plans aiming at the amelioration of the hydrodynamic conditions of the lagoons and supported by continuous scientific monitoring is highlighted. Two canals bringing fresh water were opened at the beginning of the second sampling period, an intervention among others, suggested by the management plan proposed after the end of the first sampling period. The results show considerable variations in the values of the key environmental variables, for instance long periods with negative Redox potential values, decreased salinity and increased concentrations of the particulate organic matter and of the nutrients. The variables were correlated with the spatio-temporal community pattern, characterized during the second sampling period by: (i) greater dissimilarities among stations/seasons; (ii) disruption of the periodic trend observed on the seasonal scale; (iii) larger relative dissimilarities among the patterns stemming from the macrobenthos and the most abundant groups (polychaetes, molluscs, crustaceans); (iv) significant decrease in abundance or even the disappearance of several marine origin species, along with increased abundance in a few brackish-water species. All of the above changes in the community pattern are considered as early warning signals leading towards degradation, which has not yet been registered in the phylogenetic/taxonomic structure of the macrobenthic community.

Sorption Mechanisms of Phenanthrene, Lindane, and Atrazine with Various Humic Acid Fractions from a Single Soil Sample

The sorption behavior of organic compounds (phenanthrene, lindane, and atrazine) to sequentially extracted humic acids and humin from a peat soil was examined. The elemental composition, XPS and (13)C NMR data of sorbents combined with sorption isotherm data of the tested compounds show that nonspecific interactions govern sorption of phenanthrene and lindane by humic substances. Their sorption is dependent on surface and bulk alkyl carbon contents of the sorbents, rather than aromatic carbon. Sorption of atrazine by these sorbents, however, is regulated by polar interactions (e.g., hydrogen bonding). Carboxylic and phenolic moieties are key components for H-bonding formation. Thermal analysis reveals that sorption of apolar (i.e., phenanthrene and lindane) and polar (i.e., atrazine) compounds by humic substances exhibit dissimilar relationships with condensation and thermal stability of sorption domains, emphasizing the major influence of domain spatial arrangement on sorption of organic compounds with distinct polarity. Results of pH-dependent sorption indicate that reduction in sorption of atrazine by the tested sorbents is more evident than phenanthrene with increasing pH, supporting the dependence of organic compound sorption on its polarity and structure. This study highlights the different interaction mechanisms of apolar and polar organic compounds with humic substances.

GENETIC DIVERGENCE AND HETEROSIS IN LINSEED (Linum ussitatissimum L. )

Cluster analysis can be used to identify cultivars with similar adaptation, which can be useful for sampling in subsequent studies and parental selection in hybridization breeding programs Twenty-one flax genotypes differed in their origin and purpose were used in this study. Sixteen agronomic and yield characters were evaluated. Analysis of variance revealed significant differences for all studied characters indicating the presence of considerable amount of genetic variability. The variation due to parents, crosses were also significant for presence of most characters. Parents vs crosses were significant for most characters, indicating the heterotic effects. Significant positive heterosis over mid-Parents, better parent and commercial cultivars were observed for seed yield/fed, number of apical branches/plant and number of capsules/plant. The crosses exhibited heterosis for seed yield also showed significant heterosis for most yield components characters. The cross combination Sakha 3 x Gowhar surpassed all genotypes for oil content. The 85% of dissimilarity coefficients were significant. The Twenty-one parents were grouped into seven major groups based on relative dissimilarity among them with significant differences between groups for most characters. The maximum distance observed between cluster V and VII, whereas the minimum distance between cluster III and VI. The forty one genotypes were grouped into ten clusters, while most F1 combinations were distributed on seven differed clusters indicating that the progeny produced from crossing between two distantly related parents showed divergent distance and gave values surpassed their parents in most characters.

Dining with the Dragon: Africa’s Pick from the Table

The debate on Sino-African relations remains a contentious topic especially when there has not been much breakthrough as to which generally acceptable theoretical perspective, can such a dissimilar relationship offer. Interdependent as they may be, yet the disparities among them from asymmetric view point has led to the diverse differences in perspective between a more powerful China and less powerful Africa, hence the strong presence of misperception and misunderstanding that may lead to conflict of interest. Consequently however, China adopts a soft power approach with a continent that have had centuries of engagement with Western powers, to an extent of been preferred over her Western counterparts. This work therefore analysis a mutually beneficial relationship with a rising China and Africa`s cautious path to follow.

Cochlea-scaled spectral entropy predicts rate-invariant intelligibility of temporally distorted sentences

Some evidence, mostly drawn from experiments using only a single moderate rate of speech, suggests that low-frequency amplitude modulations may be particularly important for intelligibility. Here, two experiments investigated intelligibility of temporally distorted sentences across a wide range of simulated speaking rates, and two metrics were used to predict results. Sentence intelligibility was assessed when successive segments of fixed duration were temporally reversed (exp. 1), and when sentences were processed through four third-octave-band filters, the outputs of which were desynchronized (exp. 2). For both experiments, intelligibility decreased with increasing distortion. However, in exp. 2, intelligibility recovered modestly with longer desynchronization. Across conditions, performances measured as a function of proportion of utterance distorted converged to a common function. Estimates of intelligibility derived from modulation transfer functions predict a substantial proportion of the variance in listeners' responses in exp. 1, but fail to predict performance in exp. 2. By contrast, a metric of potential information, quantified as relative dissimilarity (change) between successive cochlear-scaled spectra, is introduced. This metric reliably predicts listeners' intelligibility across the full range of speaking rates in both experiments. Results support an information-theoretic approach to speech perception and the significance of spectral change rather than physical units of time.

A fuzzy modeling method via Enhanced Objective Cluster Analysis for designing TSK model

This paper proposes a fuzzy modeling method via Enhanced Objective Cluster Analysis to obtain the compact and robust approximate TSK fuzzy model. In our approach, the Objective Cluster Analysis algorithm is introduced. In order to obtain more compact and more robust fuzzy rule prototypes, this algorithm is enhanced by introducing the Relative Dissimilarity Measure and the new consistency criterion to represent the similarity degree between the clusters. By these additional criteria, the redundant clusters caused by iterations are avoided; the subjective influence from human judgment for clustering is weakened. Moreover the clustering results including the number of clusters and the cluster centers are considered as the initial condition of the premise parameters identification. Thus the traditional iteration modeling procedure for determining the number of rules and identifying parameters is changed into one-off modeling, which significantly reduces the burden of computation. Furthermore the decomposition errors and the approximation errors resulted from premise parameters identification by Fuzzy c-Means clustering are decreased. For the consequence parameters identification, the Stable Kalman Filter algorithm is adopted. The performance of the proposed modeling method is evaluated by the example of Box–Jenkins gas furnace. The simulation results demonstrate the power of our model.

Effects of C60fullerene nanoparticles on soil bacteria and protozoans

Nanotechnology should produce numerous new materials in the coming years. Because of the novel design of nanomaterials with new physicochemical characteristics, their potential adverse impact on the environment and human health must be addressed. In the present study, agglomerates of pristine C60 fullerenes (50 nm to microm-size) were applied to soil at 0, 5, 25, and 50 mg/kg dry soil to assess their effect on the soil microbiota by measuring total respiration; biomass, number, and diversity of bacteria; and total number and diversity of protozoans during 14 d. Respiration and microbial biomass were unaffected by the fullerenes at any time, whereas the number of fast-growing bacteria was decreased by three- to fourfold just after incorporation of the nanomaterial. Protozoans seemed not to be very sensitive to C60, because their number decreased only slightly in the beginning of the experiment. With polymerase chain reaction and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis analysis of eubacteria and kinetoplastids from the soil, however, a difference between the fullerene treatments and nonamended controls was demonstrated. The fullerenes did not induce more than 20 to 30% of relative dissimilarity (with both bacteria and protozoans) between treatments, but this effect was persistent throughout the experiment. It therefore is recommended that fullerene nanomaterial not be spread deliberately in the environment and that their ecotoxicology be further clarified.

Predictive gene lists for breast cancer prognosis: A topographic visualisation study

BackgroundThe controversy surrounding the non-uniqueness of predictive gene lists (PGL) of small selected subsets of genes from very large potential candidates as available in DNA microarray experiments is now widely acknowledged [1]. Many of these studies have focused on constructing discriminative semi-parametric models and as such are also subject to the issue of random correlations of sparse model selection in high dimensional spaces. In this work we outline a different approach based around an unsupervised patient-specific nonlinear topographic projection in predictive gene lists.MethodsWe construct nonlinear topographic projection maps based on inter-patient gene-list relative dissimilarities. The Neuroscale, the Stochastic Neighbor Embedding(SNE) and the Locally Linear Embedding(LLE) techniques have been used to construct two-dimensional projective visualisation plots of 70 dimensional PGLs per patient, classifiers are also constructed to identify the prognosis indicator of each patient using the resulting projections from those visualisation techniques and investigate whether a-posteriori two prognosis groups are separable on the evidence of the gene lists.A literature-proposed predictive gene list for breast cancer is benchmarked against a separate gene list using the above methods. Generalisation ability is investigated by using the mapping capability of Neuroscale to visualise the follow-up study, but based on the projections derived from the original dataset.ResultsThe results indicate that small subsets of patient-specific PGLs have insufficient prognostic dissimilarity to permit a distinction between two prognosis patients. Uncertainty and diversity across multiple gene expressions prevents unambiguous or even confident patient grouping. Comparative projections across different PGLs provide similar results.ConclusionThe random correlation effect to an arbitrary outcome induced by small subset selection from very high dimensional interrelated gene expression profiles leads to an outcome with associated uncertainty. This continuum and uncertainty precludes any attempts at constructing discriminative classifiers.However a patient's gene expression profile could possibly be used in treatment planning, based on knowledge of other patients' responses.We conclude that many of the patients involved in such medical studies are intrinsically unclassifiable on the basis of provided PGL evidence. This additional category of 'unclassifiable' should be accommodated within medical decision support systems if serious errors and unnecessary adjuvant therapy are to be avoided.

'Oh goodness, I am watching reality TV'

One of the most striking challenges encountered during the empirical stages of our audience research project, `Making Class and the Self through Televised Ethical Scenarios' (funded as part of the ESRC's Identities and Social Action programme), stemmed from how the different discursive resources held by our research participants impacted upon the kind of data collected. We argue that social class is reconfigured in each research encounter, not only through the adoption of moral positions in relation to `reality' television as we might expect, but also through the forms of authority available for participants. Different methods enabled the display of dissimilar relationships to television: reflexive telling, immanent positioning and affective responses all gave distinct variations of moral authority. Therefore, understanding the form as well as the content of our participants' responses is crucial to interpreting our data. These methodological observations underpin our earlier theoretical critique of the `turn' to subjectivity in social theory (Wood and Skeggs, 2004), where we suggest that the performance of the self is an activity that reproduces the social distinctions that theorists claim are in demise .

Visualization of balancing systems based on naïve psychological approaches

In this paper, we propose a novel medium for interactions based on an interpersonal psychological approach referred to as ‘naive psychology’. We adopt the visual assessment of clustering tendency (VAT) to naive psychology for the visual understanding of other people. The VAT algorithm produces a visual display that can be used to assess clustering tendencies in a set of persons (notions) by reconstructing a digital image representation of a square relational dissimilarity matrix for its set. This algorithm clearly represents two types of imbalanced situations in naive psychology: crisp and fuzzy. The visual image of a balanced or imbalance situation is useful for a deeper human understanding.

Gender and homophily: Differences in male and female association in Blau space

Homophily, the tendency for similar individuals to associate, is one of the most robust findings in social science. Despite this robustness, we have less information about how personal characteristics relate to differences in the strength of homophily. Nor do we know much about the impact of personal characteristics on judgments of relative dissimilarity. The present study compares the strength of age, religious, and educational homophily for male and female non-kin ties using network data from the 1985 General Social Survey. It also compares the patterning of ties among dissimilar alters for both sexes. The results of this exploratory effort indicate that males and females are almost equally homophilous, although religious homophily exerts a stronger influence on females than males. Males and females do, however, differ in their tendency to associate with certain types of dissimilar alters. Education is essentially uniform for both sexes, religious difference is more important for females than males, and those over sixty or under thirty are less different from the middle categories of age for females than for males. The results suggest that males are able to bridge larger areas of social space in their non-kin interpersonal networks and likely accumulate greater social capital as a consequence.

THE COMPLEMENTARY EFFECTS OF RELATIONAL DISSIMILARITY AND GROUP FAULTLINES: A MULTI-LEVEL ANALYSIS OF DIVERSITY.

This article examines the complementary effects of relational dissimilarity and group faultlines through a multi-level analysis of diversity. Results indicate that ethnic dissimilarity and team faultlines were generally negatively associated with any intentions to work with team or group members on future endeavors. Further article topics include diversity of the individual and team level, and the integration of relational dissimilarity and team diversity research and literature for contextual purposes.

The fuzzy polynucleotide space revisited

A theory of fuzzy polynucleotides, including an n-dimensional metric fuzzy polynucleotide space, has been previously introduced by the present author for fuzzy-theoretical analysis of nucleic acids [Sadegh-Zadeh K. Fuzzy genomes. Artif Intell Med 2000;18:1-28; Sadegh-Zadeh K. Ein Verfahren zur Fuzzydecodierung und Fuzzydechiffrierung von Informationen. Offenlegungsschrift DE 199 36 925 A 1. Deutsches Patent- und Markenamt; 2001]. The conceptual framework of that theory has been used by Nieto et al. [Nieto JJ, Torres A, Vázquez-Trasande MM. A metric space to study differences between polynucleotides. Appl Math Lett 2003;16:1289-94; Nieto JJ, Torres A, Georgiou DN, Karakasidis TE. Fuzzy polynucleotide spaces and metrics. Bull Math Biol 2006;68:703-25] and Torres et al. [Torres A, Nieto JJ. The fuzzy polynucleotide space: basic properties. Bioinformatics 2003;19:587-92; Torres A, Nieto JJ. Fuzzy logic in medicine and bioinformatics. J Biomed Biotechnol 2006;1-7 [Article ID 91908]] to create a completely different, 12-dimensional metric space which they have also called 'the fuzzy polynucleotide space'. In the present paper both spaces are compared. Both metric spaces are briefly outlined. Similarity and dissimilarity relationships between polynucleotide strings are measured in both spaces to compare their performance. Nieto et al.'s and Torres et al.'s metric space measures the relationships between polynucleotide chains incorrectly. Structurally highly different polynucleotide sequences are misclassified as highly similar ones, and completely different sequences are misclassified as identical ones. For this reason their construct is to be considered as a device of misdiagnosis that bears "fuzzy polynucleotide space" as a misnomer.

Citizens Abroad

This book explores a critical and often neglected aspect of emigration fromMiddle Eastern countries. Rather than focusing on the policies of the statesreceiving Middle Eastern immigrants, Brand’s research studies the policies ofthose Middle Eastern states from which emigration originates. She attributesthis neglect to the chauvinism of scholars writing from the Americas andWestern Europe who have made their own countries the central actors of theirresearch. Her other theoretical contribution is to challenge and deconstructsimplistic and outdated conceptions of state sovereignty. She selects four casestudies (viz., Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan), noting each one’s variedlevels of involvement in the expatriates’ lives, the emigrants’ differentdestinations, and the dissimilar relationships between the expatriates and theircountries of origin. By bringing together four disparate cases in one book,Brand addresses the larger question of how emigration from states impactsthe originating states’ conceptions of their own sovereignty ...

On the limits of effort testing: Symptom validity tests and severity of neurocognitive symptoms in nonlitigant patients

Modern symptom validity tests (SVTs) use empirical cutoffs for decision making. However, limits to the applicability of these cutoffs may arise when severe cognitive symptoms are present. The purpose of the studies presented here was to explore these limits of applicability. In Experiment 1, a group of 24 bona fide neurological patients without clinically obvious cognitive symptoms was compared to a group of 24 patients with rather severe symptoms. A comprehensive test battery was employed, which included four SVTs (the Test of Memory Malingering, TOMM, the Word Memory Test, WMT, the Bremer Symptomvalidierung, BSV, and the Amsterdam Short-Term Memory Test, ASTM). In Experiment 2, a group of 20 patients with mild Alzheimer's disease was compared to 14 healthy controls. Results of both studies showed that cognitive impairment may significantly interfere with SVT performance. Correlation analyses revealed dissimilar relationships between SVTs and neuropsychological test measures. Whereas TOMM and WMT correlated mainly with tests of declarative memory, the BSV correlated with tests of attention, and ASTM correlated with tests of working memory. Intercorrelations between symptom validity measures were relatively low. The published cutoffs of the TOMM would be suitable for estimating effort in patients with Mini-Mental State Examination scores of 24 or above. More research will be necessary to investigate how performance in SVTs is related to cognitive functioning in populations of severely impaired patients.

Perceptual dissimilarities among acoustic stimuli and ipsilateral electric stimuli

Five users of cochlear implants who had residual acoustic hearing in the implanted ear postoperatively participated in a study comparing the percepts elicited by acoustic and electric stimuli. The stimuli comprised pulse trains delivered to single electrodes and pure tones presented ipsilaterally. In the experiments, 12 equally loud stimuli with differing frequencies, electrode positions, and pulse rates were generated. Subjects listened to all of the possible pairs of stimuli in each set, and provided a relative dissimilarity rating for the members of each stimulus pair. The data were analyzed using non-metric multi-dimensional scaling techniques. Stimulus spaces were plotted in two dimensions to represent the results for each subject with each stimulus set. The results suggested that one dimension was associated with a pitch-like percept, related to the acoustic tone frequency and the active electrode position. The second dimension separated the acoustic stimuli from the electric stimuli. Generally, the electric pulse rate seemed to have a relatively small perceptual effect in this experimental context. Overall, the results show that acoustic pure tones are perceived as very different from electric pulse trains delivered to single electrode positions with constant rate, even when both the acoustic and the electric stimuli are presented to the same ear.

Berber language ideologies, maintenance, and contraction: Gendered variation in the indigenous margins of Morocco

Language contraction is shaped by the unequal distribution of power and resources, both between the language community and the dominant society, and within the contracting language community itself. Gender is connected to other social divisions and inequalities, rendering it central to processes of maintenance and loss. For indigenous groups struggling for recognition and rights, public acknowledgement of intra-group fractures may be political suicide, but for scholars it is crucial, albeit absent from the outpouring of attention to endangered languages. Linguistic ideologies about place, gender, and social change naturalize, reinforce, and mediate subjectivities, ethnolinguistic repertoires, national identities, and collective moralities. Two groups of Tashelhit Berber speakers of southwestern Morocco – Anti-Atlas mountain dwellers and Sous Valley plains dwellers – contrast in regard to their patterns of language maintenance and contraction, but in both, women are central in ways that engage their dissimilar relationships to Arabic speakers and to their own conceptions of rurality.

Withholding inputs in team contexts: Member composition, interaction processes, evaluation structure, and social loafing.

Social loafing was observed as a naturally occurring process in project teams of students working together for 3-4 months. The authors assessed the contributions that member composition (i.e., relational dissimilarity and knowledge, skills, and abilities; KSAs), perceptions of the team's interaction processes (i.e., dispensability and the fairness of the decision-making procedures), and the team's evaluation structure (i.e., identifiability) make toward understanding loafing behavior. Identifiability moderated the impact of dispensability on loafing but not the impact of fairness on loafing. Perceptions of fairness were negatively related to the extent that participants loafed within their team. Specific aspects of relational dissimilarity were positively associated with perceptions of dispensability and negatively associated with perceptions of fairness, whereas KSAs were negatively associated with perceptions of dispensability.