Kind Of Transition Research Articles

Regime Dispensability and Democratic Transitions: A Case Comparison of Spain and Turkey

Democratic transitions are usually complex and uncertain processes, and specifying paths to democratisation is a tentative process. One of the controversial and less explored paths is that of regime self-transformation. An attempt is made in this paper to explain this kind of transition with the notion of regime dispensability, a situation in which the dictatorial regime is abandoned in favour of a non-dictatorial one, using two countries that experienced such regime-initiated democratic transitions, namely Spain and Turkey, in a comparative framework. Dispensability is linked to the nature of the dictatorial regime and is used as a tool to account for causes of, and regime groups that can bring about, the regime's transformation, as well as for the implications of self-transformation for the future democracies.

Palliative patients’ and their significant others’ experiences of transitions concerning organizational, psychosocial and existential issues during the course of incurable cancer: a systematic review protocol

Review question/objective The objective of this review is to identify, appraise and synthesize the best available evidence exploring palliative patients’ or their significant others’ experiences of transitions during the course of incurable cancer. In this review, transitions are conceptualized as experiences concerning organizational, psychosocial and existential issues. More specifically, the review question is: What kinds of transitions do palliative patients and their significant others experience during the course of incurable cancer; in particular experiences relating to transitions concerning organizational, psychosocial and existential issues? Inclusion criteria Types of participants This review will consider studies that include adults aged 18 years and above who are suffering from incurable cancer and/or significant others (current or bereaved) of a person who is suffering has suffered from incurable cancer. Types of intervention(s)/phenomena of interest This review will consider studies that investigate experiences of organizational, psychosocial, or existential transitions during the course of incurable cancer. Context The course of incurable cancer. Studies exploring euthanasia will be excluded because euthanasia is not included in the WHO definition of palliation.

A Lighthouse for Urban Agriculture

This article advances the concept of the agroecological “lighthouse” as a civic space for learning and participating in the principles and practices of urban food production. As urbanization threatens to encourage the increased industrialization of agriculture, growing food in cities promises to alleviate this pressure while creating new opportunities for community empowerment and greater access to sustainable, healthy, and affordable food. This kind of transition, I argue, will demand social relations that bridge science, practice, and movement—and that cut in surprising ways across traditional boundaries between university and community. Drawing from a recent experience in an Urban Agroecology shortcourse in Berkeley, California, I illustrate what such relationships might look like, profiling the caretaker of one backyard garden in the Bay Area. This urban grower effuses what James Scott calls metis, moving fluidly across institutional boundaries, experimenting with agroecological innovations, and offering his space as a lighthouse commons for participatory learning. Interestingly, he is not a PhD, but a retired postal worker. With the stakes mounting for progress in food security across the urban-rural divide, the agroecological lighthouse opens up potential for new researcher-farmer partnerships as well as a means for expanding what we consider legitimate knowledge-making communities. Advancing the notion of a “lighthouse extension model,” I challenge the discourse of mainstream cooperative extension, arguing that a more egalitarian food system will likely emerge from participation by those traditionally excluded from shaping it.

Miscibility maps for polymer blends: Effects of temperature, pressure, and molecular weight

We study a Gibbs free energy model for describing the thermodynamics of compressible polymer blends in the case of nonpolar polymers. This model is a mean field model equivalent to the cell model of Prigogine et al. and close also to the model by Flory-Orvoll and Vrij. The model is expressed as a function of the interaction energies between monomer pairs (a, b, and c), the degrees of polymerization (XA and XB), a close packing parameter ρ0, the temperature, and the pressure. We derive an analytical expression regarding blend miscibility. All the already observed phase behaviors are recovered: the occurrence of two kinds of upper critical solution transition (UCST): case-I and case-II UCST for which the pressure has a destabilizing or stabilizing effect, respectively, and lower critical solution transition; cases where the pressure have a non-monotonous effect on the UCST temperature; cases where the spinodal lines close up under high pressures; and the so-called hour-glass transition. The model allows for making explicit the effect of the different physical parameters on phase behavior. We calculate complete miscibility maps regarding the occurrence of the various possible kinds of transitions in the 2D space b/a and XA, for different values of (c−ab)/a, applied pressure P, and chain length ratios. This approach may come as a complement to already existing, more quantitative and elaborated approaches. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 2014, 52, 419–443

Effect of Annealing Temperature on the Optical Properties of ZnO Nanoparticles

In this work, ZnO films were prepared by drop casting technique. The films were deposited on quartz substrates under different annealing time (15, 30, 45 and 60 min.) at a constant temperature (800 °C). The optical properties were achieved by measuring the absorbance and transmittance spectra in the wavelength range (200-900) nm. It was found that the absorbance decreases while transmission increases as the annealing time increases, while the reflectance decreases as the annealing time increases. The optical measurements indicate the kind of transition which was a direct allowed with an average band gap energies lie between 3.3 eV and 3.54 eV with the change of annealing time.

Transition from nonresonant to resonant random lasers by the geometrical confinement of disorder

We report on a transition in random lasers that is induced by the geometrical confinement of the emitting material. Different dye doped paper devices with controlled geometry are fabricated by soft lithography and show two distinguished behaviors in the stimulated emission: in the absence of boundary constraints, the energy threshold decreases for larger laser volumes showing the typical trend of diffusive nonresonant random lasers, while when the same material is lithographed into channels, the walls act as cavity and the resonant behavior typical of standard lasers is observed. The experimental results are consistent with the general theories of random and standard lasers and a clear phase diagram of the transition is reported.

Effect of Annealing Temperature on the Optical Properties of ZnO Nanoparticles

In this work, ZnO films were prepared by drop casting technique. The films were deposited on quartz substrates under different annealing time (15, 30, 45 and 60 min.) at a constant temperature (800 °C). The optical properties were achieved by measuring the absorbance and transmittance spectra in the wavelength range (200-900) nm. It was found that the absorbance decreases while transmission increases as the annealing time increases, while the reflectance decreases as the annealing time increases. The optical measurements indicate the kind of transition which was a direct allowed with an average band gap energies lie between 3.3 eV and 3.54 eV with the change of annealing time.

Micellization of St/MMA Gradient Copolymers: A General Picture of Structural Transitions in Gradient Copolymer Micelles

In this work, a gradient copolymer of styrene (St) and methyl methacrylate (MMA) is synthesized via reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer living radical polymerization and its micellization behaviors in an acetone and water mixture are investigated by transmission electron microscopy, light scattering, and NMR spectroscopy. Three different kinds of transitions were found to coexist in a single system for the first time: a unimers to micelles transition, a star-like micelles to crew-cut micelles transition resulting from the shrinkage of micelles, and morphological transitions from spherical micelles to cylindrical micelles to vesicles. Our findings provide a general picture of structural transitions and relaxation processes in gradient copolymer micelles, which can lead to the development of novel materials and applications based on gradient copolymers.

On the possibility of two phase transitions in liquid helium

An explanation is proposed for the maxima in the dielectric constant and density observed in liquid helium slightly above the superfluid transition temperature. It is shown that they may be caused by a phase transition that results in spontaneous polarization of the helium. This kind of transition is possible in the liquid because when an atom is polarized its energy levels are lowered, so that the polarization is energetically favorable, especially for light atoms. In addition, the development of a dipole moment in an atom leads to the appearance of an additional electric field and, therefore, to an increase in the energy. The possible spontaneous polarization of the system of atoms is determined by the competition among these factors. In accordance with this concept, as the temperature of liquid helium is lowered there is an initial phase transition into a polarized normal phase, followed by one from this nonzero polarization state into the superfluid state. The transition of the normal fluid into the polarized phase is described in terms of a phenomenological theory of phase transitions. The transition can be of first or second order.

Bursting with Randomness: A Simple Model for Stochastic Control of Gene Expression

If a gene's promoter were a light switch, you'd probably call an electrician. That's because rather than simply turning on and off in a limited and predictable way, many genes—whose expression is controlled by their promoters—are expressed in bursts, with expression fluctuating randomly over time. Analyzing the nucleosome configuration of single gene molecules by electron microscopy. What is the molecular basis of this transcriptional bursting? Previous work has suggested, but not directly demonstrated, that gene promoters can assume alternative structural configurations, raising the possibility that the promoter might randomly flip among these alternatives. Transcription requires that the polymerase machinery gain access to the promoter, and that access can be inhibited when DNA is tightly wrapped around histone proteins to form nucleosomes, the basic protein–DNA unit of structure within chromosomes. Researchers have speculated that these alternative promoter configurations might be linked to the number and distribution of nucleosomes within the promoter, but there has been no proof. The best way to test that hypothesis is by direct observation, and that is what Christopher Brown, Hinrich Boeger, and colleagues set out to do. Their work confirmed that the promoter of PHO5, a well-studied yeast gene, does indeed adopt alternative configurations based on nucleosome distribution. And they went further, examining the probability distribution of those nucleosomes and constructing a mechanistic model that accounts for that distribution, and hence the phenomenon of transcriptional bursting. The key to their study was to chemically “freeze” the promoter regions of multiple PHO5 genes, and then use the electron microscope to determine the precise configuration of each. The gene's promoter includes three nucleosome binding sites, and they were able to tabulate the relative frequency of each of the eight possible binding states (i.e., occupied-occupied-occupied, occupied-occupied-empty, etc.). Next, they built a mathematical probability model to test various assumptions about the transitions among the binding states. They distinguished three kinds of transitions: assembly of a nucleosome on a binding site, disassembly and removal, or sliding of a nucleosome from one site to another. They found that assembly and disassembly alone accounted for the number of observed nucleosomes, but that sliding was needed to account for their distribution. In particular, it appeared that sliding out of the middle position toward the ends was common. Further, the best fit with the data came when disassembly at the first position occurred only when the second position was unoccupied. Since transcription is maximally repressed in the fully occupied state and maximally permitted in the fully unoccupied state, the stochastic transitions among these and the intermediate states suggest that transcription of the PHO5 gene occurs in random bursts, the authors concluded. Further experimentation and modeling allowed them to predict that binding states in which the middle position was unoccupied were the most conducive to transcription. But the transcription rate was not maximal in all conducive states; other, as-yet unidentified factors presumably play a role in determining the degree of transcription for a given conducive state. The model the authors developed provides a structural basis for transcriptional bursting consistent with a large body of data. While other models might also explain that data, none do so as simply and with as few “working parts” as theirs—generally a sign that a model is pointing in the right direction. Brown CR, Mao C, Falkovskaia E, Jurica MS, Boeger H (2013) Linking Stochastic Fluctuations in Chromatin Structure and Gene Expression. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001621

Alcohol drinking among college students: college responsibility for personal troubles

BackgroundOne young adult in two has entered university education in Western countries. Many of these young students will be exposed, during this transitional period, to substantial changes in living arrangements, socialisation groups, and social activities. This kind of transition is often associated with risky behaviour such as excessive alcohol consumption. So far, however, there is little evidence about the social determinants of alcohol consumption among college students. We set out to explore how college environmental factors shape college students' drinking behaviour.MethodsIn May 2010 a web questionnaire was sent to all bachelor and master students registered with an important Belgian university; 7,015 students participated (participation = 39%). The survey looked at drinking behaviour, social involvement, college environmental factors, drinking norms, and positive drinking consequences.ResultsOn average each student had 1.7 drinks a day and 2.8 episodes of abusive drinking a month. We found that the more a student was exposed to college environmental factors, the greater the risk of heavy, frequent, and abusive drinking. Alcohol consumption increased for students living on campus, living in a dormitory with a higher number of room-mates, and having been in the University for a long spell. Most such environmental factors were explained by social involvement, such as participation to the student folklore, pre-partying, and normative expectations.ConclusionsEducational and college authorities need to acknowledge universities’ responsibility in relation to their students’ drinking behaviour and to commit themselves to support an environment of responsible drinking.

Democratic Transformation and Regional Institutions: The Case of Myanmar and ASEAN

The focus of this article is Myanmar's transition to democracy, which is taking place after almost half a century of military rule. The former military rulers are themselves the architects of transition. This article notes that one of the key challenges faced by military regimes during this kind of transition is the problem of “credible commitments”. In short, the issue is this: a transition will only be successful if it has the support of the political opposition and the public at large. But why should these groups believe in the promises of former tyrants? Problems of credibility and low expectations about the intention and capacity of the military to effect reform can cause destabilisation and undermine prospects for a successful transition. In worst case scenarios, instability leads to a resurgence of authoritarianism, or to a(nother) military coup. This article highlights the role of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in assisting the transition and stabilisation of Myanmar's fledgling democracy. The argument is that ASEAN provides a means whereby Myanmar's leaders can make credible commitments about their intentions in relation to liberalisation and democratisation, lending support to Myanmar's reformist government at a crucial time in the transition to democracy. The article concludes that under certain circumstances, even regional organisations such as ASEAN, which are not comprised of a majority of democratic states, can (to a degree) influence perceptions about a democratising regime's commitment to reform.

Aesthetics of Affects

(Yubraj Aryal interviewed Charles Altieri on Aesthetics of Affects. Mr Aryal is focusing on what can affect tell us about expression of value, judgment, subjectivity and aesthetic experience itself in literature.) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Y. A.: You wrote on your homepage also recently wrote a book on the affects and that shapes my thinking on most topics. But I am in transition. I have been teaching Shakespeare and Hegel and will teach the epic because I want a stage on which to figure out what I can say about affect in literature. What kind of transition are you talking about? Does this transition signal the change in your position of theory of meaning in interpretation of literature? What is that grand stage, which allows you to say something in literature, which was not possible before? C. A.: I felt I was in transition in many respects. I had written all I had to say about feeling and about mood. I did not feel I had anything original to say about other affective states. And I was dismayed that the position setting emotion against subjectivity seemed to dominate literary theory while philosophers did not even mention my book in their bibliographies. I also knew that what I was writing on Wallace Stevens was probably pretty good, but after that I thought I would have nothing new to say about Modernism and Modernist writers. This is the negative side. Positively I wanted to teach Shakespeare and the epic because any literary theory seems to me to have to fully appreciate the many aspects of such work. And it, along with my continuing fascination with Wittgenstein, has considerably transformed my thinking. The most important change is that I want to talk about values and valuing rather than affect per se. Much of affect theory can be focused on how we make valuations, since value seems to me to depend on feeling plus a reflection that wants the feeling to continue or appreciates where it is leading. My dream is to reconsider formalist claims as in fact claims about invitations to perform acts of valuing. Then formalism is not an instrument for securing autonomy but rather an education in distinctive possibilities for aligning our senses of value with what occurs as we read. And the patterns in our valuings tend to produce an actual orientation toward what we take as significant values worth fighting for and adapting in general contexts. Also reading those texts makes me think about how almost all literary theory seeks ways of talking about the worldliness of the text. We argue really only about to what degree this worldliness can or should be based distinctively on modes of reading and engaging the work that we can teach as literary and so shared by texts from different historical epochs. For me this worldliness is captured best by theories of expression, that is theories trying to explain how self-consciousness can take overt responsibility for what had been inchoate senses of who one is that become articulate in the process of writing. I do not equate self-consciousness with individual characters or authors but it is a property of the sources of energy and direction that seem to thrive on increasing levels of articulation that the text can take on. Expressive self-consciousness is more capacious than any empirical self in part because it takes in part the role of force demanding emotional investment and projecting possible futures for what is given in the text. No one can read far in Shakespeare or in the epic without having to face the roles of grief and mourning in literary experience. But also no one can read far in those works without also feeling the need to be able to talk about how these works also try to contextualize such grief as a condition of seeking through art more capacious forms of self-consciousness that are oriented toward collective modes of awareness. I find Hegel obviously our greatest thinker about what expression involves. …

Radical Moral Imagination: Courage, Hope, and Articulation

This paper develops the basis for a new account of radical moral imagination, understood as the transformation of moral understandings through creative response to the sensed inadequacy of one's moral concepts or morally significant appraisals of lived experience. Against Miranda Fricker, I argue that this kind of transition from moral perplexity to increased moral insight is not primarily a matter of the “top‐down” use of concepts. Against Susan Babbitt, I argue that it is not primarily a matter of “bottom‐up” intuitive responsiveness to experience. Beyond courage and hope, radical moral imagination involves the articulation of inchoate experience, which allows individuals to make new kinds of moral moves and to lay claim to others' acknowledgment of the meaning of these moves.

On the Theory of Post-Communist Economic Transition to Market

The paper investigates the utility of economic theory for post-Communist economic transformation. It serves to explain the main reasons for market reform failure in different post-Communist countries. A literature review suggests that after the collapse of the Communist system there was no economic theory of transition to market. Whenever one considers the transition of post-Communist economies to a market system, it has to be placed on record, as this kind of transition has no precedent in history. There is as yet no special economic theory of post-Communist transformation and it is just developing.

A kind of noise-induced transition to noisy chaos in stochastically perturbed dynamical system

We investigate a kind of noise-induced transition to noisy chaos in dynamical systems. Due to similar phenomenological structures of stable hyperbolic attractors excited by various physical realizations from a given stationary random process, a specific Poincare map is established for stochastically perturbed quasi-Hamiltonian system. Based on this kind of map, various point sets in the Poincare’s cross-section and dynamical transitions can be analyzed. Results from the customary Duffing oscillator show that, the point sets in the Poincare’s global cross-section will be highly compressed in one direction, and extend slowly along the deterministic period-doubling bifurcation trail in another direction when the strength of the harmonic excitation is fixed while the strength of the stochastic excitation is slowly increased. This kind of transition is called the noise-induced point-overspreading route to noisy chaos.

A Context-aware Architecture for Mental Model Sharing through Semantic Movement in Intelligent Agents

Recent studies in multi-agent systems are paying increasingly more attention to the paradigm of designing intelligent agents with human inspired concepts. One of the main cognitive concepts driving the core of many recent approaches in multi agent systems is shared mental models. In this paper, we propose an architecture for sharing mental models based on a new concept called semantic movement. This architecture has been inspired by a variety of mental models in humans and supports agents working in different simultaneous contexts and it uses semantic movement as a conflict resolution mechanism. Semantic movement is a kind of transition from the present mental states to some new states in order to resolve harming conflicts between mental models of participants. We formalized the semantic movement process in order to use it in our proposed architecture. Our test bed to evaluate this architecture is a set of complex scenarios which are likely impossible to be solved by individual agents without sharing. Our architecture exhibits better performance than other alternative methods that have sharing capabilities. We believe that the proposed architecture would be able to provide agents with the ability of generating more consistent behaviors between agents. Moreover, this architecture can become a suitable platform for the negotiation of self interested agents.

Early Childhood Services: Using Narratives to Explore Parents’ Experiences of Transition

This article examines the concepts of transitions in early childhood through the lens of parents’ personal narratives. How do parents define transition or the process of change? What are the stages that they journey through as they parent their preschool children? This exploration is not only interested in identifying the kinds of transitions experienced by parents, but also the processes of change and the meanings that parents give to them. Furthermore, the nature of the interactions and relationships that accompany the processes of change are examined. These narratives emerge from an early childhood development demonstration site charged with the task of creating integrated programs and services that are responsive to community needs within an educational context. To set the stage for the personal narratives of transition, the larger political narrative of transition provincially, nationally and internationally is also examined.

Which kind of transition is important for sound representation? An event-related potential study

Auditory transients (such as sound onset or a frequency transition within a continuous sound) are assumed to parse the auditory input into smaller units enabling the formation of unitary sound representations separately for each segment. This was discovered by using the mismatch negativity (MMN) component of the event-related potential (ERP) that taps into auditory sensory memory representations. For unstructured sounds, MMN amplitude decreased or even vanished with increasing the temporal distance of an irregular feature (deviance, e.g. duration decrement) relative to the onset of an otherwise regularly occurring sound, whereas for sounds that were segmented by a transient, MMN persisted. It has been speculated that the P1–N1–P2 complex, indexing the sensory encoding of the transient, determines the temporal units of the acoustic input that are represented by the information processing system. To test this hypothesis, we utilized a previously reported asymmetry in the sensory encoding of physically identical but time-reversed transitions between segments of constant and gliding frequency. In separate blocks, we regularly presented 1400-ms sounds with a centered constant-to-glide or glide-to-constant transition. Occasionally and unpredictably, one of the regularly occurring sounds was shortened in duration to 910ms. We found larger transition-related P1–N1–P2 potentials accompanied by larger deviance-related MMN amplitudes for sounds with constant-to-glide transition than for sounds with glide-to-constant transition. This provides evidence that it is the precise sensory encoding of the transition which is crucial for automatically parsing the auditory input into smaller units, thus enabling the formation of unitary sound representations even for late segments.

Narcissism in the Age of Technology

Narcissism in the Age of Technology