Natural Categories Research Articles

ÇANKIRI İLİNDE YOK OLMA TEHLİKESİ ALTINDAKİ VE EDAFİK ENDEMİK GYPSOPHILA GERMANICOPOLITANA HUB.-MOR.’UN IN VITRO KOŞULLARDA ÇOĞALTIMI

In this study, in vitro propagation of Gypsophila germanicopolitana HUB.- MOR., which grows on gypsum hills within the limits of Çankırı province was taken as an aim. The species is included in the list of plants under “critical extinction (CR)” according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources red list category. Shoot tips and internodes of the plant were used as explant sources for in vitro propagation, as basal nutrient medium 1) Murashige and Skoog (MS) 2) Nitsch & Nitsch (NN) were chosen, as plant growth regulators 1) 6-benzylaminopurine (BAP) (0 mg/L, 0.5 mg/L, 1 mg/L) and 2) Kinetin (KIN) (0 mg/L, 0.5 mg/L, 1 mg/L) were used as cytokinin source as well as 3) Indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) (0 mg/L) L, 0.25 mg/L, 0.5 mg/L) and 4) α-naphthalene acetic acid (NAA) (0 mg/L, 0.25 mg/L, 0.5 mg/L) were as auxin sources. After that 36 combinations with different doses were established. Gelrite (2.1 g/L) was used as a gelling agent and 30 g/L of sucrose was added as a carbon source to the nutrient media. As a result, the best shoot regeneration was observed in Nitsch & Nitsch (NN) nutrient medium with a combination of 0 mg/L KIN + 0.5 mg/L NAA plant growth regulator. Root regeneration was more successfully present within the explants cultured in MS nutrient medium than in NN nutrient medium. No other in vitro propagation studies have been carried out on this endemic species before and so it has a unique value in serving as a basis for future studies.

Multi-dimensional sensorimotor grounding of concrete and abstract categories.

Semantic categories, and the concepts belonging to them, have commonly been defined by their relative concreteness, that is, their reliance on perception. However, sensorimotor grounding must be regarded as going beyond the basic five senses and incorporate a multi-dimensional variety of perceptual and action experience. We present a series of exploratory analyses examining the sensorimotor grounding of participant-produced member concepts for 117 categories, spanning concrete (e.g. animal and furniture) and highly abstract (e.g. unit of time and science) categories. We found that both concrete and abstract categories are strongly grounded in multi-dimensional sensorimotor experience. Both domains were dominated by vision and, to a lesser extent, head movements, but concrete categories were more grounded in touch and hand-arm action, while abstract categories were more grounded in hearing and interoception. Importantly, this pattern of grounding was not uniform, and subdomains of concrete (e.g. ingestibles, animates, natural categories and artefacts) and abstract (e.g. internal, social and non-social) categories were grounded in different profiles of sensorimotor experience. Overall, these findings suggest that the distinction between abstract and concrete categories is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest, and that the strength and diversity of sensorimotor grounding in abstract categories must not be underestimated. This article is part of the theme issue 'Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences'.

Financial Hazard Prediction Due to Power Outages Associated with Severe Weather-Related Natural Disaster Categories

Severe weather conditions not only damage electric power infrastructure, and energy systems, but also affect millions of users, including residential, commercial or industrial consumers. Moreover, power outages due to weather-related natural disasters have been causing financial losses worth billions of US dollars. In this paper, we analyze the impact of power outages on the revenue of electric power suppliers, particularly due to the top five weather-related natural disasters. For this purpose, reliable and publicly available power outage events data are considered. The data provide the time of the outage event, the geographic region, electricity consumption and tariffs, social and economic indicators, climatological annotation, consumer category distribution, population and land area, and so forth. An exploratory analysis is carried out to reveal the impact of weather-related disasters and the associated electric power revenue risk. The top five catastrophic weather-related natural disaster categories are investigated individually to predict the related revenue loss. The most influencing parameters contributing to efficient prediction are identified and their partial dependence on revenue loss is illustrated. It was found that the electric power revenue associated with weather-related natural disasters is a function of several parameters, including outage duration, number of customers, tariffs and economic indicators. The findings of this research will help electric power suppliers estimate revenue risk, as well as authorities to make risk-informed decisions regarding the energy infrastructure and systems planning.

An appraisal of the current status of inhibition of glucose transporters as an emerging antineoplastic approach: Promising potential of new pan-GLUT inhibitors.

Neoplastic cells displayed altered metabolism with accelerated glycolysis. Therefore, these cells need a mammoth supply of glucose for which they display an upregulated expression of various glucose transporters (GLUT). Thus, novel antineoplastic strategies focus on inhibiting GLUT to intersect the glycolytic lifeline of cancer cells. This review focuses on the current status of various GLUT inhibition scenarios. The GLUT inhibitors belong to both natural and synthetic small inhibitory molecules category. As neoplastic cells express multiple GLUT isoforms, it is necessary to use pan-GLUT inhibitors. Nevertheless, it is also necessary that such pan-GLUT inhibitors exert their action at a low concentration so that normal healthy cells are left unharmed and minimal injury is caused to the other vital organs and systems of the body. Moreover, approaches are also emerging from combining GLUT inhibitors with other chemotherapeutic agents to potentiate the antineoplastic action. A new pan-GLUT inhibitor named glutor, a piperazine-one derivative, has shown a potent antineoplastic action owing to its inhibitory action exerted at nanomolar concentrations. The review discusses the merits and limitations of the existing GLUT inhibitory approach with possible future outcomes.

The Role of Touristic Product Components in Destination Selection

This research analyzed the effect of the main touristic product components (Cultural and Natural Attractions, Tourism Services Infrastructure, Transportation Facilities, Price Accessibility, and Image) on tourists’ destination selection in the seven most-visited destinations in the world in 2020 (France, Spain, the USA, China, Italy, Turkey, and Mexico). The selected destinations were analyzed and compared with the PROMETHEE technique, using the data in the 2019 reports of the “Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index” and the "Tourism Brand Country Ranking." The results of the analysis showed the order of superiority of the destinations as Spain, France, Italy, China, the USA, Mexico, and Turkey. The criteria and effect levels that affected this ranking are examined in detail for each destination in the findings section of this paper. It was concluded that Turkey fell behind in the ranking due, in particular, to its low performance in the Cultural and Natural Attractiveness category, despite its rich cultural and natural values. This research reveals that differences in the ranking of the 7 countries that attract the most tourists in the world depend on the characteristics of the various touristic product components, and the reasons for these differences are within the touristic product components framework.

Anti-populist populism: Musical challenges to Trump's America and Erdoğan's Turkey

AbstractPopulism is a discursive construct that represents popular interests and values by ‘pretend[ing] to speak’ for the people who are constructed separate and opposed to a powerful elite. Yet populism, in its various forms and accents, ‘can adapt flexibly to a variety of substantive ideological values and principles’. This is manifested in ‘the people’ not being a prefixed natural category, but a signifier that acquires meaning through discourses and contexts. This article considers how populism is articulated in hip hop videos that criticise two authoritarian-populist politicians: America's Trump and Turkey's Erdoğan. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies, Eminem's ‘The Storm’ and Ezhel's ‘Yarınımız Yok (We have no tomorrow)’ are analysed to demonstrate how oppositional popular music can articulate its own brands of populism, transcending contexts, yet shaped by them.

Opening the Black Box: Finding Osgood’s Semantic Factors in Word2vec Space

State-of-the-art models of artificial intelligence are developed in the black-box paradigm, in which sensitive information is limited to input-output interfaces, while internal representations are not interpretable. The resulting algorithms lack explainability and transparency, requested for responsible application. This paper addresses the problem by a method for finding Osgood’s dimensions of affective meaning in multidimensional space of a pre-trained word2vec model of natural language. Three affective dimensions are found based on eight semantic prototypes, composed of individual words. Evaluation axis is found in 300-dimensional word2vec space as a difference between positive and negative prototypes. Potency and activity axes are defined from six process-semantic prototypes (perception, analysis, planning, action, progress, and evaluation), representing phases of a generalized circular process in that plane. All dimensions are found in simple analytical form, not requiring additional training. Dimensions are nearly orthogonal, as expected for independent semantic factors. Osgood’s semantics of any word2vec object is then retrieved by a simple projection of the corresponding vector to the identified dimensions. The developed approach opens the possibility for interpreting the inside of black box-type algorithms in natural affective-semantic categories, and provides insights into foundational principles of distributive vector models of natural language. In the reverse direction, the established mapping opens machine-learning models as rich sources of data for cognitive-behavioral research and technology.

MKANet: An Efficient Network with Sobel Boundary Loss for Land-Cover Classification of Satellite Remote Sensing Imagery

Land cover classification is a multiclass segmentation task to classify each pixel into a certain natural or human-made category of the earth’s surface, such as water, soil, natural vegetation, crops, and human infrastructure. Limited by hardware computational resources and memory capacity, most existing studies preprocessed original remote sensing images by downsampling or cropping them into small patches less than 512 × 512 pixels before sending them to a deep neural network. However, downsampling incurs a spatial detail loss, renders small segments hard to discriminate, and reverses the spatial resolution progress obtained by decades of efforts. Cropping images into small patches causes a loss of long-range context information, and restoring the predicted results to their original size brings extra latency. In response to the above weaknesses, we present an efficient lightweight semantic segmentation network termed MKANet. Aimed at the characteristics of top view high-resolution remote sensing imagery, MKANet utilizes sharing kernels to simultaneously and equally handle ground segments of inconsistent scales, and also employs a parallel and shallow architecture to boost inference speed and friendly support image patches more than 10× larger. To enhance boundary and small segment discrimination, we also propose a method that captures category impurity areas, exploits boundary information, and exerts an extra penalty on boundaries and small segment misjudgments. Both visual interpretations and quantitative metrics of extensive experiments demonstrate that MKANet obtains a state-of-the-art accuracy on two land-cover classification datasets and infers 2× faster than other competitive lightweight networks. All these merits highlight the potential of MKANet in practical applications.

Investigating the impact of urban landscape composition and configuration on PM2.5 concentration under the LCZ scheme: A case study in Nanchang, China

Urban landscape pattern alters the distribution of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by affecting “source and sink” directly and microclimate indirectly. Most previous works investigate their relationship by landscape metrics that are difficult to be applied in sustainable urban planning. This study innovatively linked PM2.5 with the local climate zone (LCZ) which is a visible landscape pattern classification framework at urban scale. Impacts of urban landscape composition and configuration on PM2.5 were evaluated through PM2.5 differences analyzes of inter-LCZ categories and intra-built category and correlation analysis between PM2.5 and landscape metrics adopted in LCZ scheme. Results show that significant PM2.5 differences exist both inter-LCZ categories and intra-built category, implying LCZ scheme can reflect the urban spatial variation of PM2.5. The natural category always has a lower PM2.5 concentration than the built category. PM2.5 concentrations “compact > open” and “high-rise > mid-rise > low-rise” in built category generally exist throughout the year. Height of roughness elements (HRE) and aspect ratio (AR) show the most significant correlation with PM2.5. This study provides a novel perspective investigating the impact of urban landscape pattern on PM2.5 and scientific guidance for sustainable urban planning in regard to air pollution mitigation.

Global Meta-analysis of Airborne Bacterial Communities and Associations with Anthropogenic Activities.

Airborne microbiome alterations, an emerging global health concern, have been linked to anthropogenic activities in numerous studies. However, these studies have not reached a consensus. To reveal general trends, we conducted a meta-analysis using 3226 air samples from 42 studies, including 29 samples of our own. We found that samples in anthropogenic activity-related categories showed increased microbial diversity, increased relative abundance of pathogens, increased co-occurrence network complexity, and decreased positive edge proportions in the network compared with the natural environment category. Most of the above conclusions were confirmed using the samples we collected in a particular period with restricted anthropogenic activities. Additionally, unlike most previous studies, we used 15 human-production process factors to quantitatively describe anthropogenic activities. We found that microbial richness was positively correlated with fine particulate matter concentration, NH3 emissions, and agricultural land proportion and negatively correlated with the gross domestic product per capita. Airborne pathogens showed preferences for different factors, indicating potential health implications. SourceTracker analysis showed that the human body surface was a more likely source of airborne pathogens than other environments. Our results advance the understanding of relationships between anthropogenic activities and airborne bacteria and highlight the role of airborne pathogens in public health.

Comparative life cycle assessment of Li-Sulphur and Li-ion batteries for electric vehicles

Nowadays, most of the electric vehicles (EVs) are powered by Lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries due to their high energy density, higher power density and degree of development relative to other battery technologies. As Li-ion technology evolves and the EVs fleet increases, it is important to understand the environmental impacts of mass-producing the battery packs for EVs. However, with 80-150 Wh/kg energy density, current Li-ion batteries are not able to power the EVs for a comparable driving range with conventional vehicles. Lithium-sulphur (Li-S) batteries have emerged as promising battery technology, with a higher theoretical capacity and energy density than Li-ion batteries used today. Moreover, Li-S batteries presumably present a lower environmental profile due to their chemical composition compared to Li-ion ones. To verify this statement, this study performs a life cycle assessment (LCA) of Li-S battery cells (under industrial development at the moment) that have been scaled up accordingly to estimate their performance as a battery for EVs. This comparison will provide the impact of each battery and the potential benefits in terms of environmental impact indicator values of the Li-S technology. The impacts of the Li-S battery are compared with those of a Nickel-Cobalt-Manganese (NCM) battery under the same driving distance. The environmental impact assessment results show that Li-S batteries present a most favourable environmental profile compared to NCM batteries, especially in the natural resource depletion categories where the Li-S battery has 70%-90% lower values compared to the Li-ion one.

Among-individual differences in auditory and physical cognitive abilities in zebra finches.

Among-individual variation in performance on cognitive tasks is ubiquitous across species that have been examined, and understanding the evolution of cognitive abilities requires investigating among-individual variation because natural selection acts on individual differences. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which individual differences in cognition are determined by domain-specific compared with domain-general cognitive abilities. We examined individual differences in learning speed of zebra finches across seven different tasks to determine the extent of domain-specific versus domain-general learning abilities, as well as the relationship between learning speed and learning generalization. Thirty-two zebra finches completed a foraging board experiment that included visual and structural discriminations, and then these same birds went through an acoustic operant discrimination experiment that required discriminating between different natural categories of acoustic stimuli. We found evidence of domain-general learning abilities as birds’ relative performance on the seven learning tasks was weakly repeatable and a principal components analysis found a first principal component that explained 36% of the variance in performance across tasks with all tasks loading unidirectionally on this component. However, the few significant correlations between tasks and high repeatability within each experiment suggest the potential for domain-specific abilities. Learning speed did not influence an individual’s ability to generalize learning. These results suggest that zebra finch performance across visual, structural, and auditory learning relies upon some common mechanism; some might call this evidence of “general intelligence”(g), but it is also possible that this finding is due to other noncognitive mechanisms such as motivation.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.3758/s13420-022-00520-w.

The Inhibition Effect of Affordances in Action Picture Naming: An Event-related Potential Study.

How quickly are different kinds of conceptual knowledge activated in action picture naming? Using a masked priming paradigm, we manipulated the prime category type (artificial vs. natural), prime action type (precision, power, vs. neutral grip), and target action type (precision vs. power grip) in action picture naming, while electrophysiological signals were measured concurrently. Naming latencies showed an inhibition effect in the congruent action type condition compared with the neutral condition. ERP results showed that artificial and natural category primes induced smaller waveforms in precision or power action primes than neutral primes in the time window of 100-200 msec. Time-frequency results consistently presented a power desynchronization of the mu rhythm in the time window of 0-210 msec with precision action type artificial objects compared with neutral primes, which localized at the supplementary motor, precentral and postcentral areas in the left hemisphere. These findings suggest an inhibitory effect of affordances arising at conceptual preparation in action picture naming and provide evidence for embodied cognition.

Is Concept Appraisal Modulated by Procedural or Declarative Manipulations?

A recent study has established that thinkers reliably engage in epistemic appraisals of concepts of natural categories. Here, five studies are reported which investigated the effects of different manipulations of category learning context on appraisal of the concepts learnt. It was predicted that dimensions of concept appraisal could be affected by manipulating either procedural factors (spacing of learning, perceptual fluency) or declarative factors (causal knowledge about categories). While known effects of these manipulations on metacognitive judgements such as category learning judgements and confidence at test were replicated, procedural factors had no reliable effects on the dimensions of concept appraisal. Effects of declarative manipulations on some forms of concept appraisal were observed.

Bringing the ‘nation-state’ into being: affect, methodological nationalism and globalisation of higher education

ABSTRACT Methodological nationalism (MN) pervades higher education scholarship and practice, particularly in the arena of globalisation of higher education (HE) (Shahjahan and Kezar 2013). MN refers to the assumption that national boundaries define the natural category or unit of analysis for society. Drawing on affect theories, this conceptual article aims to problematise how the ‘nation state’ as a natural category (or container) pervades global HE practices and policies. Affect refers to emotions, responses, reactions and feelings that are relational and transpersonal, and an object’s (e.g., nation-state) continuous emergence and unfolding in a world driven by intensities and feelings. Based on three real-life examples in/about South Asian HE, we demonstrate how the ‘nation-state’ category comes into being (and becomes ‘sticky’) through the experienced and imagined encounters among: (a) individuals, (b) national policy and (c) transnational actors. We show how, through imaginaries and practices, the ‘global’ manifested through using the ‘nation-state’, indicating a strong and evolving relationship between the two categories, informed by emotional and imaginative futures. We argue that an affect lens illuminates how MN is perpetuated as the nation-state becomes a naturalised container for (potential) encounters in the enactments of HE globalisation and moving beyond MN requires an ontological shift.

Peran Hashtag #Indonesiabucketlist pada Konten Regram @Indtravel dalam Upaya Customer Engagement Marketing di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

Instagram becomes prominent social media that connect online communities to tourism destination although Covid-19 occurs. This study aims to explore the role of regram contents which are followed with #IndonesiaBucketList in Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economy of Indonesia Instagram official account, @indtravel. Data collected was the posts including photos, captions, comments, and likes, uploaded during the period of social restriction (PSBB) to emergency restriction (PPKM) for Java and Bali in third quarter of 2021. In particular, the present study examines customer engangement marketing model of @indtravel marketing practices in a time of crisis. Content analysis was employed in this qualitative descriptive study by identifying the regram contents posted with hashtag #IndonesiaBucketList. The results reveal that natural attraction category was the primary theme of the contents along with the most mentioned provinces, such as East Nusa Tenggara, Bali, Central Java, and East Java. It is also consistent that customer engagement cycle of @indtravel suggest customer engangement marketing practice is dealing with tourism crisis during Covid-19 pandemic.
 Keywords: Instagram, Social Media, Regram, Hashtag, Customer Engagement Marketing, Tourism Crisis.

Study of Natural Scene Categories in Measurement of Perceived Image Quality

One challenge facing image quality assessment (IQA) is that current models designed or trained on the basis of exiting databases are intrinsically suboptimal and cannot deal with the real-world complexity and diversity of natural scenes. IQA models and databases are heavily skewed toward the visibility of distortions. It is critical to understand the wider determinants of perceived quality and use the new understanding to improve the predictive power of IQA models. Human behavioral categorization performance is powerful and essential for visual tasks. However, little is known about the impact of natural scene categories (SCs) on perceived image quality. We hypothesize that different classes of natural scenes influence image quality perception—how image quality is perceived is not only affected by the lower level image statistics and image structures shared between different categories but also by the semantic distinctions between these categories. In this article, we first design and conduct a fully controlled psychovisual experiment to verify our hypothesis. Then, we propose a computational framework that integrates the natural SC-specific component into image quality prediction. Research demonstrates the importance and plausibility of considering natural SCs in future IQA databases and models.

Acanthaster coral predator density in the Pulau Dua area, Aceh Selatan

The crown of thorns starfish is one of the main threats to damage to coral reefs worldwide. Research on Acanthaster coral predator density in the Pulau Dua area, South Aceh district, has been carried out in March 2021, using the Line Intercept Transect (LIT) method. The results showed that the density Acanthaster planci obtained 42 individuals/12.000m2 with natural criteria. Corals fractures can support the life of Acanthaster planci substrate conditions dominated by coral fractures. It can also grow thread algae (Coraline) and encrusting algae, which will then be eaten by Acanthaster planci which are still in the larval stage. This research concludes that the density of Acanthaster planci obtained is still in the natural category with coral reef conditions including good criteria.

The importance of ecological validity, ultimate causation, and natural categories.

The target article raises important questions about the applicability of experimental social psychology research on topics with policy implications. This commentary focuses on the importance of attending to a variety of factors to improve ecological validity as well as considering the ultimate factors shaping behavior and the role of natural categories in the stability of stereotypes and their influence.

Protivrječnost građanskog i etničkog u Dejtonskom sporazumu

The subject of our analysis is the civic and ethnic component in the Dayton Agreement, which we will consider, first as separate categories and then as their interplay and contradictory outcomes of their permeation. The methodical approach to the topic of our analysis implies several aspects such as historical, formal-legal, legal-dogmatic, as well as the content analysis and comparative approach. The results of our analysis should show us whether the coexistence of the ethnic and the civic is possible, what processes occur during their relationship and what the ultimate outcome is in terms of influence on the political system of BiH. The analysis of this topic should lead us to the realization of whether the ethnic and the civic are natural categories characteristic of BiH, which derive from its historical heritage, or the categories imposed by the international factors.