New Line Of Inquiry Research Articles

Interlocutors’ judgment of Lx conventional expressions: An exploratory study

Abstract The present study is a perception study that investigates how French L1 speakers evaluate the speech produced by advanced French Lx users that deviates from the pragmatic norms of the local community. More specifically, this exploratory study investigates how conventional expressions that displayed pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic deviances affected the raters’ (N = 62) evaluation of perceived communicative effectiveness and perceived likeability of the speakers in imagined intercultural encounters. Results from the study revealed that deviances were generally judged more severely on both evaluative dimensions than the target conventional expressions. Interestingly, however, findings also showed that deviances that partly included the pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic resources preferred by target community members were evaluated positively. Methodological recommendations to pursue this new line of inquiry in the field of intercultural pragmatics are also discussed.

Of Climate Change, Quantum Physics and Causation: Is it Time for a Probabilistic Approach to Causation in Tort Law?

To date, the requirement that a plaintiff prove causation has hampered the success of tort-based claims against corporate greenhouse gas emitters. The need for an alternative approach to causation is clear. In recent years, courts and academics have engaged with the task of finding viable alternatives to the dominant "but for" test for causation. This article adds to that endeavour by proposing a new line of inquiry, grounded in approaches to causation that have emerged in scientific disciplines. It argues that the demise of deterministic theories of causation in science, and the rise of indeterministic and probabilistic alternatives, could be of interest to lawyers seeking a new approach to causation in law that is better tailored to the challenges of climate change. The article contends that courts' rigid application of the "but for" test is rooted in a Newtonian assumption that all things have a determinate cause. It advocates instead for a probabilistic approach, drawing on Fairchild v Glenhaven Funeral Services Ltd as evidence of its feasibility. Such an approach, it is argued, creates a real prospect of success for climate change litigants.

Asymmetric architecture in nests and nature

Satisfying natural symmetries surround us – in snowflakes, starfish and butterfly wings. And our fondness for mirror images is also reflected in the design of exquisitely balanced buildings, such as the Taj Mahal and the White House. Asymmetries, however, also abound across many living things. Male fiddler crabs bear two claws that are starkly different in size, the larger of which they use to fight and flirt. Within flatfish, winter flounder host eyes on their right side while summer flounder have eyes on their left. Perhaps closer to home, differences between our left and right sides are the reason your left-handed friend struggles to operate that can-opener. To examine why asymmetries are so abundant in nature, Nicolas Adreani and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Germany, observed the nest architecture of red ovenbirds (Furnarius rufus).Red ovenbirds are native year-round to eastern South America, inhabiting open habitats, including urban areas where they build remarkable domed nests resembling old adobe wood-fired ovens made from mud, straw and dung, featuring entrances that face either left or right. As these birds are cultural icons in each of the five South American countries where they are found, most inhabitants can recognize these large thick clay ‘oven’ nests, which appear on trees or man-made structures such as fenceposts and buildings. Taking advantage of this widespread recognition, Adreani and colleagues released a free multilingual smartphone app and recruited over 1200 citizen scientists from Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay through social media platforms. This team of citizen scientists – over 400 of whom are listed as co-authors – collected information about <12,500 nests spanning the bird's entire distribution. For each nest, the app provided the volunteers with an 8-step survey, collecting photos and information on nest location (automatic GPS coordinates), height above ground, whether the nest was covered or uncovered, and whether it was built on a natural or artificial structure. They also logged whether the nest was in a natural, rural or urban location, which direction the entrance was pointing, and whether the entrance was on the right or left side of the nest, which they referred to as ‘asymmetry type’.With this information in hand, the authors found that nest asymmetry did not occur randomly, since there were 12% more right-entrance nests than left-handed nests. However, from the environmental data collected by volunteers, the scientists concluded that these factors alone could not explain the occurrence of either right- or left-leaning nests. Next, they set out to determine whether there was a genetic component that could explain the nest asymmetry.Ovenbirds typically work together for 2–3 months to build their annual nest. Since they tend not to reuse the nests in the following years, it's common to see several nests clustered close together within a single territory, sometimes even one on top of the other! As these birds are monogamous, nests that were in close proximity within a territory and showed up on a single photo were likely to have been produced by one couple. The team measured how often right- and left-sided nests occurred in a territory and used that information to calculate the chance that couples built nests with the same asymmetries. They found that the pairs tended to build nests with the same sidedness, hinting at either a cultural or inherited basis for this behaviour. This discovery opens a whole new line of inquiry that could unravel an underlying genetic component for asymmetric architecture in nests and nature.

Federico Fellini (1920–2020), special issue of Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, vol 9, no. 1, 2021

Federico Fellini (1920–2020), special issue of <i>Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies,</i> vol 9, no. 1, 2021

Detached but not deviant: the impact of career expectations and job crafting on the dysfunctional effects of amotivation

PurposeThis study aims to investigate the link between amotivation and workplace deviance. The authors further outlined how the relationship between amotivation and deviant behavior can be mitigated via proactive work strategies such as job crafting and career outcome expectations.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a convergent design, mixed-method study to investigate workplace deviance as an outcome of amotivation or the lack of motivation towards an activity. The quantitative data from cross-sectional surveys entailed 127 respondents. The qualitative data comprised of 25 in-depth interviews. The authors sought insights from individuals' lived experiences to understand how amotivated individuals behave at work.FindingsThe quantitative findings contended a significant relationship between amotivation and organizational deviance. The authors also found evidence for the buffering role of career outcome expectations on amotivation and deviance. Finally, avoidance job crafting has been shown to significantly attenuate the aforementioned relationship. The qualitative study identified three broader themes about amotivated individuals' work outcomes.Practical implicationsAmotivation can arise among individuals who feel trapped in a job they want to exit and can result in a range of dysfunctional outcomes including workplace deviance. While amotivated employees may be hard to flag, employers can keep such individuals from demonstrating workplace deviance through placing interventions such as job crafting and career development programs.Originality/valueThe existing literature on work motivation has predominantly overlooked the role of amotivation in determining employee outcomes. The current research generates a new line of inquiry by identifying workplace deviance as an outcome of amotivation. The authors further highlighted that such dysfunctional outcomes of amotivation can be mitigated by job crafting and career outcomes expectancies.

A deep analysis of the image and video processing techniques using nanoscale quantum-dots cellular automata

The advancement of small electrical components into the nanoscale range opens up opportunities for massively parallel computing systems. Quantum-dot Cellular Automata (QCA) is a potential novel nanoelectronics technique that fits image processing requirements well. QCA circuits are typically highly stable, quick, and utilize little energy. Because studies about QCA logic image processing are starting up, the suggested contribution will initiate a new line of inquiry in the real-time video and image processing domain. Noise reduction, face identification, feature extraction, segmentation, skeletonizing, thickening, thinning, object detection, form extraction, and tracking are all examples of image processing. This article describes how to use QCA technology for image processing in various ways. The fundamentals of image processing approaches and the function of QCA in them are covered. The findings demonstrate that a more effective layout based on QCA technology would reduce power consumption and computational complexity in the long run. We anticipate that this compendium will give readers an overview of the advances made in quantum image processing and pique their curiosity in doing a more complex investigation in the field.

From Incunabula to Book History: Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Search for their Printed Past

The history of the printed book in Africa is a relatively new line of inquiry. One of the most challenging issues confronting its practitioners will be to produce authoritative and comprehensive records of the national output of African countries, an essential prerequisite before venturing into more complex analysis. In this panorama, Eritrea and Ethiopia seem to represent two happy exceptions: the pioneering work of Ḫǝruy Wäldä Śǝllase, Stephen Wright’s Ethiopian Incunabula and then the supplements by Stefan Strelcyn, Osvaldo Raineri, and Kibrom Tseggai have allowed for the reconstruction of large sections of the print production of the two countries. This article maps out the cultural and political context in which the attention for Ethiopian incunabula emerged and traces the stages of the collective effort that has allowed the preservation of the traces of the early printed documentation in Eritrea and Ethiopia. The article argues that there are still significant margins of improvement in the retrospective coverage of the history of the printed book in Africa, especially since the arrival of digital technologies and the Internet that have offered a very effective set of tools for solving some of the problems that have plagued African retrospective national bibliographies since their inception.

Sharing Collections and Sharing Stories

AbstractAs archaeology has evolved, partnerships between private collectors and archaeologists have ebbed and flowed. This article contributes to a growing body of work dedicated to recognizing the contributions of the collecting community, with a focus on maintaining reciprocal models for long-term collaborations. This research article argues that for these collaborative efforts to progress, archaeologists must operate through an archaeological ethnographic lens that fosters work in partnership and generative dialogues. Utilizing ethics from the Society for American Archaeology's “Statement on Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past” (Society for American Archaeology 2018), an undergraduate student and private collector partnered to retroactively document an artifact collection collected over 60 years in Colorado's San Luis Valley. This article is distinct, however, in that it centers the research methods, offering a pragmatic example of utilizing an archaeological ethnographic framework alongside collaborative inquiry and oral history methodologies. The partnership cultivated within the research team opened a new line of inquiry into the collector's past collaborations with professionals, revealing a variety of informative and illuminating stories. As the academic discourse widens, incorporating such stories into the canon will improve collaborations and foster networks of partners to create sustainable long-term collaborations that ultimately lead to greater understanding of and care for the material past.

Rival or comrade? A systematic review and conceptual framework of when and why the powerful act prosocially or antisocially towards each other

AbstractWe present a systematic review of the literature on power and its interpersonal consequences. Our review, comprising 339 studies published in 145 research articles, shows that this line of research has primarily examined how powerholders attend to and act towards powerless individuals, or others in general. We therefore know surprisingly little about how powerholders attend to and act towards other powerholders. To address this issue, we present a conceptual framework that outlines how an actor’s power interacts with a target’s power to influence prosocial and antisocial beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. We identify two routes in the literature detailing how powerholders respond to one another. First, building on rivalry literature, we present a competitive route suggesting that powerholders rival each other and engage in conflict. Second, building on social identity and social dominance literature, we present a harmonious route suggesting that powerful peers will show compassion and care for each other. Finally, we bring forth suggestions for how future research could test these two perspectives, by presenting moderators that determine when each of these two routes is activated. In doing so, we offer important implications for the power literature and open a new line of inquiry for future research.

Memetic rhetorical theory: an analytic model for the spread of information online

Modern discourse is often characterized by such extreme polarization that participants operate from entirely different sets of facts. These alternative facts represent a new line of inquiry for rhetoricians, who must determine how false facts gain credibility. This article outlines Memetic Rhetorical Theory (MRT), a model for understanding how information evolves to become credible in a given environment.

Co-occupation and co-constructed habits, routines, and sense of place: An argument for exploration of human-canine interaction

ABSTRACT Since its inception, occupational science has explored the phenomenon of humans doing together, including humans doing with other humans and with objects. However, it has yet to explore humans doing with animals. Given animals are living, sentient beings that have the potential to greatly impact human occupation, they cannot be equated to inanimate objects or simply viewed as part of the environment or context. The purpose of this article is to establish the relevance of human-animal interaction to occupational science and open a new line of inquiry and understanding of human-animal occupation. The paper provides background information about human-animal interaction and introduces the impact of canines on occupational engagement, habits, routines, and sense of place. An insight into how human-canine interaction may be reconceptualized as human-animal co-occupation is also presented. Finally, implications for the discipline are discussed. Given that this is a novel topic within the discipline, this paper introduces just some of the ways canines impact occupation.

Antecedents to heuristics: decoding the role of herding and prospect theory for Indian millennial investors

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how heuristics are formed and whether herding and prospect theory act as antecedents to heuristics. The relationship is explored specifically for millennials.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed relationship is explored specifically for millennials. Herding and prospect theory are modelled as antecedents to heuristics. The study uses survey data from 923 millennials from India to test the model for two financial products: equity and mutual funds. Regression analysis is used to evaluate the model.FindingsFindings support the role of herding and prospect theory as antecedents to heuristics of millennials although to varying degrees for equity and mutual fund investments. The impact of herding on heuristics is likely to be smaller for equity investments as compared to mutual fund investments.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings provide insights into how heuristics are formed for millennials. The findings add to literature by beginning a new line of inquiry on how heuristics are formed. Since the model is tested on a single generation, future research can test the model on other generations. In addition, future research can also add more antecedents to our proposed model.Practical implicationsFindings from this study can provide financial planners and marketers with an understanding of how heuristics are formed for millennials. Financial planners can use these insights while providing financial advice to this generation and marketers can use them to create more relevant outreach.Social implicationsFinancial investments are an important conduit for financial security. By understanding the cognitive processes that influence financial investment decision-making, it is possible for educators to create content appropriately and for financial planners to advise clients accordingly to enable optimal financial decisions that will be wealth-creating.Originality/valueExisting literature primarily treats heuristics, herding and prospect theory as being independent of each other. The authors take a novel approach to model the antecedents to heuristics to be herding and prospect theory. The model is tested on millennials for two financial products: equity and mutual funds.

The Surprising Resilience of Freud’s Libidinal Types and Their Influence on Leadership

ABSTRACT Freud’s Libidinal Types, first published in 1932, have been quietly informing the psychometric assessment of personality. So quietly, in fact, that it had to be rediscovered. Freud’s short work on normal personality types, published near the end of his life, was essentially a hypothesis, based on his life experience, but it was never formally tested or validated. This article is the story of how these seven types were independently rediscovered, expanded to cover conflict management, and applied to the practice of human development. Leaders who become more aware of their intrinsic motives and how those motives influence their use (and overuse) of strengths can improve the effectiveness of their leadership relationships. Furthermore, insight into these types brings a new line of inquiry to the creation, interpretation and communication of organizational purpose.

Partial dependence through stratification

Partial dependence curves (FPD) are commonly used to explain feature importance once a supervised learning model has been fitted to data. However, it is common for the same partial dependence algorithm to give meaningfully different curves for different supervised models, even when the algorithm is applied to the same data. As a result, it is difficult to distinguish between model artifacts and true relationships in the data. In this paper, we contribute metods for computing partial dependence curves, for both numerical (StratPD) and categorical explanatory variables (CatStratPD), that work directly from training data rather than the predictions of a fitted model. Our methods provide a direct estimate of partial dependence, and rely on approximating the partial derivative of an unknown regression function. We investigate settings where contemporary partial dependence methods – including FPD, Accumulated Local Effects (ALE), and SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) methods – give biased results. We demonstrate that our approach works correctly on synthetic data and plausibly on real data sets. This work motivates a new line of inquiry into nonparametric partial dependence that provides robust information about the variables considered in a supervised learning task.

The political signification of riots: A dispositive perspective on the 2011 England riots

This article suggests a new perspective on the political signification of riots, using the 2011 England riots as a case. The sociological literature tends to look for the political signification of riots in the riots themselves. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of the dispositive, the article develops a new approach that analyses the optical grids in which riots are made visible as objects for thought and action that can be either political or apolitical. By analysing the case of the 2011 England riots, the article shows how the dispositives that made the riots visible make it possible to ascribe a both obscure and radical political signification to the riots. The article opens up a new line of inquiry about the relation between riots and politics, and allows us to reconsider the political signification of riots.

Determining the effect of sertraline on nitrogen transformation through the microbial food web in sediments based on 15N-DNA-stable isotope probing

Antidepressants may influence the food web and alter the nitrogen cycle through top-down forces. However, the effect of antidepressants on the key nitrogen-using species in the benthic microbial food web remains unclear, particularly the resulting changes in the nitrogen transformation process within the microecosystems. Therefore, in this study, we employed DNA stable-isotope probing to detect nitrogen-converting organisms at various trophic levels and quantify the nitrogen transformation process for the first time. The input of sertraline greatly increased nitrogen-transforming microorganisms and promoted more species to participate in the nitrogen transformation process. 100 μg/L sertraline was observed to stimulate the predation of bacteria via protozoa and metazoan, increasing the total nitrogen flow flux through the microbial food web to 31.50%, 1.32 times that of the natural condition. The results confirm that at sertraline concentrations close to the lowest observable effect concentration in the meiobenthos (100 μg/L), key components in the microbial food web were largely interfered and exerted a long-term interference on the nutrient cycle in the river sediment ecosystem. These findings confirm that sertraline has negative effects on river ecosystems from the perspective of microbial food webs and open a new line of inquiry into assessing ecological risks of antidepressants.

Uncovering the nuances of criminal motivations andmodus operandiin the Russian Far East: A wildlife crime case study

Wildlife crime is a relatively new line of inquiry for scholars of criminology; traditionally it has been the purview of conservation science. However, as conservation is fundamentally about changing human behavior, the value of a criminological perspective to understand both the theoretical underpinnings of wildlife crime commission and practical mitigation strategies is being increasingly recognized. Based on an ethnographic case study on the poaching and trafficking of Amur tigers in the Russian Far East, this article reflects upon the use of criminological ethnographic methods to understand the complexity and subtleties of wildlife crime by directly interviewing the poachers, middlemen, buyers, and smugglers involved. The article seeks transparency on how qualitative methods can be successfully employed to engage in fieldwork with active criminals in peripheral settings.

Transnational Funds of Knowledge: A New Line of Inquiry into the Experience of Migrant Workers in South Korea

Transnational Funds of Knowledge: A New Line of Inquiry into the Experience of Migrant Workers in South Korea

Towards a Part-of-Speech (PoS) gram approach to academic writing: A case study of research introductions in different disciplines

This study innovatively applies the Part-of-Speech-gram (PoS-gram) procedure to the examination of language patterning and variability in a largely conventionalized part-genre (i.e., research introductions). Based on 400 article introductions from computer engineering (CE) and cognitive linguistics (CL), the study has identified key PoS-grams and their associated lexico-grammatical frames, using the written academic component of British National Corpus as the reference corpus. The analysis reveals key PoS-grams shared in CE and CL introductions, e.g., those associated with the step “purposive announcement”, as well as the discipline-specific ones such as the PoS-gram for structure-outlining only found in CE introductions. Compared to various forms of multi-word sequences like n-grams, the PoS-gram has the unique strength of grouping phraseologies with similar or identical structure and discursive functions and yet either recurrent or varying lexical choices under the co-selected grammatical categories. The advantage enriches analyses and helps yield pedagogically useful findings, in that patterning and variability is revealed not only in the overall function, structure and composition of PoS-grams but in such aspects of their recurrent or diversified tokens. This study illustrates the innovative application of corpus-based PoS-gram procedure to academic genres, which may inspire a promising new line of inquiry and the current genre pedagogy.

Virus Mechanics under Molecular Crowding.

Viruses avoid exposure of the viral genome to harmful agents with the help of a protective protein shell known as the capsid. A secondary effect of this protective barrier is that macromolecules that may be in high concentration on the outside cannot freely diffuse across it. Therefore, inside the cell and possibly even outside, the intact virus is generally under a state of osmotic stress. Viruses deal with this type of stress in various ways. In some cases, they might harness it for infection. However, the magnitude and influence of osmotic stress on virus physical properties remains virtually unexplored for single-stranded RNA viruses-the most abundant class of viruses. Here, we report on how a model system for the positive-sense RNA icosahedral viruses, brome mosaic virus (BMV), responds to osmotic pressure. Specifically, we study the mechanical properties and structural stability of BMV under controlled molecular crowding conditions. We show that BMV is mechanically reinforced under a small external osmotic pressure but starts to yield after a threshold pressure is reached. We explain this mechanochemical behavior as an effect of the molecular crowding on the entropy of the "breathing" fluctuation modes of the virus shell. The experimental results are consistent with the viral RNA imposing a small negative internal osmotic pressure that prestresses the capsid. Our findings add a new line of inquiry to be considered when addressing the mechanisms of viral disassembly inside the crowded environment of the cell.