Hierarchy Of Relations Research Articles

Social networks of pregnant gilts during outdoor feeding and the effects on their offspring

Social relationships are important aspects of the behavioural biology of pigs and can be affected by the type of housing pigs are kept in. Exploring agonistic interactions and affiliative behaviours can reveal effects on adult pigs and their descendants. This research investigated the social dynamics among gilts throughout pregnancy during collective feeding in an outdoor housing system and the effects of these dynamics on the stability of the group and the offspring of the group members. For this study, 15 gilts were oestrus synchronised and artificially inseminated with three different semen pools. The paddocks where the gilts were housed contained a mud pool, natural tree shade, and two nipple drinkers. Two daily meals (∼2.5 kg/day/gilt) were provided to the group on the floor. Feeding behaviour was recorded for three continuous days (20 min in the morning and again in the afternoon) every gestational (a total of 42 h of video recording). Saliva samples were collected at 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. on these same days. A trained observer evaluated all the videos using Boris software to determine agonistic and affiliative behaviours. After farrowing, the piglet data collected included sex, mortality, and body weight (BW) at 10, 25, 29, and 36 d of age. Elo scores were calculated to quantify the relative hierarchy among the gilts based on the behaviour assessment. Generalised linear mixed models (GLMMs) were used for data analyses, and the significance of fixed effects was determined at p < 0.05. The tendency of the gilts to feed together decreased as gestation progressed. Heavier gilts had lower salivary cortisol concentrations, and higher gilt rank was correlated with higher morning salivary cortisol concentrations and heavier piglets. Maternal modulation of offspring performance in pigs warrant further investigation. Assessment of gilts' social feeding behaviours is relevant for considering pigs' behaviour in genetic selection and improving commercial facilities and management practices to improve animal welfare.

Mechatronic technological system based on CNC and intelligent mechatronic mechanism

A mechatronic technological system (MTS) has been developed. It consisting of a CNC metal-cutting machine tool and a mechatronic spindle, made on the basis of an intelligent mechatronic mechanism (IMM). The main elements of the technological system – the CNC and IMM devices – are parts of a single hierarchical, two-level control system, representing, respectively, the upper and lower control levels in this system. The upper control level – the CNC device – ensures stabilization of the kinematic parameters of machining (displacement, speed, acceleration) and their software change in accordance with the CNC control program. The lower control level – the IMM device – ensures stabilization of the power parameters of mechanical machining (cutting axial force and torque) and their software change in accordance with the technological requirements for the surface quality and the physical-and-mechanical state of the surface layer of the machined parts. At both control levels (the upper and lower ones), closed automatic control systems “by deviation” of the adjustable kinematic (upper control level) and power (lower control level) parameters of mechanical machining are functioning. Moreover, the automatic control system of the lower control level of the hierarchy in relation to a similar automatic control system of the upper control level, implements the method of automatic control “by disturbance”. This, in addition to directly ensuring surface finish and surface integrity, allows improving the quality of stabilization of kinematic cutting parameters at the upper control level. Experimental studies of MTS were carried out when machining parts from various materials (steel, polymer composite materials, superhard crystals and stones, other difficult-to-machine materials).

Application of multi index comprehensive evaluation method in the selection of wastewater treatment processes

The study comprehensively evaluates various wastewater treatment processes by using Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to identify the optimal method for wastewater treatment. To conduct this evaluation, six key indicators were identified and used for assessment: five-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD5) removal rate, chemical oxygen demand (COD) removal rate, ammonia nitrogen removal rate, total nitrogen removal rate, total phosphorus removal rate, and suspended solid removal rate. Initially, GRA was employed to calculate the grey relational degree of each treatment process based on the weights of the indicators, and the treatment processes were then ranked and analyzed according to these degrees. Subsequently, AHP was applied to construct a judgment matrix, determine the weights of each indicator, and ensure the matrix's rationality through consistency testing. The study reveals significant differences in the performance of various wastewater treatment processes among the indicators, with the Modified A2/O+AO process showing the highest comprehensive performance in the evaluation. The findings provide a scientific basis for improving efficiency, reducing pollution, and guiding policy and technological development.

Rights-based policies for role-bearing people: Are geo-cultural norms a hindrance to cultivating safer sport?

Many (inter)national governments and sports organisations are implementing standardised Safe Sport policies and guidelines. However, the Western-born, rights-based norm that underlies Safe Sport can collide with pre-existing geo-sociocultural norms of local contexts. Drawing from a case study of South Korea's elite sport pathway where tightened regulations on abuse challenge the long-lasting relational hierarchy based on Confucianism, this paper examines how athletes and coaches manoeuvre within the fast-changing social order shaped by the new safeguarding policies and practices. Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with 48 participants around two Elite Sports Schools, the paper shows that the rights-based norm integral to Safe Sport is sifted through the Confucian hierarchy, generating two main shifts respectively in coaches’ roles (from caring disciplinarians to professional service providers) and senior athletes’ (from potential abusers to benevolent superiors). That is, individual actors re-script their relational template by negotiating between the familiar and new relational ethics. From this, the paper suggests that Safe Sport is not a straightforward process of modernising less advanced practices up to a certain standard; it requires understanding how individuals make sense of the process in their own socio-cultural contexts.

African Cosmology, Hierarchies of Power, and Slave Dynamics in the Book of Philemon

Past scholarship on Philemon has reiterated the cultural and institutional power of slavery with particular attention to the acceptance and use of slavery as an important instrument of control and domination. Working within this scholarship, the present work acknowledges the centrality of the preceding thesis, but engages the letter to Philemon from the perspective of the inherent cosmology which accepted the master/slave hierarchical structure within a religious framework in explaining human/divine encounters, and encounters among human beings. Since African cosmology exhibits interesting points of continuity with this projected cosmology, this paper charts a new direction for studies in Philemon by reiterating the critical importance of this hierarchy of power relations in the master/slave model at the heart of the letter. It is this accepted worldview that prevented Paul from advocating for the freedom of Onesimus, and called for the double imprisonments of Onesimus. Consequently, the study interrogates the cosmology of Philemon in connection to African divine/human encounters by problematizing the description of God as Master, and the devotees as the helpless slaves of the deity. This cultural mindset naturally accepts slavery and normalizes human/divine encounters within the rhetoric of this dehumanizing enterprise.

Study on the changing patterns of production performance of laying hens and their relationships with environmental factors in a large-scale henhouse

The production performance of laying hens is influenced by various environmental factors within the henhouse. The intricate interactions among these factors make the impact process highly complicated. The exact relationships between production performance and environmental variables are still not well understood. In this study, we measured the production performance of laying hens and various environmental variables across different parts of the henhouse, evaluated the weight of each environmental variable, and constructed a laying rate prediction model. Results displayed that body weight, laying rate, egg weight and eggshell thickness of hens decrease gradually from WCA to FA (P < 0.05). Serum levels of FSH and LH, as well as antibody level of H5 Re-13, gradually decrease from WCA to FA (P < 0.05). Moreover, the values for temperature (T), temperature-humidity index (THI), air velocity (AV), carbon dioxide (CO2), and particulate matter (PM2.5) gradually increase from WCA to FA (P < 0.05). Conversely, the relative humidity (RH) value gradually decreases from FA to WCA (P < 0.05). Additionally, the weights of the environmental variables, determined using a combination of the grey relational analysis (GRA) and analytic hierarchy process (AHP), were as follows in descending order: RH, THI, T, light intensity (LI), AV, PM2.5, NH3, and CO2. When the number of decision trees in the laying rate prediction model was set to 2,500, the results displayed a high level of agreement between the model's predictions and the observed outcomes. The model's performance evaluation yielded an R2 value of 0.89995 for the test set, suggesting strong predictive effects. In conclusion, the current study revealed significant differences in both the production performance of laying hens and the environmental variables across different parts of the henhouse. Furthermore, the study demonstrated that different environmental factors have distinct impacts on laying rate, with humidity and temperature identified as the primary factors. Finally, a multi-variable prediction model was constructed, exhibiting high accuracy in predicting laying rate.

When social hierarchy matters grammatically: Investigation of the processing of honorifics in Korean

Korean grammar encodes relative social hierarchies among interlocutors in various ways. This study utilized honorific subject-verb agreement in Korean to investigate how social hierarchies are processed during sentence comprehension. The experimental results showed that honorific violations elicited processing difficulties. The use of an honorific verb with an unhonorifiable subject resulted in lower naturalness ratings, longer reading times, and elicited a P600, similar to effects observed with number, person, and gender agreement in Spanish or English. These findings suggest that social hierarchies have become integrated into grammar, constraining how native Korean speakers process sentences. However, the agreement between honorific subjects and verbs seems asymmetrical; the mismatch effect was smaller or absent when an honorifiable subject was not accompanied by an honorific verb, suggesting that while an honorific verb requires an honorifiable subject, the reverse is not necessarily true. The results indicate that the -si agreement in Korean is a form of morpho-syntactic agreement, despite its asymmetrical nature.

Escape from the periphery. World-system of cinema and Polish film

The main aim of this text is to outline the possibilities of applying Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory to the analysis of cinema. Concepts developed by Wallerstein, especially the notion of the relationship between the core and the periphery of international political-economic systems, can be useful in trying the hegemony of Hollywood cinema in the global circulation of film content, as well as the positions smaller film industries occupy in relation to it. The assumptions of this theory will be tested using the example of the cinema of Central and Eastern Europe in recent decades, making it possible to determine its relative hierarchy in the global chain of production and consumption of audiovisual content. Special attention has been focused on Poland, presented as a model example of a local film industry attempting to emerge from the peripheral position it occupied after the political transformation of 1989.

From Paso del Norte to the Borderplex: Labor Devaluation, Bordering, and the Remaking of Uneven Development in the US–Mexico Borderlands

Based on over two years of ethnographic research in the US–Mexico borderlands, this article examines how regional economic development actors work to position the border region as a competitive node in the global economy. In the context of the economic uncertainty generated by recent political and economic restructuring, like the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, actors deploy discourses of regionalism and practices of regional integration as part of an economic development strategy designed to foment both economic recovery and competitiveness. I argue that central to their efforts to promote a modern, seamlessly integrated binational border region to interested investors and employers is the maquiladora model of economic development. This is an economic development model built on (1) the long-term devaluation of industrial labor and (2) the active maintenance of the geopolitical border itself, as an institution reproductive of the racialized (and relational) hierarchies of value that underwrite the border region’s competitiveness. Engaging insights on capitalism’s uneven development from feminist economic geography and contributions from border studies, I suggest that an empirical engagement with the US–Mexico borderlands expands our geographic imagination of where, and how, racialized devaluation happens. Ultimately, taking regional actors and their economic development strategies and imaginaries seriously illuminates their ongoing importance in shaping regional economic trajectories, and therefore the well-being of border communities, now, and in the future.

Understanding the Thermodynamics of Magnesium Binding to RNA Structural Motifs.

Divalent magnesium ions (Mg2+) serve a vital role in defining the structural and catalytic chemistry of a wide array of RNA molecules. The body of structural information on RNA motifs continues to expand and, in turn, the functional importance of Mg2+ is revealed. A combination of prior work on the structural characterization of magnesium binding ligands with inner- and outer-sphere coordination modes, with recorded experimental binding energies for inner- and outer-sphere contacts, demonstrates the relative affinity and thermodynamic hierarchy for these sites. In turn, these can be correlated with cellular concentrations of free available magnesium ions, allowing the prioritization of populating important functional sites and a correlation with physiological function. This paper summarizes some of the key results of that analysis and provides predictive rules for the affinity and role of newly identified Mg binding sites on complex RNA structures. The influence of crystal packing on magnesium binding to RNA motifs, relative to their solution form, is addressed and caveats made.

Development of a New Method for Assessing Project Risks in Sustainable Building Construction Projects in Developing Countries: The Case of Jordan

Sustainable buildings contribute significantly to achieving sustainable development and provide many benefits. However, sustainable building construction projects are riskier than traditional construction projects. Thus, this research aimed to identify and assess the risks in sustainable construction projects in Jordan based on their probabilities of occurrence and impacts on time and cost. For this purpose, a literature review and structured interviews were performed to identify the risks. Additionally, questionnaire surveys were conducted, and the relative relevance index and analytic hierarchy process were utilized to assess the probabilities and impacts of these risks on time and cost. After that, a focus group discussion was conducted. According to the the risks’ probability and impacts on time and cost, the top-scoring risks include changes to the original design, budgeting inaccuracies owing to a lack of experience with sustainable building projects, additional costs incurred as a result of the use of sustainable building construction materials and equipment, inadequate or inaccurate sustainable design information, insufficient funds from clients, inadequate project planning for a sustainable building project, a tight project schedule for a sustainable building project, and insufficient identification of sustainable construction’s scope. This research contributes to the body of knowledge and practice by providing a novel integrated method for assessing risks in sustainable building construction projects in Jordan.

STRATEGY FOR ELIMINATING CORRUPTION THREATS TO UKRAINE'S NATIONAL SECURITY

The article reveals the strategy for elimination of corruption threats to national security. It is a system of knowledge about legal and organisational measures aimed at ensuring the supremacy of human virtues in public-legal relations at a level that excludes both potential and real threats to human rights, territorial integrity, safe living conditions of citizens and other constitutional values. It is a molar set, the content capacity of which is divided into at least two atomic units – legal norms and the implementation of legal norms. Taken together, both components of the strategy are capable of ensuring the preservation of these values and the development of the nation on this basis on an ongoing basis. The first component is intended to cover the content of legal relations. The second component involves the practical implementation of legal norms. These two variables equally saturate the functional and structural content of the security of national interests. Accordingly, the security of the nation exists only under the condition of the implementation of law-making and law-enforcement operations, which is possible only at the level of the institutionalisation of these processes. Any replacement of an institution by a person, of public interest by private interest, of law by its visibility, of freedom by force, determines the operational and/or strategic dysfunction of law, which leads to the loss of meaningful national values. It is determined that the hierarchy of initial relations of key concepts for understanding corruption distortions, the essential content of national interests and the relationship of corruption acts with the level of threats to Ukraine's national security form the ontological basis of the strategy for eliminating such threats. This basis should also include the principles of its creation, updating, implementation and monitoring of effectiveness. This is the introductory part of the strategy. In the substantive part of the strategy, it is necessary to specify the goal, tasks and areas of national interests, as well as the subjects of its implementation, effectiveness control and renewal. These subjects include all public authorities, civil organisations and each citizen. The main responsibility for the effectiveness of this approach lies not only with specialised anti-corruption bodies, but necessarily with all national public authorities. It is emphasised that there will be a system of control over such performers within the already existing infrastructure of public authorities and with detailed rules on the limits of control by citizens, the legal possibilities of which should be wide enough to ensure that this control remains an effective tool for ensuring the provisions of the specified strategy, including the possibility for citizens to use legal procedures of vigilantism. Separate sections of this strategy should be devoted to detailed rules for strengthening national security through transnational connections and digital technological resources. The secret part of the strategy should contain rules for using the nation's permanent and situational advantages, its individual features and other resources at a particular moment in time, as well as in the short, medium and long term. This part should also reflect the algorithms for determining the nature and qualities of these advantages, timely verification of their emergence and transformation. The author establishes that all these rules and algorithms should be combined with the rules for determining the changing nature of corruption acts and corruption subjects and their criminal accomplices.

IBPGNET: lung adenocarcinoma recurrence prediction based on neural network interpretability.

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) is the most common histologic subtype of lung cancer. Early-stage patients have a 30-50% probability of metastatic recurrence after surgical treatment. Here, we propose a new computational framework, Interpretable Biological Pathway Graph Neural Networks (IBPGNET), based on pathway hierarchy relationships to predict LUAD recurrence and explore the internal regulatory mechanisms of LUAD. IBPGNET can integrate different omics data efficiently and provide global interpretability. In addition, our experimental results show that IBPGNET outperforms other classification methods in 5-fold cross-validation. IBPGNET identified PSMC1 and PSMD11 as genes associated with LUAD recurrence, and their expression levels were significantly higher in LUAD cells than in normal cells. The knockdown of PSMC1 and PSMD11 in LUAD cells increased their sensitivity to afatinib and decreased cell migration, invasion and proliferation. In addition, the cells showed significantly lower EGFR expression, indicating that PSMC1 and PSMD11 may mediate therapeutic sensitivity through EGFR expression.

From zen to stigma: Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and their cross‐cultural links to mental health

AbstractStigma remains a significant barrier preventing individuals from seeking the support they need, particularly for individuals with East Asian heritages. To explore potential mechanisms, this study examined links from East Asian ideologies to mental health help‐seeking attitudes and peace of mind across five cultural groups: 322 respondents in China, 400 in Japan, 362 in Taiwan, 319 Asian Americans, and 688 white Americans. The three teachings of East Asia accounted for 31%–85% of the cross‐cultural differences in mental health attitudes and peace of mind. Empowering Confucian tenets (self‐cultivation, leading by example, and human heartedness), Taoism, and Buddhism all uniquely predicted greater peace of mind across most of the groups. Empowering Confucianism also predicted lower mental health stigma whereas Buddhism predicted greater stigma. Finally, Restrictive Confucian tenets (e.g., interpersonal harmony, propriety, and relational hierarchy) predicted greater stigma and lower peace of mind. Implications for addressing stigma/resistance within treatment and for promoting mental health across cultures are discussed.

Hierarchy of demographic and social determinants of mental health: analysis of cross-sectional survey data from the Global Mind Project

ObjectivesTo understand the extent to which various demographic and social determinants predict mental health status and their relative hierarchy of predictive power in order to prioritise and develop population-based preventative...

Competition in the Complementation of Old English Control Verbs with Oblique Marking: A Corpus Analysis

The aim of this article is to explain the syntactic competition found in the complementation of Old English Prevent verbs. The competition on argumenthood involves linked verbal predications and linked nominal predications. Evidence is gathered for continuity both between finite and non-finite linked verbal predications as well as between non-finite and nominalised linked predications. This evidence points to a diachronic development: finite clause &gt; non-finite clause &gt; nominalisation. The main conclusion of the article is that the Interclausal Relation Hierarchy predicts the replacement of the finite clause complementation with non-finite clause complementation in such a way that the syntactically tighter noun phrase involving a deverbal nominalisation constitutes the next step of syntactic development.

The evolution and transformation of youth entrepreneurship in China: a sociological analysis

The purpose of the article is to conduct a socio-historical study of the evolution and stages of the formation of youth entrepreneurship in China. The main problem is to identify and characterize the evolution and patterns that reveal the entrepreneurship of Chinese youth as a market mechanism that successfully functions in the conditions of the socialist economy of China. The object of the study is the entrepreneurial activity of young Chinese people. The subject of the study is the systematization of the stages of formation of youth entrepreneurship in various periods of transformation of Chinese society. The sources of information are scientific research carried out by Russian and Chinese researchers, as well as researchers from other countries. A comprehensive analysis of the sociodynamics of the development of youth entrepreneurship in China allows us to thoroughly and objectively identify and characterize the main systemic connections of this social phenomenon. The research methodology assumes a socio-historical analysis of the stages of the formation of youth entrepreneurship in China. A generalized analysis of the significant dependence of youth entrepreneurship on the general trends in the development of entrepreneurship in China as a social institution and the need for significant regulatory, organizational, educational efforts on the part of society and the state for its formation, maintenance and development is carried out. It is shown that at the stage of transition of Chinese society from subsistence farming to a planned economy (1945-1950), youth entrepreneurship was mainly spontaneous, non-institutional in nature and manifested itself as facts of entrepreneurial activity of individuals. The patriarchal way of life and rigid hierarchies of relations did not contribute to the development of entrepreneurial initiative of young people. At the second stage, in the process of transition to an industrial society (1951-1966), the centralization of the economy is increasing, and the main areas of activity of Chinese youth are directed to the political sphere, to the detriment of entrepreneurial initiatives in the economy. The third stage, the transition to an open society (1967-1978), is characterized by changes in the understanding of the political role of youth in society, the era after the Cultural Revolution laid the foundation for recognizing the important role of market foundations and youth entrepreneurship in the subsequent stages of China's development. The transition to a legal society (the fourth stage of the "Four Modernizations", after 1978), gives impetus to the development of youth entrepreneurship in China.

Scaling Package Queries to a Billion Tuples via Hierarchical Partitioning and Customized Optimization

A package query returns a package---a multiset of tuples---that maximizes or minimizes a linear objective function subject to linear constraints, thereby enabling in-database decision support. Prior work has established the equivalence of package queries to Integer Linear Programs (ILPs) and developed the SketchRefine algorithm for package query processing. While this algorithm was an important first step toward supporting prescriptive analytics scalably inside a relational database, it struggles when the data size grows beyond a few hundred million tuples or when the constraints become very tight. In this paper, we present Progressive Shading, a novel algorithm for processing package queries that can scale efficiently to billions of tuples and gracefully handle tight constraints. Progressive Shading solves a sequence of optimization problems over a hierarchy of relations, each resulting from an ever-finer partitioning of the original tuples into homogeneous groups until the original relation is obtained. This strategy avoids the premature discarding of high-quality tuples that can occur with SketchRefine. Our novel partitioning scheme, Dynamic Low Variance, can handle very large relations with multiple attributes and can dynamically adapt to both concentrated and spread-out sets of attribute values, provably outperforming traditional partitioning schemes such as kd-tree. We further optimize our system by replacing our off-the-shelf optimization software with customized ILP and LP solvers, called Dual Reducer and Parallel Dual Simplex respectively, that are highly accurate and orders of magnitude faster.

Mutual Perceptions and China-South Korea Relations: A Comparative Study of the Academic Literature

How do China and South Korea see their relationship after 30 years of normalization, and why have views shifted since 2017? Research on perceptions and their foreign policy implications usually draws from offcial discourse and public opinion. This review essay assesses the nature and drivers of China-South Korea mutual perceptions by comparing their academic literature on bilateral relations. Scholarly accounts may offer longer-term interpretations of specialized interests, and a fuller picture of how and why views vary. On both sides of the China-South Korea academic debate, the quantitative volume of studies and qualitative appraisal of relations declined in the 2017???2021 Xi Jinping-Moon Jae-in period. Levels of optimism/pessimism vary by issue-area. Views of third-party constraints on security relations, and domestic political influences on societal relations, drive mutual pessimism. Koreans are more pessimistic about the economic partnership and reassess historical relations more unfavourably, which trace back to views of relative dependence and hierarchy. Three implications emerge for post-2022 relations in light of leadership transition in Beijing and Seoul. Enduring security priorities require minimum strategic interdependence and stronger trust-building mechanisms. Positive functional spillovers from economic and local/nonstate cooperation remain in question. And lasting cultural costs of political disputes compel joint efforts to enhance mutual understanding. Overall, shifts in structural and ideational factors that historically drove normalization are driving the current discord, and prompting both sides to lower future expectations of each other.

The image of male / female artist in Ukrainian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in the gender aspect

The study examines gender issues in the works of Ukrainian writers on the border of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose main heroes and heroines are representatives of art. In the dramaturgical works of this time, due to the departure from the social issues, the problems of gender equality and the possibility of choosing their life path by women actresses are intensified. This topic today remains an almost unexplored in scientific works, which determines the relevance and scientific novelty of our article. The purpose of the study is to consider the processes of modernization of Ukrainian literature in the context of gender and feminist issues, as well as to analyze the peculiarities of writers’ interpretation of images of artists in prose and drama using general scientific approaches and comparative typological method. The research results allows to state that such writers as O. Konisky and H. Khotkevych seek to reveal the peculiarities of the worldview of their characters. At the same time, the attitude of the heroes towards the female gender is traditional, the chosen ones of the musicians – main literary personages – should be female associates who fully support the lofty thoughts and deeds of their husbands. Actors and actresses in the plays by M. Starytsky and I. Karpenko-Kary raise the most difficult issues of family life, fidelity and betrayal of wives and husbands in marriage, life in a civil marriage and others that continue to be relevant in our time. L. Starytska Cherniakhivska, Lesia Ukrainka and O. Kobylianska, going beyond gender issues in the direction of feminist views, transfer the emphasis in their plays and short prose to the tragedy of a talented woman who devoted herself to art. Thus, Ukrainian writers of the studied period considered in sufficient detail the problem of gender relations in their modern society, in particular, the issue of family betrayal in its interpretation by representatives of the opposite sexes, and built a kind of hierarchy of relations between women and men.