114612 research outputs found
Sort by
Distribution in homology classes and discrete fractal dimension
Get PDFIn this note, we examine the proportion of periodic orbits of Anosov flows that lie in an infinite zero density subset of the first homology group. We show that on a logarithmic scale we get convergence to a discrete fractal dimension
Integrating home and international students in HE : academic and social effects of pair work PBL assignments online
Get PDFIntegration is vital to student well-being in higher education but integrating new students from different countries can be challenging. To ascertain students’ integration into their new environment, this mixed method study combined the data collected from weekly diary entries of home and international students at the start of one engineering program, with follow-up interviews. These students studied primarily online due to the pandemic. The diary entries focused on their adjustment to the program from an academic, social and pair work perspective. Results show that the students reacted slightly negatively to the academic experience but very positively to their pair work. It seems that the teacher-formed pair work helped to bridge the academic and social gap and not only alleviate some of the stress caused by assignments, but in some cases, provided new social contacts. The article concludes that structural factors within the course can facilitate interaction and thus support integration
Sociomateriality and open strategising in an organisational structural change context
Get PDFThrough the lenses of strategising and sociomaterial perspective, the goal of the study is to understand how people and tools are combined to favour (or not) open strategising, in a context of organisational structural change. Based on a qualitative case study we evidence the importance of the organisational structural change context in the connection between sociomateriality and open strategising. We reveal, through the sociomateriality lens, that human and non-human actors enable open strategising to be performed in such context as well as favour the practitioners to be promoters of openness and influencers of the open strategy level during an organisational change context. Our findings unveil the implications of sociomateriality for practitioners in the organisational change context considering the open strategising and expand our understanding about the mechanisms of the dynamics of open strategy
Comparing the influence of intellectual humility, religiosity, and political conservatism on vaccine attitudes in the U.S., Canada, and UK
Get PDFThree studies of USA, Canada, and UK respondents examined pro-vaccine attitudes as predicted by intellectual humility, belief in science, religiosity, and political attitudes. Intellectual humility (IH) refers to the capacity to understand limits of one’s own beliefs and showed strong relationship to pro-vaccine attitudes across samples. Pro-vaccine attitudes were correlated with Intellectual Humility and negatively correlated with political conservatism and religiosity. Regression models compared overlapping influences of belief predictors on vaccine attitudes. Across countries, IH was the most consistent predictor of pro-vaccine attitudes when controlling for other beliefs and thinking styles (political conservatism, belief in science, religiosity). In comparison, political conservatism was a significant predictor of vaccine attitudes in regression models on U.S. and Canadian respondents, and religiosity only held as a predictor in regression models in the U.S sample. We conclude with a discussion of intellectual humility as a predictor of vaccine attitudes and implications for research and persuasion
Farming to fighting : how shifting agricultural incomes only impact the most powerful rebel group
Get PDFRecent research into the relationship between agricultural income and conflict has revealed sub-national geographic variation in the relationship. But many governments fighting rebellion are involved in more than one conflict simultaneously. This paper engages in a sub-national analysis of Colombia, utilising data on coffee income and violence across two individual rebel groups, to argue that the relationship between shifts in agricultural income and conflict holds only for the strongest group in a conflict region. This is explained by considerations of opportunity cost, a proposition tested in an analysis of competing mechanisms. Results show strong support for the propositions
Price increases and their financial consequences in international Business-to-business selling
Get PDFAlthough price increases are common in business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets, research examining the consequences of price increases on financial performance outcomes in B2B contexts is scarce. This study takes a relationship perspective on price increases and examines how a portfolio price increase affects the financial performance of the customer relationship and whether and how this effect varies between international business customers from different cultures. Based on objective data from 966 international B2B customers of a chemical goods company, this study examines a large-scale field intervention. Results show that higher portfolio price increases, although rooted in an increase of upstream costs, have more severe harm to B2B customers’ sales revenue than lower portfolio price increases. These consequences vary with customers’ cultures as B2B customers with culture-specific communal norms are more susceptible to the magnitude of portfolio price increases than customers without such norms. International B2B companies, therefore, need to refrain from implementing uniform price increases and should consider their business customers’ cultural origin when designing and implementing price increases
A weakly supervised learning pipeline for profiled fibre inspection
Get PDFAutomatic profiled fibre recognition and analysis can accelerate quality inspection and contributes to the upgrade of the textile industry. However, these tasks often require significant manual effort to generate instance‐level annotations for fully supervised training. In this paper, the authors propose a weakly supervised pipeline for profiled fibre inspection using electron‐microscopic (EM) images with only image‐level annotations. It automatically identifies fibre instances and estimates shape factors to facilitate fibre quality inspection. As the core of the pipeline, the weakly supervised network (WesNet) is designed to localize hundreds of crowded fibre samples by raw patch generation and fibre sample sifting. Particularly, the composite similarity measurement integrates different patch‐wise similarities, enabling the network to distinguish fibre from background robustly. For quality inspection, the pipeline further analyzes the fibre instances, utilizing several efficient techniques to estimate the shape factors. Experiments on the real fibre electron‐microscopic images demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the pipeline. Results show that WesNet outperforms several supervised and weakly supervised methods, including two state‐of‐the‐art weakly supervised networks
Japan's 'three national security documents' and defense capabilities : reinforcing a radical military trajectory
No full textJapan’s government argues that its 2022 three national security documents are at the same time transformational and yet maintain overall continuity in military and security policy. This article through investigating pivotal aspects of the defense reforms—perceived threats and strategy, defense budgets, counterstrike doctrine and capabilities, first island chain defense, and domestic policy and public resolve for implementation—weighs the strength of arguments for essential continuity versus step change. It concludes that the three documents fundamentally change Japan’s exclusively defense-oriented policy and the division of labor in the U.S.-Japan alliance, further accelerate Japan’s radical military trajectory, and pose important implications for regional security
Vicarious coding : breaching computational opacity in the digital era
No full textDigital representations are ubiquitous in the workplace. Screen displays, forecasts, simulations, indicators, multi-dimensional models, figures, and images are increasingly central to work of all kinds. Representations are simultaneously transparent and opaque. They contain and reveal information about the organization. At the same time, they conceal the computational work used to convert data about the physical world into abstract depictions. Computational opacity is consequential when representations become misaligned with the physical world they depict. We examine how computational opacity can be breached, allowing non-programmers to repair misalignments between representations and the physical world. Drawing on an ethnography of a machine-shop floor, we show how operators develop practical computational literacy skills—the capacity to visualize and talk about physical objects and processes independent of them; to translate this noncomputational thinking and talking into computational symbols, syntax, structure, and assumptions; and to create computational solutions. We show how operators develop this skill vicariously, observing programmers as they solve problems. We contribute to understanding how, in an increasingly digitized workplace, those without programming capacities may decrease their dependence on programmers and increase their capacity to create and alter representations of the physical world
