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L.E.L. in and out of the Birkbeck Album: poetics and politics
Get PDFLetitia Elizabeth Landon’s contributions to Anna Birkbeck’s album may seem out of place among entries by radicals and reformers associated with the London Mechanics’ Institution, among them John Bowring, William Hone, Robert Owen, and John Thelwall. Yet contrasting sentimental poetics with radical politics fails to capture the radical aesthetics of the 1820s. Thelwall, for instance, placed Landon, whom he called ‘Sappho’, among ‘Poets and Poetry of the Age’. The album authors include editors of journals that shaped Landon’s career: William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette, where Landon made her reputation in the 1820s; and Samuel Carter Hall, the editor of The Amulet and the New Monthly Magazine, which were important venues for her later poems. This article analyses the Landon poems entered into the Birkbeck album after being published in the Literary Gazette, together with later poems published in Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (1832) and the New Monthly Magazine (1836), teasing out the poetics and politics of her poetry in challenging an egotistical, Wordsworthian strand of Romantic writing, and arguing instead for ‘the public circulation of affect and the necessity of dreaming as a social need’
Attitudes toward adoption by transgender adults
Get PDFThis study explored cisgender heterosexual adults’ perceptions of children placed in an adoptive family led by a couple with a transgender partner. Participants (n = 871) read one of five vignettes in which a couple (a cisgender different-gender couple, a cisgender same-gender male couple, a cisgender same-gender female couple, a couple with a female transgender partner, or a couple with a male transgender partner) intended to adopt two children. After reading the vignette, participants rated beliefs about children’s psychological development, willingness to support the adoption, and completed an attitude toward LGBTQ rights scale. Moderation analyses revealed that participants with low levels of support for LGBTQ rights perceived children adopted by couples with a transgender partner as being at greater risk of victimization and poor psychological adjustment compared to children adopted by either cisgender same-gender couples or cisgender different-gender couples and were less inclined to endorse adoption. A multigroup path analysis model revealed that support for LGBTQ rights impacted on agreement with adoption via the mediation of participants’ concerns for children’s psychological adjustment more strongly regarding transgender parents than cisgender same-gender couples. Our findings demonstrated that cis-heteronormativity concerns eclipsed claims to reproductive justice for transgender people seeking parenthood
Risk disclosure and entrepreneurial resource acquisition in crowdfunding digital platforms: evidence from digital technology ventures
Get PDFThe widespread development of digital technology facilitates the emergence of new entrepreneurial modes, of which crowdfunding digital platforms are one. In the digital environment of crowdfunding platforms, digital entrepreneurs can acquire the key resources they need to develop their startups in a fast and cost-effective way. However, the information asymmetry derived from the digital nature of crowdfunding platforms leads to a lower chance of success for entrepreneurial ventures in this market, especially those in digital technology, limiting the important role that crowdfunding platforms can play in digital entrepreneurship. To this end, we focus on the risk disclosure section introduced by crowdfunding platforms to alleviate information asymmetry and explore the influence mechanism of the content of risk disclosure on entrepreneurial resource acquisition in crowdfunding digital platforms. By employing a novel text mining technique, structural topic modelling, we analyse the risk disclosure texts of 4,284 digital technology crowdfunding projects and successfully identify a range of factors that constrain the development of digital technology ventures in crowdfunding platforms. Furthermore, we find that the risk topics disclosed by digital entrepreneurs negatively affect entrepreneurial resource acquisition, but that this relationship is moderated by the reward structure setting in the context of reward-based crowdfunding. The findings of this study not only enrich the literature on crowdfunding and digital entrepreneurship, but also provide valuable practical implications on how crowdfunding digital platforms can be used to promote the development of digital entrepreneurship
The impact of loan risk compensation policy in the short food supply chain: is Blockchain-enabled financing more efficient?
Get PDFPurpose – This study aims to explore conditions for the application of blockchain-enabled financing versus traditional prepayment. It seeks to understand how a short food supply chain can choose more efficient financing pattern under loan risk compensation policy, crucial for designing an optimal short food supply chain.
Design/Methodology – Employing Stackelberg game, decisions of the short food supply chain regarding the adoption of different financing patterns are modeled. The theoretical model's outcomes are validated using data from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of China, including publicly available market prices and costs of soybeans and wheat over the past decade. Adjusted market prices are derived using consumer price index for residential prices to eliminate the impact of inflation.
Findings – The loan risk compensation rate, prepayment discount rate, blockchain-enabled financing interest rate, and distribution of crop output create three distinct scenarios, prompting members of the short food supply chain to form various financing pattern preferences. Simultaneously, loan risk compensation effectively improves supply chain performance. Moreover, the impact of risk compensation is more pronounced at lower output rates.
Originality/Value – This research emphasizes that the blockchain-enabled financing pattern is not always dominant. Government departments can shape the financing pattern preferences of supply chain members by adjusting risk compensation rate, thereby promoting the application of the blockchain-enabled financing pattern. This paper contributes to the literature on the adoption of blockchain technology for financing short food supply chain by delving into the issue of financing pattern selection
Measuring the relationship between museum attributes and visitors: an application of topic model on museum online reviews
Get PDFPurpose: The purpose of this paper is to extract museum attributes from museum online reviews through structural topic model. And analyze the impact of museum attributes on visitor experience and satisfaction.
Design/Methodology/approach: 114,645 English reviews from January 2010 to April 2022 were obtained by writing a crawler program and applying machine learning method of structural topic modeling to identify museum attributes. Then, the hypothetical model is analyzed using structural equation modeling
Findings-The structural topic model identifies the three main attributes and 16 sub-attributes of the museum and the visitor's personal experience at the museum. The results of the structural equation modeling analysis showed that the core offerings had a positive impact on both the visitor's personal experience and satisfaction. Peripheral services and ambience overall have a negative impact on visitor experience and satisfaction.
Research limitations/implications: This study extends the empirical study of the impact of museum attributes on visitors through unstructured data. However, the review sample for this study was only selected from museums in the United Kingdom; therefore, museums in different countries or regions could be selected for future research.
Practical implications: The results of this study clarify the link between museums and visitors and the different impact of each museum attribute on visitors' influence. Therefore, in order to achieve marketing objectives, museum managers should focus on visitor experience and satisfaction, rather than limiting themselves to the presentation of "products". They should also meet the needs of visitors in the increasingly competitive cultural tourism industry.
Originality/value: This study extends previous research that tested the relationship between museum attributes and visitors. The findings contribute to the development of museum theory and provide a basis for future research directions that can be used by museum managers to develop marketing strategies
Compositional verification of first-order masking countermeasures against power side-channel attacks
Get PDFPower side-channel attacks allow an adversary to efficiently and effectively steal secret information (e.g., keys) by exploiting the correlation between secret data and runtime power consumption, hence posing a serious threat to software security, particularly cryptographic implementations. Masking is a commonly used countermeasure against such attacks, which breaks the statistical dependence between secret data and side-channel leaks via randomization. In a nutshell, a variable is represented by a vector of shares armed with random variables, called masking encoding, on which cryptographic computations are performed. While compositional verification for the security of masked cryptographic implementations has received much attention because of its high efficiency, existing compositional approaches either use implicitly fixed pre-conditions that may not be fulfilled by state-of-the-art efficient implementations, or require user-provided hard-coded pre-conditions that are time consuming and highly non-trivial, even for an expert. In this article, we tackle the compositional verification problem of first-order masking countermeasures, where first-order means that the adversary is allowed to access only one intermediate computation result. Following the literature, we consider countermeasures given as gadgets, which are special procedures whose inputs are masking encodings of variables. We introduce a new security notion parameterized by an explicit pre-condition for each gadget, as well as composition rules for reasoning about masking countermeasures against power side-channel attacks. We propose accompanying efficient algorithms to automatically infer proper pre-conditions, based on which our new compositional approach can efficiently and automatically prove security for masked implementations. We implement our approaches as a tool MaskCV and conduct experiments on publicly available masked cryptographic implementations including 10 different full AES implementations. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach
The Apollo Programme and its legacy
Get PDFIt is now over fifty years since the Apollo missions to the Moon. This paper briefly reviews the Apollo programme and its scientific legacy, and argues that science would benefit from a human return to the Moon
Automatic real-time hand tracking enhances adolescents’ spatial skills by eliminating haptic feedback
No full textSpatial skills underlie how humans acquire, represent, organise, manipulate, and navigate their environment, and therefore are fundamental for survival and proper function. Spatial skills involve the integration of sensory-motor information with higher-order cognitive representations. Previous research showed that spatial skills can be improved through training, yet it is unknown what sensory information is better for training. Here, we tested a new application for real-time hand tracking as a manipulator of sensory information that enhances spatial skills in late childhood. To that end, children (n = 29; ages 14-15) completed a 7-week school training programme (eight 30-minute sessions) to improve their spatial skills. Children were randomly assigned into one of two training regimens: Hapto-Visual (HV; students constructed a physical 2D polydron net from different perspectives of a 3D cube) or Visual-Only (VO; students constructed a digitised version of the 2D polydron net without tactile information). Children’s spatial skills were assessed before and after the training programme using established tests (Modified Mental Rotation and Mental Paper-Folding Tasks). We found significant improvement in both groups, with a significantly enhanced performance by the VO group compared to the HV group. Our findings suggest that omitting haptic feedback during spatial training compels reliance on mental representations, thereby bolstering spatial skills more effectively. These findings present a new application for real-time hand-tracking technology in educational settings and demonstrate its cost-effective potential to advance spatial abilities in young students
New words, new lives: employing interpretative phenomenological analysis integrated with strategies from ethnography in researching the lived experience of multilingualism and vulnerability in survivors of torture and modern slavery
Get PDFFew studies in applied linguistics address the methodological and ethical issues encountered in studying asylum seekers and refugees. Moreover, more research is needed on the lived-experience of multilingualism and vulnerability to understand better the interrelations between multilingualism, vulnerability, and empowerment. Based on a study which combines Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis with ethnographic approaches this paper explores the impact of multilingualism on the rehabilitation of survivors of torture and human rights violations. It provides researchers with reflections and insights on how to do effective research with vulnerable multilinguals and better understand the role language plays in contributing to lived-experiences of vulnerability
The assembly platform FimD is required to obtain the most stable quaternary structure of type 1 pili
Get PDFType 1 pili are important virulence factors of uropathogenic Escherichia coli that mediate bacterial attachment to epithelial cells in the urinary tract. The pilus rod is comprised of thousands of copies of the main structural subunit FimA and is assembled in vivo by the assembly platform FimD. Although type 1 pilus rods can self-assemble from FimA in vitro, this reaction is slower and produces structures with lower kinetic stability against denaturants compared to in vivo-assembled rods. Our study reveals that FimD-catalysed in vitro-assembled type 1 pilus rods attain a similar stability as pilus rods assembled in vivo. Employing structural, biophysical and biochemical analyses, we show that in vitro assembly reactions lacking FimD produce pilus rods with structural defects, reducing their stability against dissociation. Overall, our results indicate that FimD is not only required for the catalysis of pilus assembly, but also to control the assembly of the most stable quaternary structure
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