323,165 research outputs found
Spectrums of investment in Doctor Who fandom
This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Drawing upon a significant weight of empirical data, collected in the field, this thesis proposes a set of four spectrums of investment engaged in by cult media fans: the spectrum of financial investment; the spectrum of what is here termed 'participatory investment'; the spectrum of investment in the idea of textual authenticity; and the spectrum of multiple investments. The spectrum model allows the individual members of the research sample to be located within specific regions of each spectrum and correlations to be drawn between the distinct spectrums, in order for any patterns which emerge to be examined. The thesis also reviews a number of relevant theoretical concerns such as fan studies, ethnography and social psychology
Dollarization and semi-dollarization in Ecuador
Over the 1980s and 1990s, GDP growth had stagnated because of oil export price volatility and natural disasters, the sacrifice of capital formation to heavy external public debt service, and incomplete and uneven structural reform. The exchange rate depreciation that proved continually necessary to sustain the net-export surplus and limit external debt accumulation induced Ecuadorians to dollarize spontaneously. The 1998 shocks affected real economic activity--hence bank loan portfolios, and widened the fiscal and current acccount deficits. The external imbalance led to exchange rate depreciation. Dollar-denominated bank loans whose borrowers lacked dollar income increasingly turned non-performing. At the same time, the depreciation swelled the locla currency value of dollar deposit liabilities. Many depositors, fearing that banks had become unsafe, withdrew, and over 1999 the Central Bank had to provide banks massive liquidity support. By year's end, the resulting monetary issue ledto the exchange rate collapse and incipient hyperinflation that forced the move to full dollarization. Ecuador's Central Bank will continue operating, using its foreign exchange holdings to carry out limited liquidity management and lender-of-last-resort activities. Ecuador's public accounts and banking system remain vulnerable to commodity-price and natural shocks. Exchange rate adjustment and monetary expansion are no longer available, however, to manage the external accounts, accommodate the public deficit, or assist failing banks. Further structural reform remains essential to assure fiscal discipline and banking system safety.Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Payment Systems&Infrastructure,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Sector Economics&Finance,Financial Intermediation
Diffusive author(s), cohesive author: Analysis of S/N (1994)
This study indicates the ways in which various aspects of the author(s) are brought forth in Dumb type’s performance art, the S/N production. Previous research has suggested a non-hierarchical organization of Dumb type and the absence of a “privileged author” in Dumb type’s collaborative work, S/N. However, the results that I have investigated from member’s interviews on the creative process of S/N along with my analysis of the recorded images of S/N, indicate a different aspect of the author(s). First, S/N was created through, so to speak, the collective ideas of the members of Dumb type. Further, S/N has at least nine quotations from previous performances, installations, and printed writings, besides the work-in-progress technique. Explicating one of the “author functions” as given by Michel Foucault, each text has plural subjects of the author. However, it has been revealed from members’ interviews that Teiji Furuhashi had a decision-making role in selecting the members’ ideas within the performance. Since then, S/N has had plural subjects of creation; however, Furuhashi is one of the subjects of creation along with the “privileged author.” S/N has plural authors (diffusive authors) yet at the same time, it has a “privileged author,” Teiji Furuhashi (cohesive author)
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Polymer superstructure dynamics on free-standing graphene resolved by ultrafast low-energy electron diffraction
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
We conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Polymer superstructure dynamics on free-standing graphene resolved by ultrafast low-energy electron diffraction
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Can archives of audiovisual TV interviews be used to make authors more visible to students, and thereby reduce the learning gap between native and non-native language speakers in college classes? We examined students in a college course who learned about one scholar's ideas through watching an audiovisual TV interview (i.e., visible author format) and about another scholar's ideas through reading a formal text description (i.e., invisible author format). For the invisible author, native language speakers scored significantly higher than the non-native language speakers on a corresponding exam question (i.e., a cognitive measure), generated more words on the exam question (i.e., a motivational measure), and mentioned the author's name more often in answering the exam question (i.e., an affective measure). For the visible author, the groups did not differ on any of these measures. These findings provide evidence for the idea that making the author visible through audiovisual TV interviews can eliminate the learning gap between native and non-native language speakers. 3 Universities around the world serve students who are non-native speakers of th
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