1,721,059 research outputs found
Bioengineering for peripheral arterial diseases: From nanosystems for vascular drug delivery to bioactive small diameter vascular prostheses
No full textBirth in Bonobos (Pan paniscus) : Female Cohesiveness and Emotional Sharing
No full textSociality around birth has been proposed as a unique feature of our species and traces its origin to the very beginning of human evolution. In traditional societies, the social and practical support to the parturient is almost exclusively provided by women, with absolute cultural taboos preventing the participation of men. Humans surely differ from their closest living relatives in the imperative need for assistance during delivery that is linked to some distinctive traits of birth in our species. Yet, considering the social, cognitive and emotional complexity of many primate species, it is plausible that they may show a certain degree of sociality around birth. It is nowadays impossible to draw a reliable picture of the social dynamics around birth in monkeys and apes since the only available reports on the behaviour of group members during deliveries are scattered and anecdotal. Here we describe three daytime births in bonobos (Pan paniscus) . The observation conditions of the captive environment allowed us to film and quantitatively describe the behaviours of the whole group. Our data show that birth in bonobos is a peculiar social event in which females are particularly concerned. Indeed, females stay closer to the parturient than males do and the frequency of affiliative interactions is higher within female-female dyads, whereas the frequency of agonistic interactions is higher within female-male dyads. Moreover, the more dominant and elderly females also provided a sort of ‘assistance’ to the parturient, by performing the same gesture performed by her to grab the infant during its birth, although only the mother grabbed the infant at the delivery. These results show that the bonds linking bonobo females are also reinforced during rare events, such as births. We suggest that the collective support of females in bonobos might be one of the building blocks of more complex and culturally shaped forms of sociality which are expressed during the delivery event in humans
Embracing behaviour: Distribution, Incidence and Potential Adaptive Role in a captive Group of Theropithecus gelada
No full textCommunicating the motivation to play: gestures and facial expressions in bonobos
No full textThe correct production and interpretation of communicative signals is of primary importance for social animals. Free brachio-manual gestures, so far only reported for humans and other apes, are considered as intentional signals. Facial expressions, on the other hand, although used during intentional communication, are influenced by emotional states. Play is one of the most sophisticated forms of social communication and it has also been reported to be the context in which gestures occur more frequently in two Pan species. Through a video-analysis of playful sessions, we investigated the use of a) facial expressions and b) gestures in Pan paniscus. Both of them were more frequent during the most risky form of play, that is play fighting. The redundancy of signals is effective in reducing the probability of escalation into overt aggression. The difference between the use of gestures and facial expressions emerges with the variation of players' number. Gestures tend to decrease as the number of players increases; whereas facial expressions are independent from the number of players involved. Both communicative patterns are performed mainly when the receiver can perceive them, thus suggesting the intentional nature of these displays. The importance of deeply understanding the way apes and other primates communicate through gestures and how this capacity develops becomes central when considering that our ancestors' first linguistic expressions were probably in the gestural more than in the vocal domain
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe 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
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe 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
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