bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Evaluation of Anti-Depressant Effect of Banana Pulp on Mice
Authors: Sarfaraz Sana , Khan Manal , Bano Tanveer , Aftab Saba , Shakeel Sajida Duaa , Akhtar Ulfat , Fatima Reem
Published: October 2020

Background: The prevalence of depression is alarming all over the world afflicting billions of individuals. Depression is a common mental disorder and is one of the major causes of morbidity worldwide. Although, there are known effective treatment for depression, but antidepressant therapy usually causes a wide range of undesirable adverse effects and also increases the risk for suicide in individuals with ongoing treatment. So in order to reduce the risks associated, a study was conducted to evaluate the antidepressant potential of Musa paradisiacal Linn, commonly known as Banana fruit and to assess whether the natural source could be used to treat depression.
Bubble trail and folia in cenote Zapote, Mexico: petrographic evidence for abiotic precipitation driven by CO2 degassing below the water table
Authors:   Carbonate and Karst Process Laboratory, Institute of Geology, National Autonomous University of México, López-Martínez Rafael , Gázquez Fernando ,   University of Almeria, Calaforra José ,   University of Almeria, Audra Philippe ,   Université Nice Côte d’Azur, Bigot Jean ,   21 Rue des Hospices, 34090 Montpellier, France, Pi Puig Teresa ,   National Laboratory of Geochemistry and Mineralogy, Institute of Geology, National Autonomous University of México, Alcántara-Hernández Rocío ,   National Laboratory of Geochemistry and Mineralogy, Institute of Geology, National Autonomous University of México, Navarro Ángel ,   The Gopro Family, Quintana Roo, Mexico, Crochet Philippe ,   Photographe de la spéléologie et du monde minéra, France, Corona Martínez Liliana ,   Centro de Geociencias (CGEO), National Autonomous University of México, Daza Brunet Raquel ,   Carbonate and Karst Process Laboratory, Institute of Geology, National Autonomous University of México
Published: October 2020

Folia are speleothems that resemble bells, inverted cups, or bracket fungi, and whose origins are still controversial. Cenote Zapote (an underwater cave) in the Yucatán Peninsula (México), is home to some of the largest folia reported to date. These speleothems are currently growing in an active underwater system, meaning this site offers an excellent opportunity to constrain the different formation models proposed for folia, which have traditionally relied on inactive examples. In Cenote Zapote, folia are closely related to bubble trails and cupolas, suggesting an underwater CO2-degassing process. In thin section, they display a succession of columnar-open and columnar-elongated endings in micrite-dendritic fabrics. Our petrographic and geochemical results demonstrate the abiotic origin of these folia and indicate carbonate precipitation from cold water by CO2 degassing below the water table that started at least 5,210 yrs BP. We conclude that these folia formed as a result of subaqueous calcite precipitation around CO2 bubbles trapped below overhanging walls of the cave. The sequential alternation of columnar and micritic fabrics can be explained by changes in the position of the halocline and H2S-rich water mass while the exceptional size is the result of carbonate precipitation from waters saturated in CaCO3 during thousans of years. Then we propose the classification of these speleothems as a subtype of folia. This subtype could be named Hells Bells, respecting its original description.
Co-authorship of Joint utterances in Japanese
Authors: Obana Yasuko , Haugh Michael
Published: October 2020

The paper introduces a type of joint utterance construction in Japanese, in which two independent sentential-level units are amalgamated, which has hitherto received little attention in the literature. Unlike traditional joint utterance construction where one speaker maintains authority over the syntactic structure of the forthcoming continuation and the other accedes to this, thereby constituting a single TCU (turn constructional unit), our examples demonstrate that both speakers can have authority over the syntactic design of joint utterances. We call such collaborative utterances ‘co-authored joint utterances’ in this paper.The uniqueness of co-authored joint utterances lies in their syntactic architecture. While syntactic and semantic continuity are successfully achieved in constructing co-authored joint utterances, they represent a co-joined structure in which two sentential-level units are involved with their shared part constituting a point of amalgamation, and because of this, the structure of a co-authored joint utterance can no longer be parsed with extant grammar.In analysing co-authored joint utterances, we examine how they can be treated in relation to the distinction between TCU (Turn Constructional Unit) continuation and new TCUs. Due to the particularities of the syntactic architecture of co-authored joint utterances, their existence raises questions about the way in which this distinction is currently operationalised, because despite being syntactically an incremental continuation, and so seemingly a TCU continuation, the co-authored joint utterance implements an action beyond what was initially instantiated by the antecedent of that joint utterance, and so arguably constitutes a new TCU.
Dialog History Construction with Long-Short Term Memory for Robust Generative Dialog State Tracking
Authors: Lee Byung-Jun , Kim Kee-Eung
Published: October 2020

One of the crucial components of dialog system is the dialog state tracker, which infers user’s intention from preliminary speech processing. Since the overall performance of the dialog system is heavily affected by that of the dialog tracker, it has been one of the core areas of research on dialog systems. In this paper, we present a dialog state tracker that combines a generative probabilistic model of dialog state tracking with the recurrent neural network for encoding important aspects of the dialog history. We describe a two-step gradient descent algorithm that optimizes the tracker with a complex loss function. We demonstrate that this approach yields a dialog state tracker that performs competitively with top-performing trackers participated in the first and second Dialog State Tracking Challenges.
Spectral decomposition method of dialog state tracking via collective matrix factorization
Authors: Perez Julien
Published: October 2020

The task of dialog management is commonly decomposed into two sequential subtasks: dialog state tracking and dialog policy learning. In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate the true dialog state from noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. The state tracking task is primarily meant to support a dialog policy. From a probabilistic perspective, this is achieved by maintaining a posterior distribution over hidden dialog states composed of a set of context dependent variables. Once a dialog policy is learned, it strives to select an optimal dialog act given the estimated dialog state and a defined reward function. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on a bilinear algebric decomposition model that provides an efficient inference schema through collective matrix factorization. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset and we show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results compared to the state-of-the-art trackers that participated in this standard benchmark. Finally, we show that the prediction schema is computationally efficient in comparison to the previous approaches.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Williams Jason D. , Raux Antoine , Henderson Matthew
Published: October 2020

This short article introduces the Special Issue on Dialogue State Tracking.
Reports in Discourse
Authors: Hunter Julie
Published: October 2020

Attitude or speech reports in English with a non-parenthetical syntax sometimes give rise to interpretations in which the embedded clause, e.g., "John was out of town" in the report "Jill said that John was out of town", seems to convey the main point of the utterance while the attribution predicate, e.g., "Jillsaid that", merely plays an evidential or source-providing role (Urmson, 1952). Simons (2007) posits that parenthetical readings arise from the interaction between the report and the preceding discourse context, rather than from the syntax or semantics of the reports involved. However, no account of these discourse interactions has been developed in formal semantics. Research on parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure has yielded hypotheses about the discourse interactions of parenthetical reports, but these hypotheses are not semantically sound. The goal of this paper is to unify and extend work in semantics and discourse structure to develop a formal, discourse-based account of parenthetical reports that does not suffer the pitfalls faced by current proposals in rhetorical frameworks.
A Psycholinguistic Model for the Marking of Discourse Relations
Authors: Yung Frances , Duh Kevin , Komura Taku , Matsumoto Yuji
Published: October 2020

Discourse relations can either be explicitly marked by discourse connectives (DCs), such as therefore and but, or implicitly conveyed in natural language utterances. How speakers choose between the two options is a question that is not well understood. In this study, we propose a psycholinguistic model that predicts whether or not speakers will produce an explicit marker given the discourse relation they wish to express. Our model is based on two information-theoretic frameworks: (1) the Rational Speech Acts model, which models the pragmatic interaction between language production and interpretation by Bayesian inference, and (2) the Uniform Information Density theory, which advocates that speakers adjust linguistic redundancy to maintain a uniform rate of information transmission. Specifically, our model quantifies the utility of using or omitting a DC based on the expected surprisal of comprehension, cost of production, and availability of other signals in the rest of the utterance. Experiments based on the Penn Discourse Treebank show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art performance at predicting the presence of DCs (Patterson and Kehler, 2013), in addition to giving an explanatory account of the speaker’s choice.
Just because: In search of objective criteria of subjectivity expressed by causal connectives
Authors: Levshina Natalia , Degand Liesbeth
Published: October 2020

The connective because can express both highly objective and highly subjective causal relations. In this, it differs from its counterparts in other languages, e.g. Dutch, where two conjunctions omdat and want express more objective and more subjective causal relations, respectively. The present study investigates whether it is possible to anchor the different uses of because in context, examining a large number of syntactic, morphological and semantic cues with a minimal cost of manual annotation. We propose an innovative method of distinguishing between subjective and objective uses of because with the help of information available from an English/Dutch segment of a parallel corpus, which is accompanied by a distributional analysis of contextual features. On the basis of automatic syntactic and morphological annotation of approximately 1500 examples of because, every English sentence is coded semi-automatically for more than twenty contextual variables, such as the part of speech, number, person, semantic class of the subject, modality, etc. We employ logistic regression to determine whether these contextual variables help predict which of the two causal connectives is used in the corresponding Dutch sentences. Our results indicate that a set of semantic and syntactic features that include modality, semantics of referents (subjects), semantic class of the verbal predicate, tense (past vs. non-past) and the presence of evaluative adjectives, are reliable predictors of the more subjective and objective uses of because, demonstrating that this distinction can indeed be anchored in the immediate linguistic context. The proposed method and relevant contextual cues can be used for identification of objective and subjective relationships in discourse.
Dialog Structure Through the Lens of Gender, Gender Environment, and Power
Authors: Prabhakaran Vinodkumar , Rambow Owen
Published: October 2020

Understanding how the social context of an interaction affects our dialog behavior is of great interest to social scientists who study human behavior, as well as to computer scientists who build automatic methods to infer those social contexts. In this paper, we study the interaction of power, gender, and dialog behavior in organizational interactions. In order to perform this study, we first construct the Gender Identified Enron Corpus of emails, in which we semi-automatically assign the gender of around 23,000 individuals who authored around 97,000 email messages in the Enron corpus. This corpus, which is made freely available, is orders of magnitude larger than previously existing gender identified corpora in the email domain. Next, we use this corpus to perform a largescale data-oriented study of the interplay of gender and manifestations of power. We argue that, in addition to one’s own gender, the “gender environment” of an interaction, i.e., the gender makeup of one’s interlocutors, also affects the way power is manifested in dialog. We focus especially on manifestations of power in the dialog structure — both, in a shallow sense that disregards the textual content of messages (e.g., how often do the participants contribute, how often do they get replies etc.), as well as the structure that is expressed within the textual content (e.g., who issues requests and how are they made, whose requests get responses etc.). We find that both gender and gender environment affect the ways power is manifested in dialog, resulting in patterns that reveal the underlying factors. Finally, we show the utility of gender information in the problem of automatically predicting the direction of power between pairs of participants in email interactions.
Examples and Specifications that Prove a Point: Identifying Elaborative and Argumentative Discourse Relations
Authors: Scholman Merel C.J. , Demberg Vera
Published: October 2020

Examples and specifications occur frequently in text, but not much is known about how they function in discourse and how readers interpret them. Looking at how they’re annotated in existing discourse corpora, we find that annotators often disagree on these types of relations; specifically, there is disagreement about whether these relations are elaborative (additive) or argumentative (pragmatic causal). To investigate how readers interpret examples and specifications, we conducted a crowdsourced discourse annotation study. The results show that these relations can indeed have two functions: they can be used to both illustrate/specify a situation and serve as an argument for a claim. These findings suggest that examples and specifications can have multiple simultaneous readings. We discuss the implications of these results for discourse annotation.
Discourse coherence and the interpretation of accented pronouns
Authors: Mozuraitis Mindaugas , Heller Daphna
Published: October 2020

It has long been argued that accenting or stressing a pronoun (i.e., making it prosodically prominent) changes its interpretation as compared to its unaccented counterpart. However, recent experimental work demonstrated that this generalization does not apply when the alternative interpretation of the pronoun is not plausible (Taylor et al., 2013). In a series of three experiments that use an offline comprehension task, we show, first, that the lack of reversal is observed when plausibility is controlled for. We furthermore show that a new generalization cannot be formed by excluding cases where the bias towards the unmarked interpretation is strong or cases where the character in the alternative interpretation is low in salience. Instead, we conclude that what constrains the interpretation of accented pronouns is coherence relations, with parallel discourses exhibiting reversal and result discourses not exhibiting reversal. We propose that the difference between coherence relations should be viewed in what would be the minimal change in order to create a ‘surprising’ or expected’ event, which is the characteristic of accenting more generally.
Discourse Markers in Speech: Distinctive Features and Corpus Annotation
Authors: Crible Ludivine , Cuenca Maria-Josep
Published: October 2020

It is generally acknowledged that discourse markers are used differently in speech and writing, yet many general descriptions and most annotation frameworks are written-based, thus partially unfit to be applied in spoken corpora. This paper identifies the major distinctive features of discourse markers in spoken language, which can be associated with problems related to their scope and structure, their meaning and their tendency to co-occur. The description is based on authentic examples and is followed by methodological recommendations on how to deal with these phenomena in more exhaustive, speech-friendly annotation models.
User-Adaptive A Posteriori Restoration for Incorrectly Segmented Utterances in Spoken Dialogue Systems
Authors: Komatani Kazunori , Hotta Naoki , Sato Satoshi , Nakano Mikio
Published: October 2020

Ideally, the users of spoken dialogue systems should be able to speak at their own tempo. Thus, the systems needs to interpret utterances from various users correctly, even when the utterances contain pauses. In response to this issue, we propose an approach based on a posteriori restoration for incorrectly segmented utterances. A crucial part of this approach is to determine whether restoration is required. We use a classiﬁcation-based approach, adapted to each user. We focus on each user’s dialogue tempo, which can be obtained during the dialogue, and determine the correlation between each user’s tempo and the appropriate thresholds for classiﬁcation. A linear regression function used to convert the tempos into thresholds is also derived. Experimental results show that the proposed user adaptation approach applied to two restoration classiﬁcation methods, thresholding and decision trees, improves classiﬁcation accuracies by 3.0% and 7.4%, respectively, in cross validation.
Cross-domain analysis of discourse markers in European Portuguese
Authors: Cabarrão Vera , Moniz Helena , Batista Fernando , Ferreira Jaime , Trancoso Isabel , Mata Ana Isabel
Published: October 2020

This paper presents an analysis of discourse markers in two spontaneous speech corpora for European Portuguese - university lectures and map-task dialogues - and also in a collection of tweets, aiming at contributing to their categorization, scarcely existent for European Portuguese. Our results show that the selection of discourse markers is domain and speaker dependent. We also found that the most frequent discourse markers are similar in all three corpora, despite tweets containing discourse markers not found in the other two corpora. In this multidisciplinary study, comprising both a linguistic perspective and a computational approach, discourse markers are also automatically discriminated from other structural metadata events, namely sentence-like units and disfluencies. Our results show that discourse markers and disfluencies tend to co-occur in the dialogue corpus, but have a complementary distribution in the university lectures. We used three acoustic-prosodic feature sets and machine learning to automatically distinguish between discourse markers, disfluencies and sentence-like units. Our in-domain experiments achieved an accuracy of about 87% in university lectures and 84% in dialogues, in line with our previous results. The eGeMAPS features, commonly used for other paralinguistic tasks, achieved a considerable performance on our data, especially considering the small size of the feature set. Our results suggest that turn-initial discourse markers are usually easier to classify than disfluencies, a result also previously reported in the literature. We conducted a cross-domain evaluation in order to evaluate the robustness of the models across domains. The results achieved are about 11%-12% lower, but we conclude that data from one domain can still be used to classify the same events in the other. Overall, despite the complexity of this task, these are very encouraging state-of-the-art results. Ultimately, using exclusively acoustic-prosodic cues, discourse markers can be fairly discriminated from disfluencies and SUs. In order to better understand the contribution of each feature, we have also reported the impact of the features in both the dialogues and the university lectures. Pitch features are the most relevant ones for the distinction between discourse markers and disfluencies, namely pitch slopes. These features are in line with the wide pitch range of discourse markers, in a continuum from a very compressed pitch range to a very wide one, expressed by total deaccented material or H+L* L* contours, with upstep H tones.
Asymmetries between interpretation and production in Catalan pronouns
Authors: Mayol Laia
Published: October 2020

The literature on Romance null-subject languages has often postulated a division of labor between Null and Overt pronouns: Nulls prefer to retrieve an antecedent in subject position, whereas Overts prefer an antecedent in a lower syntactic position (Carminati, 2002). However, recent research on English pronouns (Rohde and Kehler, 2014) has shown grammatical function alone cannot explain pronoun interpretation. According to these models, pronoun interpretation and production are sensitive to different sets of factors and, instead of being mirror images of each other, are related probabilistically in a Bayesian fashion. This paper tests this model with Catalan data from two discourse-completion experiments to study the grammatical and pragmatic factors that affect the interpretation and production of Null and Overt pronouns. Our main result is that both Null and Overt pronouns present asymmetries regarding their interpretation and production: (1) the production of Null pronouns is affected mainly by grammatical factors (they are subject-biased), but their interpretation is also influenced by pragmatic factors (in particular, rhetorical relations), and (2) while Overt pronouns have a strong interpretation bias towards the object, the data indicates that they are not the preferred form to refer to the object.
Reasoning Between the Lines: a Logic of Relational Propositions
Authors: Potter Andrew
Published: October 2020

This paper describes how Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and relational propositions can be used to define a method for rendering and analyzing texts as expressions in propositional logic.  Relational propositions, the implicit assertions that correspond to RST relations, are defined using standard logical operators and rules of inference.  The resulting logical forms are used to construct logical expressions that map to RST tree structures.  The resulting expressions show that inference is pervasive within coherent texts.  To support reasoning over these expressions, a set of rules for negation is defined.  The logical forms and their negation rules can be used to examine the flow of reasoning and the effects of incoherence.  Because there is a correspondence between logical coherence and the functional relationships of RST, an RST analysis that cannot pass the test of logic is indicative either of a problematic analysis or of an incoherent text.  The result is a method for analyzing the logic implicit within discursive reasoning.
The timing of prominence information during the resolution of German personal and demonstrative pronouns
Authors: Patterson Clare , Schumacher Petra
Published: October 2020

German personal and demonstrative pronouns have distinct preferences in their interpretation; personal pronouns are more flexible in their interpretation but tend to resolve to a prominent antecedent, while demonstratives have a strong preference for a non-prominent antecedent. However, less is known about how prominence information is used during the process of resolution, particularly in the light of two- stage processing models which assume that reference will normally be to the most accessible candidate. We conducted three experiments investigating how prominence information is used during the resolution of gender-disambiguated personal and demonstrative pronouns in German. While the demonstrative pronoun required additional processing compared to the personal pronoun, prominence information did not affect resolution in shallow conditions. It did, however, affect resolution under deep processing conditions. We conclude that prominence information is not ruled out by the presence of stronger resolution cues such as gender. However, the deployment of prominence information in the evaluation of candidate antecedents is under strategic control.
Robust increase of Indian monsoon rainfall and its variability under future warming in CMIP-6 models
Authors: Katzenberger Anja , Schewe Jacob , Pongratz Julia , Levermann Anders
Published: October 2020

Abstract. The Indian summer monsoon is an integral part of the global climate system. As its seasonal rainfall plays a crucial role in India's agriculture and shapes many other aspects of life, it affects the livelihood of a fifth of the world's population. It is therefore highly relevant to assess its change under potential future climate change. Global climate models within the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP-5) indicated a consistent increase in monsoon rainfall and its variability under global warming. Since the range of the results of CMIP-5 was still large and the confidence in the models was limited due to partly poor representation of observed rainfall, the updates within the latest generation of climate models in CMIP-6 are of interest. Here, we analyse 32 models of the latest CMIP-6 exercise with regard to their annual mean monsoon rainfall and its variability. All of these models show a substantial increase in June-to-September (JJAS) mean rainfall under unabated climate change (SSP5-8.5) and most do also for the other three Shared Socioeconomic Pathways analyzed (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, SSP3-7.0). Moreover, the simulation ensemble indicates a linear dependence of rainfall on global mean temperature with high agreement between the models and independent of the SSP; the multi-model mean for JJAS projects an increase of 0.33 mm/day and 5.3 % per degree of global warming. This is significantly higher than in the CMIP-5 projections. Most models project that the increase will contribute to the precipitation especially in the Himalaya region and to the northeast of the Bay of Bengal, as well as the west coast of India. Interannual variability is found to be increasing in the higher-warming scenarios by almost all models. The CMIP-6 simulations largely confirm the findings from CMIP-5 models, but show an increased robustness across models with reduced uncertainties and updated magnitudes towards a stronger increase in monsoon rainfall.
A method for solving heat transfer with phase change in ice or soil that allows for large time steps while guaranteeing energy conservation
Authors: Tubini Niccolò , Gruber Stephan , Rigon Riccardo
Published: October 2020

Abstract. The accurate simulation of heat transfer with phase change is a central problem in cryosphere studies. This is because the nonlinear behaviour of enthalpy as function of temperature can prevent thermal models of snow, ice and frozen soil from converging to the correct solution. Existing numerical techniques rely on increased temporal resolution in trying to keep corresponding errors withing acceptable bounds. Here, we propose an algorithm, originally applied to solve water flow in soils, as a method to solve these integration issues with guaranteed convergence and conservation of energy for any time step size. We review common modeling approaches, focusing on the fixed-grid method and on frozen soil. Based on this, we develop a conservative formulation of the governing equation and outline problems of alternative formulations in discretized form. Then, we apply the nested Newton-Casulli-Zanolli (NCZ) algorithm to a one-dimensional finite-volume discretization of the energy-enthalpy formulation. Model performance is demonstrated against the Neumann and Lunardini analytical solutions and by comparing results from numerical experiments with integration time steps of one hour, one day, and ten days. Using our formulation and the NCZ algorithm, the convergence of the solver is guaranteed for any time step size. With this approach, the integration time step can be chosen to match the time scale of the processes investigated.
Catholic News Archive
Authors: Kabel Sharon
Published: October 2020

The Catholic News Archive (CNA) is a freely available unique digital collection of American Catholic Newspapers. With an impressive range of advanced search options and search filters, and a friendly mobile layout, it encourages serious research as well as easy browsing. Every newspaper
page is scanned with optimal character recognition (OCR). The lack of export options is a serious hindrance to heavy-duty research, which is unfortunate given how extensive and interdisciplinary the content is. The uncorrected OCR is counterbalanced by powerful search options, diverse result
display options, and user-corrected OCR.
Discography of American Historical Recordings
Authors: Holmes Sarah
Published: October 2020

The Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) is an open-access database that has information on over 314,000 matrixes or master recordings from the early period of recording with recordings that date back to the late nineteenth century. The recordings come from a variety
of companies and are composed of a large variety of styles and genres. The database not only includes information on recordings that were published but also on all known takes. The information provided comes from a variety of sources, including primary sources, all of which are verified if
possible. The website is uncomplicated and easy to understand. DAHR is a comprehensive tool for researching recording artists of the time, recording practices, and the recordings themselves.
Academic Video Online (AVON)
Authors: Beck Thomas J.
Published: October 2020

Academic Video Online (AVON) is an Alexander Street database. It presents an extensive collection of videos on a variety of topics and from numerous sources. Some of the most popular topics are American History, Anthropology, Black Studies, Counseling and Therapy, Music and Performing,
and Science and Engineering. Popular sources include BBC Landmark, CNN, Film Platform, PBS, and Sony Classic Pictures. Many other topics are also available in this database, ranging from Art and Architecture to Fashion Studies to World Music, and from World History to Hawaiian Studies to Cooking.
Additional sources include CBS, Third World Newsreel, Mayo Clinic, American Academy of Pediatrics, Nippon News, and FilmRise. The visual and audio qualities of the videos on offer here are excellent, they are easy to navigate, and include transcripts.Videos can be browsed by topic or source,
or searched for using a single search bar, which allows the user various filtering options. The search and filtering options here produce useful results, though the number of those can vary considerably depending on the search done. However, the search options available can be confusing to
the user, due to the unexplained separation of the database into groupings of videos, Channels, and Collections (see User Interface/Navigation/Searching for more information). As a consequence, users may not be able to use the database most effectively, and/or appreciate the full scope of
material available here.Pricing for this database can vary considerably, as it is based on FTE, budget, and the number of prospective users. No more specific pricing information is available from the vender. The licensing agreement for this database, on the other hand, is relatively standard
in its length, structure, and content. The quality and quantity of AVON’s content is high and should appeal to a wide variety of students and faculty in various disciplines, though users will have to learn AVON’s search idiosyncrasies, which can cause confusion.
Building Bridges among Bridge-Destroyers: Post-Conflict Interfaith Dialogue after the Bosnian War
Authors: Admirand Peter
Published: October 2020

Focusing on the Bosnian war (1992–1995), and its lingering consequences, this article turns to witness testimonies to situate and evaluate the place and value of interfaith dialogue in a post-conflict setting. It particularly focuses on the horror of neighbor killing neighbor, a seemingly intractable divide for any hope for future reconciliation and role for dialogue. To pave a way forward, this article assesses the aims and work of interfaith bodies and groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina seeking to establish peace and some form of interfaith and intercultural normalization after the Dayton Accords.
Acción social de los vendedores ambulantes en Chiapas
Authors: Trujillo López Iris Janeth
Published: October 2020

El objetivo de este estudio fue analizar los procesos y mecanismos de permanencia en actividades informales de los vendedores ambulantes de la zona centro de la ciudad de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas. Para lograr el objetivo planteado se realizó una descripción detallada de las percepciones de los actores sociales a través de una aproximación cualitativa mediante entrevistas y observación participante. Los principales hallazgos de la investigación muestran que los factores de inserción a las actividades como vendedor/a ambulante son concretados a través del reconocimiento de una identidad étnica principalmente, vínculos familiares y de amistad. Su permanencia y progresión lo atribuyen a sus formas organizativas, pues cumplen con una función determinante para la apropiación de ciertos espacios en la vía pública.
Selling and Saving Energy: Energy Efficiency Obligations in Liberalized Energy Markets
Authors: Giraudet Louis-Gaëtan , Glachant Matthieu , Nicolai Jean-Philippe
Published: October 2020

In Europe, energy efficiency obligations are imposed on energy retailers competing in liberalized energy markets. They comply by subsidizing energy efficiency investments made by energy end-users from within or outside their customer base.

We develop a model describing how competition in the energy market affects compliance strategies. We find that, instead of selecting the most cost-effective investments options, firms may either target their most elastic customers, which enables them to increase their retail price, or their competitor’s customers, which protects their sales. Allowing firms to trade obligations can restore cost-effectiveness, but reduces consumer surplus. Overall, the degree of flexibility that should be incorporated into such programs crucially depends on the degree of heterogeneity across investment costs and the relative weights governments assign to cost-effectiveness and consumer surplus.
Capital social como fator-chave para o desenvolvimento da cadeia de suprimentos do limão: o caso da ASLIM
Authors: Bastos Thalita Emanuelle Farias , Freitas Verica , Paula Veronica Angelica Freitas de
Published: October 2020

Objetivo: Este relato objetiva evidenciar de que forma o capital social foi utilizado como estratégia para o desenvolvimento da cadeia de suprimentos dos produtores de limão no Norte de Minas Gerais.Metodologia: O método de pesquisa do relato tecnológico foca na exposição de resultados práticos embasados pela teoria, o que, aliado ao estudo de caso, possibilitou o aprofundamento sobre a situação específica da Associação Norte-mineira. Para a coleta de dados, foram realizadas entrevistas, tendo sido utilizado um roteiro semiestruturado e realizada visita in loco.Originalidade: A cadeia de suprimentos do limão ainda é pouco explorada no meio acadêmico em termos de pesquisa gerencial, especialmente, a cadeia da região do Norte de Minas Gerais. Além disso, apresentar resultados práticos da utilização do capital social demonstra a relevância do estudo.Principais resultados: O reconhecimento atual da Associação dos Produtores de Limão e Outras Frutas da Região do Jaíba (ASLIM) no cenário nacional e internacional comprova que o capital social se constituiu em uma estratégia assertiva para o desenvolvimento e aprimoramento da cadeia de suprimentos do limão. Os produtores associados tiveram não apenas ganhos financeiros, como progresso estrutural, gerencial, operacional e técnico.Contribuições: A pesquisa contribui para o desenvolvimento do tema capital social na cadeia de suprimentos do limão, além de servir como exemplo para outras regiões produtoras que enfrentam problemas similares.
Planning academic publications - the role of the researcher and the development of publishable proposals
Authors: Martins Fellipe Silva , Felisoni Paulo Ribeiro , Gaspar Marcos Antonio
Published: October 2020

Objetivo: Analisar o desenvolvimento de projetos de pesquisa acadêmica sobre o prisma do pesquisador como profissional, da pesquisa como proposta e do encaixe do pesquisador e da pesquisa na Academia.Método: É utilizado como base o livro Designing Research for Publication, de Anne Sigismund Huff (que, por sua vez, contém adendos de outros autores), acrescido de literatura relevante sobre pesquisa e pesquisadores.Originalidade/relevância: Por mais que o campo de ciências sociais aplicadas tenha um arcabouço de obras à sua disposição cujo propósito é discutir projetos de pesquisa, poucas obras se propõem juntar o nível macro (a Academia e sua fluidez na condução de pesquisa e geração de teoria) e o nível micro (o projeto de pesquisa, a proposta e o valor desta), por meio da discussão da ponte entre eles realizada pelo pesquisador num processo deliberado, e ainda dos diversos interesses aos quais um projeto de pesquisa serve.Resultados: A análise do livro em comparação com a literatura corrente permite perceber os desafios do pesquisador em ciências sociais aplicadas em equilibrar objetivos de pesquisa pessoais, necessidades da área em que se insere e balancear os aspectos ativos de planejar contribuições na teoria com o lado passivo de explicação da teoria.Contribuições teóricas/metodológicas: Pesquisa acadêmica em ciências sociais aplicadas raramente é discutida em termos de pressões institucionais divergentes ao próprio processo de desenvolvimento da pesquisa, e menos ainda quanto aos efeitos entre níveis diferentes. A obra analisada não tem propósito prescritivo acadêmico, mas permite inferir que muitas vezes a subotimalidade no resultado das propostas de pesquisa se deve às divergências entre as instituições envolvidas e seus diferentes graus de envolvimento e expectativas, bem como na má interpretação de microfundamentos na pesquisa acadêmica. A combinação de conflitos institucionais com efeitos adversos de diferentes níveis (além dos aspectos técnicos inadequados comumente encontrados), podem ser motivos centrais no insucesso de projetos de pesquisa.
Application of technical nitrogen during nitriding or nitrocarburizing alloyed steels
Authors: Żółciak Tadeusz , Wach Piotr , Bilski Paweł
Published: October 2020

In the present work technical nitrogen application for surface activation of alloyed steels with chrome, particularly stainless steel X20Cr13 during nitriding and carbonitriding was investigated .Hardness and microstructure of nitrided layers were examined. Possibility of using technical nitrogen containing 0,2%O2 for surface activation of X20Cr13 stainless steel was confirmed and activation conditions for investigated alloyed steels were determined.
A revision of the Maechidiini Burmeister, 1855 (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae: Melolonthinae) from the Indo-Australian transition zone, and the first record of the tribe west of Wallace’s Line
Authors: Telnov Dmitry
Published: October 2020

Features of the Maechidiini (Scarabaeidae: Melolonthinae) genera Maechidius Macleay, 1819, Epholcis Waterhouse, 1875 and Paramaechidius Frey, 1969 are critically revised and a new synonymy is proposed: Maechidius = Epholcis syn. nov. = Paramaechidius syn. nov. A key to and an annotated checklist of Maechidiini from the Indo-Australian transition zone are presented for the first time. Thirty-five new species are described, namely Maechidius aiyura sp. nov., M. alesbezdeki sp. nov., M. awu sp. nov., M. babyrousa sp. nov., M. bintang sp. nov., M. boessnecki sp. nov., M. brocki sp. nov., M. caperatus sp. nov., M. ciliatus sp. nov., M. crypticus sp. nov., M. dani sp. nov., M. deltouri sp. nov., M. dendrolagus sp. nov., M. hamatus sp. nov., M. kazantsevi sp. nov., M. konjo sp. nov., M. lapsus sp. nov., M. legalovi sp. nov., M. leucopsar sp. nov., M. longipes sp. nov., M. mailu sp. nov., M. maleo sp. nov., M. merdeka sp. nov., M. miklouhomaclayi sp. nov., M. nepenthephilus sp. nov., M. owenstanleyi sp. nov., M. riedeli sp. nov., M. similis sp. nov., M. skalei sp. nov., M. sougb sp. nov., M. suwawa sp. nov., M. trivialis sp. nov., M. ursus sp. nov., M. weigeli sp. nov. and M. yamdena sp. nov. Six new synonyms are proposed: Maechidius Macleay, 1819 = Epholcis Waterhouse, 1875 syn. nov. = Paramaechidius Frey, 1969 syn. nov., Maechidius esau Heller, 1914 = M. setosus Moser, 1920 syn. nov. = M. setosellus Frey, 1969 syn. nov., Maechidius heterosquamosus Heller, 1910 comb. rest. = Paramaechidius clypeatus Frey, 1969 syn. nov. and Maechidius paupianus Heller, 1910 = M. arrowi Frey, 1969 syn. nov. The first records of Maechidiini from the Tanimbar Islands (Yamdena), Sangihe Islands (Sangir) and Lesser Sunda Islands (Bali) are documented, of which the latter two are the northern- and westernmost known records of Maechidius and of the tribe Maechidiini. Lectotypes are designated for 23 species. Fifteen new combinations are proposed and the original combination to Maechidius is restored for four species. Ecological data are presented for the first time for selected Papuan and Wallacean species. Type material of Wallacean and Papuan Maechidiini is depicted for the first time. A key to species is given. In total, 78 species of Maechidiini are confirmed for the Indo-Australian transition zone.
Parental Smoking Behavior and Childhood Cancer: A Case-control Study
Authors: Alyahya Mohammad S. , Al-Sheyab Nihaya A. , Amro Batool
Published: October 2020

Objectives: In this paper, we examine the relationship between parental cigarette, waterpipe, or dual smoking behavior and the development of childhood cancer. Methods: We utilized a case-control design (200 in the case age- and sex-matched with 400 control group). The
sample was selected from 3 main public hospitals in Jordan. We used a demographic data sheet to collect background information about the children and their parents, and a structured questionnaire to assess the children's exposure to second-hand smoking. Result: Children of women who
smoke on occasional to daily levels were significantly more likely to have cancer (p = .007). Also, fathers who smoke on a daily basis were significantly more likely to conceive a child with cancer compared to nonsmokers (p < .001). The regression analysis showed that women who had past
exposure to smoke were more likely to have a child with cancer compared to none-exposure women (OR = 2.9). Conclusions: Children who are exposed to smoking by family members during pregnancy are significantly more likely to develop cancer. Furthermore, children who are exposed to waterpipe
and cigarette smoking combined during their neonatal period have a higher chance of developing cancer.
Investigation of stability of gold nanoparticles modified zinc–cobalt coating in an alkaline sodium borohydride solution
Authors: Zabielaitė Aušrinė , Šimkūnaitė Dijana , Balčiūnaitė Aldona , Šimkūnaitė-Stanynienė Birutė , Stalnionienė Irena , Naruškevičius Leonas , Upskuvienė Daina , Selskis Algirdas , Tamašauskaitė-Tamašiūnaitė Loreta , Norkus Eugenijus
Published: October 2020

The electrochemical stability and durability of ZnCo alloy thin layers deposited on the titanium surface (denoted as ZnCo/Ti) and those modified by small amounts of Au nanoparticles (denoted as AuZnCo/Ti) prepared via the electrochemical metal deposition technique and a simple galvanic displacement have been investigated in alkaline sodium borohydride (NaBH4) solutions. The physical properties of the fabricated AuZnCo/Ti catalysts have been examined using field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) and inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectroscopy (ICP-OES). The electrocatalytic activity of the ZnCo/Ti and AuZnCo/Ti catalysts toward the oxidation of NaBH4 has been evaluated in an alkaline medium using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and chronoamperometry (CA), whereas the catalytic efficiency of the catalysts for the hydrolysis reaction of NaBH4 has been also examined by measuring the amount of generated hydrogen via the classic water-displacement method. It has been determined that the modification of the ZnCo alloy coating by Au nanoparticles apparently improves not only the morphology and structure of the catalyst, but also the activity and stability of the one for the oxidation of NaBH4 in an alkaline medium as compared to those of ZnCo/Ti and bare Au. The AuZnCo/Ti catalysts that have Au loadings of 63 and 306 µg cm–2 give ca. 12 and 11, respectively, times higher NaBH4 oxidation current densities as compared to those of the bare Au catalyst. Moreover, the AuZnCo/Ti catalysts catalyze the hydrolysis reaction of NaBH4 in alkaline solutions.