bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Intelligence as a discipline, not just a practice
Authors: Hoppe Magnus
Published: January 2020

This paper is a call for a new research agenda for the topic of intelligence studiesas a scientific discipline counterbalancing the present domination of research in the art ofintelligence or intelligence as a practice. I argue that there is a need to move away from a narrowperspective on practice to pursue a broader understanding of intelligence as an organizationaldiscipline with all of its complexities where the subject is seen as more critical and is allowed toreflect on itself as a topic. This path will help intelligence academics connect to theoreticaldevelopments gained elsewhere and move forward, towards establishing more of an intelligencescience. The article is critical of what the author sees as a constructionist line of thinking.Instead the author presents a theory of intelligence as learning how to “muddle through”influenced more by organizational theory. The author also argues for an independent scientificjournal in Intelligence.
A research agenda for intelligence studies in business
Authors: Solberg Søilen Klaus
Published: January 2020

This research paper defines the scope for a research agenda for competitiveintelligence (CI), market intelligence (MI) and more generally for intelligence studies inbusiness. Respondents in the survey defined the scope to include analysis, traditionalphenomena or problems, new phenomena, trans- or cross disciplinary studies, methodologicalissue and industry specific studies. Respondents were also asked to come up with terms for agood definition of the study. We found that existing definitions of CI in use are overlapping withdefinitions of other more established fields of study, like decision sciences and marketingintelligence. Respondents agreed that it’s practical to define the study in terms of understandingthe external environment. In the discussion a parallel is made to the notion of surroundingworld analysis and Stevan Dedijer’s ideas about social intelligence. A broad discussion leads toa renewed interest for disciplines studied by the humanities as we show what has been lost inthe development of the social sciences. Implications are shown and future studies suggested.
Competitive intelligence: a case study on Qoros automotive manufacturing
Authors: Ahmadinia Hamed , Karim Muhaimin
Published: January 2020

In this paper, Qoros automotive manufacturing company, which is aiming atexpanding their market in Europe, will be analyzed. In this case, the challenges that the aforementioned company has faced will be explained and some recommendations regarding marketing, strategy, production methods and other related issues based on competitive intelligence models like SWOT, Porter's Five Forces Analysis, ADL Matrix, and other related theories will be provided.
What role does technology play for intelligence studies at the start of the 21st century?
Authors: Solberg Söilen Klaus
Published: January 2020

All articles published in this issue show the role technology plays for intelligence studies in business. We see how patents can be used for competitive and business intelligence, how datamining and software can be used for geoeconomics, how it may measure the success of open source innovation in different cultures, how business intelligence software can be evaluated using fuzzy PROMETHEE and how software and the internet are used for economic and industrial espionage.
Singh writes on geoeconomics on a micro scale, the question about where a business should be located geographically to be economically viable. The author presents a new geospatial methodological approach using census data. ArcGIS software is used as a geospatial analytics tool for hotspot analysis and for producing maps.
Deshpande, Ahmed, and Khode’s article entitled “Business intelligence evaluation model in enterprise systems using fuzzy PROMETHEE” presents a new model to evaluate business intelligence for enterprise systems.
The article by Capatina, Bleoju, Yamazaki and Nistor show how strategic intelligence solutions, once performed in a collaborative culture environment, will lead to the improvement of the partners’ managerial competences and will act as enablers for competitive positioning, proving the added-value of the acquired know-how through open innovation practices.
The article by Maadi, Javidnia and Khatami shows how patents can be used as a source of information for competitive/business intelligence to highlight the technological trends in the field of energy efficient cooling of data centers. As such it is a good applied example for how patent analysis can be done in a specific industry.
The last article entitled “Economic and industrial espionage at the start of the 21st century – Status quaestionis” is by Solberg Søilen. It is an attempt to define where the field of economic and industrial espionage is today, more than ten years after the author wrote a dissertation on the subject.
As always, we would above all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB. Thanks to Dr. Allison Perrigo for reviewing English grammar and helping with layout design for all articles and to the Swedish Research Council for continuous financial support.
Why the social sciences should be based in evolutionary theory: the example of geoeconomics and intelligence studies
Authors: Söilen Klaus Solberg
Published: January 2020

This article gathers arguments for why the social sciences should be based in evolutionary theory by showing the shortcomings of the current paradigm based on the study of physics. Two examples are used, the study of intelligence studies and geoeconomics. After a presentation of the geoeconomics literature and an explanation of what the organic view of the social sciences is, we follow the study of economics as it developed after the Second World War to see where it went wrong and why.
How companies work and fail to work with business intelligence
Authors: SØILEN KLAUS SOLBERG
Published: January 2020

Most papers in this issue deal with different sides of business intelligence systems. Empirical data from a number of countries and companies are gathered to illustrate how companies work and fail to work with competitive intelligence. The paper by Alnoukari and Hanano, entitled “Integration of business intelligence with corporate strategic management,” deals with the relationships between business intelligence and strategic management. The paper proposes a BSC-BI framework that facilitates the integration of business intelligence with the balanced scorecard methodology using an example of a case from the telecom industry.The paper by Jürgens, “Patent bibliometrics and its use for technology watch,” is on the topic of technology watch and statistical analysis of patent information and proposes patent indicators for technology watch activities, which are classified into four categories: performance, technology, patent value and collaboration indicators. The case of nanotechnology for a whole country is applied as example.The paper by Søilen, “Why care about competitive intelligence and market intelligence? The case of Ericsson and Swedish Cellulose Company (SCA),” tries to answer that question with an example of two Swedish companies. The history of the intelligence function in private companies is compared to that of state and military organizations. The most interesting question turns out to be why more companies don't pay attention to CI and MI when so many arguments speak to their advantages.The paper by Gauzelin and Benz is entitled “An examination of the impact of business intelligence systems on organizational decision making and performance: The case of France”. This empirical study examines the impact of business intelligence systems on organizational decision-making and performance. They found that when BI systems are deployed in SMEs, they facilitate timely decision making, improve organizational efficiency, enable a company to meet client’s needs appropriately and lead to more satisfied employees.The paper by Langlois and Chauvel is entitled “The impact of supply chain management on business intelligence”. The authors argue for why it makes sense to see the BI function as an extension of supply chain management, but moreover they show how difficult it has become to separate BI from other IT intensive processes in the organization.As always, we would above all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB. Thanks to Dr. Allison Perrigo for reviewing English grammar and helping with layout design for all articles and to the Swedish Research Council for continuous financial support.
An examination of the impact of business intelligence systems on organizational decision making and performance: The case of France
Authors: Gauzelin Sophian , Bentz Hugo
Published: January 2020

Turbulent times are a part of modern-day business, and the way a company handles disruptive events determines its success. Various technological tools have been developed to help businesses overcome unforeseen and anticipated events that may impact the business. One such technological tool is business intelligent systems, which help to gather data regarding business operations and environment turning it into information that can be clearly understood. Large companies have adopted the use of these big data analytic systems, but most small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) lag behind. There is little information on how business intelligence systems impact SME businesses. This study examined the impact of business intelligence systems on organizational decision-making and performance. The study consists of an empirical qualitative research that was carried out with interviews of 200 members of 10 selected SMEs. The study found out that when BI systems are deployed in SMEs, they facilitate timely decision making, improves organizational efficiency, enable a company to meet client’s needs appropriately and lead to more satisfied employees.
The impact of supply chain management on business intelligence
Authors: Langlois Audrey , Chauvel Benjamin
Published: January 2020

This conceptual paper investigates the impact of the supply chain on business intelligence (BI) in private companies. The article focuses on these two subjects in order to broadly understand the concept of business intelligence, supply chain and characteristics implement such as OLAP, data warehouse or data mining. It looks at the joint advantages of the business intelligence and supply chain concepts and revisits the traditional BI concept. We found that the supply chain includes many data samples collected from the first supplier to the last customer, which have to be analysed by the company in order to be more efficient. Based on these observations the authors argue for why it makes sense to see the BI function as an extension of supply chain management, but moreover they show how difficult it has become to separate BI from other IT intensive processes in the organization.
A Bayesian approach to developing a strategic early warning system for the French milk market
Authors: Bisson Christophe , Gurpinar Furkan
Published: January 2020

A new approach is provided in our paper for creating a strategic early warning system allowing the estimation of the future state of the milk market as scenarios. This is in line with the recent call from the EU commission for tools that help to better address such a highly volatile market. We applied different multivariate time series regression and Bayesian networks on a pre-determined map of relations between macro-economic indicators. The evaluation of our findings with root mean square error (RMSE) performance score enhances the robustness of the prediction model constructed. Our model could be used by competitive intelligence teams to obtain sharper scenarios, leading companies and public organisations to better anticipate market changes and make more robust decisions.
A business intelligence framework for Sultan Qaboos University: A case study in the Middle East
Authors: Al Rashdi Saud Sultan , Nair Smitha Sunil Kumaran
Published: January 2020

Higher education institutions generate big data, yet they are not exploited to obtain usable information. Making sense of data within organizations becomes the key factor for success in maintaining sustainability within the market and gaining competitive advantages. Business intelligence and analytics addresses the challenges of data visibility and data integrity that helps to shift the big data to provide deep insights into such data. This research aims to build a customized business intelligence (BI) framework for Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). The research starts with assessing the BI maturity of the educational institutions prior to implementation followed by developing a BI prototype to test BI capabilities of performance management in SQU. The prototype has been tested for the key business activity (KBA): teaching and learning at one college of the university. The results show that the aggregation of the different KBAs and KPIs will contribute to the overall SQU performance and will provide better visibility of how SQU as an organization is functioning, which is the key towards the successful implementation of BI within SQU in the future.
An evaluation of competitive and technological intelligence tools: A cluster analysis of users’ perceptions
Authors: Fourati-Jamoussi Fatma , Niamba Claude-Narcisse , Duquennoy Julien
Published: January 2020

The purpose of this article is to discuss and evaluate the use of competitive and technological intelligence (CTI) tools by students to help designers of these tools get the best efficiency out of a monitoring process. This article introduces an application of the cluster analysis method and the competitive and technological intelligence literature. In order to evaluate the use of CTI tools, we deal with two evaluation models: Task-Technology Fit (TTF) and the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A survey was sent to users of CTI tools addressed to engineering students and the most pertinent replies were examined. The responses were analyzed by using the statistical software SPAD. Results showed a typology from the various profiles of users of this technology by using the method of classification. We note different perceptions between student users. Although this study remains focused on the individual perspective, it requires more examination about the organizational impact of the use of CTI tools. The identification of the different user profiles was done by using a cluster analysis. For the designers of CTI tools these results highlight the importance of user perception, suggesting designers take into account the perception of all user types. As these tools develop, more and more companies will be looking for skills of future engineers for monitoring and management of strategic information. That’s why practical courses in CTI are taught to the students in order to take into account the companies’ needs.
Identifying and describing sub-processes in the strategic intelligence process by qualitative content analysis in an inductive way
Authors: Abbaspour Ahmad , Amirkhani Amir Hussein , Pour Ezzat Ali Asghar , Hozori Mohammad Javad
Published: January 2020

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the sub-processes of the strategic intelligence process in organizational level analysis. Data were collected by searching the major academic and practitioner books, theses and journals in the Ebsco, Google Scholar and IranDoc databases in Persian and English. Nine thousand pages of text data were examined using content analysis. Fourteen main sub-processes were identified to describe the strategic intelligence process: (1) Identification of strategic environments and prioritizing them, (2) determination of organizational information needs and prioritizing them, (3) determination of monitoring period for each section of strategic environment and organization key information needs (KIN), (4) determination of information sources and assessment of information capturing, (5) external information scanning, (6) internal information extracting, (7) setting criteria for gathered information assessment, (8) information filtering, categorizing and abstracting, (9) information analysis, (10) interpretation and sense making (intelligence generation), (11) determination of intelligence users and intelligence distribution media, (12) intelligence distribution, (13) feedback from recipients, revision and adjustment, intelligence storage, and (14) intelligence use.  The results provided useful insight for strategic intelligence process implementation in organizations and its effectiveness evaluation. The innovative aspect of this study is its response to a lack studies about strategic intelligence process modelling.
Mapping the structure and evolution of JISIB: A bibliometric analysis of articles published in the Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business between 2011 and 2017
Authors: López-Robles José Ricardo , Otegi-Olaso Jose Ramón , Arcos Rubén , Gamboa- Rosales Nadia Karina , Gamboa-Rosales Hamurabi
Published: January 2020

Today, organizations are facing technological, economic and social challenges that require the intelligent use of data, information and knowledge. To this end, organizations are developing capabilities around intelligence. From the organizational point of view, intelligence in business is a relatively new field study, so it is convenient to know and understand what the main themes are and their evolution in order to facilitate their integration. Taking this into account, the current research conducts a conceptual and structural analysis of the Journal of Intelligence Studies in Business (JISIB). JISIB is one of the few academic journals devoted purely to publishing articles about business intelligence, collective intelligence, competitive intelligence, economic intelligence, market intelligence, marketing intelligence, scientific and technical intelligence, strategic intelligence, and their equivalent terms in other languages. This analysis is carried out by quantifying the main bibliometric performance indicators, identifying the main authors and evaluating the development of the main themes within it using SciMAT as a bibliometric analysis software. To this purpose, the documents published in JISIB from 2011 to 2017 were retrieved from two different sources: the JISIB official web page and the Web of Science. In this way, the bibliometric performance analysis evaluates the impact of the scientific output based on publications and their citations, while science mapping illustrates the intellectual structure of the journal and the evolution of the main research themes. Bearing in mind that JISIB provides an open platform for the publication of original research articles, opinion articles, book reviews and conference proceedings about the intelligence field, this research allows to understand its structure and evolution and all the themes associated with it. It provides a framework to support intelligence researchers and professionals in the development and direction of future research by identifying emerging, transversal, core and declining themes. Finally, this study includes a performance analysis of JISIB.
A competitive intelligence model based on information literacy: organizational competitiveness in the context of the 4th Industrial Revolution
Authors: Ottonicar Selma Leticia Capinzaiki , Valentim Marta Lígia Pomim , Mosconi Elaine
Published: January 2020

This paper investigated how information literacy and competitive intelligence are connected in business management and information science fields. It demonstrates the contribution of information literacy in the phases of the competitive intelligence process. This paper is relevant, since the model supports creativity and collaborative innovation in small businesses in the context of Industry 4.0. Furthermore, it contributed to connect the information science and business management fields, so it is multidisciplinary. It also proposes a theoretical model of information literacy and competitive intelligence in the context of Industry 4.0, which can be used for applied research. The methodology was developed based on a systematic literature review (SLR) of information literature and competitive intelligence. These concepts contribute to the development of a framework and a conceptual model in which the three themes are interconnected and demonstrate that information literacy can efficiently contribute to the competitive intelligence process, especially in the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Writing the Novel of Ideas: The Philosopher and Public Intellectual
Authors: Rowe Anne
Published: January 2020

Murdoch’s place as a writer in the tradition of ‘the novel of ideas’, is explored in this chapter, as are the ways in which her political views and her standing as a public intellectual impact on novels that she denied were intentionally informed by either. The reasons why Murdoch’s moral philosophy was not well received on its publication are explained as is its current significance in the field of Virtue Ethics. The chapter moves on to illustrate the ways that her philosophy covertly infiltrates her novels without any trace of didacticism, and the difficult moral paradoxes it raises. It looks at the function of the many amateur and professional philosophers who feature in the novels before it moves on to explore how Murdoch’s robust opinions on political and social issues covertly inform novels in ways which have never been fully acknowledged by literary critics.
Black Sojourners in the Métropole and in the Homeland: Challenges of Otherness in Calixthe Beyala’s Loukoum: The “Little Prince” of Belleville and Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane
Authors: Ojo Philip
Published: January 2020

Chapter explores the complexities of the postcolonial migrant experience in France via francophone literary works Loukoum: The “Little Prince” of Bellville (Calixthe Beyala) and Juletane Philip Ojo (Myriam Warner-Vieyra). In doing so, it illustrates the extent to which literary representations provide a space for criticism and mediation of migration and otherness, and a voice for disenfranchised immigrants who long for a hybrid space that they can call home. The characters’ use of language, which includes word play and transformations of standard French, is analysed, alongside other ways in which they attempt to negotiate migratory space.
Staging the Scaffold: Criminal Conversion Narratives of the Late Eighteenth Century
Authors: Junker Carsten
Published: January 2020

Chapter considers how criminal conversion narratives staged the personae of enslaved black men in ways that legitimised white-coded religious and legal discourses. It also discusses the ways in which abolitionists used the same narratives to bolster their cause, namely by diverting attention away from the alleged crimes of the enslaved toward the cruelties that drove the perpetrators to commit their crimes in the first place. Indeed, the chapter argues that criminal conversion narratives oscillated between contradictory functions: potentially humanizing the enslaved by framing them as redeemable subjects, on the one hand, and presenting them as pieces of property that can be subjected to violent punishment, thereby condemning them to the sphere of the not-quite-human and preserving civic society as the realm of white power, on the other.
A Tale of Two Monuments
Authors: Hassett Dónal
Published: January 2020

The Mediterranean separates two worlds in me, one where memories are preserved in measured spaces, the other where the wind and sand erase all trace of men on the open ranges

(Albert Camus, The First Man).1

With these words, colonial Algeria’s most famous war orphan, Albert Camus, encapsulated the struggle of thousands of families across his homeland, both Europeans and indigenous Algerians, who sought to commemorate a loved one lost on the distant battlefields of Europe. For Camus, while France was the land of cypress-lined war cemeteries, his Algerian homeland was marked by memorial anarchy where memory defied official processes of regulation and the forces of nature conspired to undermine aspirations to eternal perpetuation. Behind this lyricism lies a tacit acknowledgement of the very real challenges facing those who seek to elaborate a commemorative discourse in colonial and post-colonial societies where, even more so than in metropolitan societies, rival narratives of past, present and future are constantly struggling for dominance. In this chapter, I will trace the evolution of commemorative culture in colonial and post-colonial Algeria by comparing and contrasting the case studies of the war memorials in the cities of Algiers and Oran. In ...
‘Nos ancêtres les colons’
Authors: Harrison Nicholas
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines educational history in colonial Algeria, the context from which most of the writers and texts at the centre of the book emerged. It raises general questions about the role played in colonialism and its purported ‘civilizing mission’ by colonial education, which was characterized by a remarkable diversity of perspectives, policies and institutions. Examples include the prestigious Lyc裠‎Bugeaud and the teacher training college in Bouzar蠨‎, which were attended by several major writers; and m裥‎rsas (/madrasas) where Islam and Arabic were studied, which were also attended by some eminent francophone writers, and funded by the French authorities well into an era when all state-funded education was supposed to be secular. Debates included those around adaptation and assimilation associated with the mythical phrase ‘nos anc鳲‎es les Gaulois’. Overall the chapter shows that the place of education in colonialism is misunderstood if one assumes that colonial education worked simply and consistently as a tool of colonialism – even if that was a significant part of the story. [166]
Competing Narratives and Performancesin Rwanda’s Gacaca Courts
Authors: Breed Ananda , Jamar Astrid
Published: January 2020

The aim of this chapter is to deconstruct how human rights reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch produce knowledge on the Rwandan gacaca courts as a failed (semi-) legal justice mechanism, and the implications therein. These reports play a fundamental role in our understanding of conflict, violence and accountability measures in the aftermath of atrocities. We use the analytical tools provided by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur's work on narrative and memory in order to understand how such knowledge is constructed and what is excluded in human rights reports. We argue that the human rights reports establish a fixed and static conception of gacaca. Crucially, we show that human rights reports remake history into a single imagery by eradicating context and subjectivity. What remains is a story of failure that leaves little room for different interpretations or meanings attached to gacaca.
Maps and Territories
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

The rapidity of postwar globalization and the structural changes it has brought to both social and spatial aspects of everyday life have meant, in France as elsewhere, the destabilizing of senses of place, identity, and belonging, as once familiar, local environments are increasingly de-localized and made porous to global trends and planetary preoccupations. Maps and Territories identifies such preoccupations as a fundamental underlying impetus for the contemporary French novel. Indeed, like France itself, the protagonists of its best fiction are constantly called upon to renegotiate their identity in order to maintain any sense of belonging within the troubled territories they call home. Maps and Territories reads today’s French novel for how it re-maps such territories, and for how it positions its protagonists vis-à-vis the spatial crisis of globalized capitalism. It uncovers previously unseen affinities amongst—and offers original perspectives on—a diverse set of authors: namely, Michel Houellebecq, Chloé Delaume, Lydie Salvayre, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Virginie Despentes, Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, and Marie Darrieussecq. In the process, it sets the literary works into dialogue with a range of influential theorists of postmodernity and globalization, including Paul Virilio, Marc Augé, Peter Sloterdijk, Bruno Latour, Fredric Jameson, Edward Casey, David Harvey, and Ursula K. Heise.
Dérive psychose géographique
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

This chapter reads Chloé Delaume’s J’habite dans la télévision [I Live in the Television] (2006), a novel that directly confronts the reader with the hegemony of commercial visual media in everyday life. Delaume takes as a starting point former TF1 CEO Patrick Le Lay’s assertion that television exists in order to ‘sell to Coca Cola…available human brain time.’ Delaume subjects herself to 22 months of constant television viewing, documenting—and attempting to resist—such effects upon her mind and body. By amplifying the everyday activity of television watching to the point of hyperbole, Delaume takes us from the ‘metanoia’ of having the polished world delivered to you on the screen, to the ‘paranoia’ and ‘dérive psychose géographique’ [drifting geographical psychosis] that results from television’s worst de-localizing and de-socializing effects. This chapter draws upon Paul Virilio’s media theory and Delaume’s own musings upon map and territory—which draw upon Deleuze and Guattari—to reveal the processes by which commercial visual media deprives its viewers of the cognitive distance vis-à-vis reality needed to forge existential territory. Delaume’s ludic novel goes to great lengths to restore this distance, and exposes the political and phallocratic regime behind television’s imposed logics in the process.
A Tale of Two Frances
Authors: Armstrong Joshua
Published: January 2020

This chapter reads Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015-17), a comédie inhumaine that depicts a deeply divided—increasingly neoliberal and reactionary—France. Despentes, in a rather utopian vein, would heal those divisions, staging a collective social awakening. As such, the trilogy is symptomatic of a trend one encounters in a swath of recent French novels, in which a sudden refusal of the neoliberal socio-political order ignites revolutionary movements. A key element of these novels (including Despentes’s) is the representing of a post-Mitterrand France for whom society is marked by la précarité [precarity]. Vernon Subutex must fall through the cracks of society and become homeless in order to, in a surprising reversal, encounter new, utopian, and borderline-mystical social possibilities. I uncover the internal contradictions of this reversal, however, noting that such contradictions are also symptomatic of that recent utopian novelistic impulse that must imagine another world at all costs. This chapter reads Despentes’s depiction of a divided, pre- and post-‘Charlie Hebdo’ France in the light of Emmanuel Todd’s Qui est Charlie: Sociologie d’une crise religieuse ? [Who Is Charlie?: Xenophobia and the New Middle Class], as well as via a reading of Despentes’s own writings on gender and society.
Writing and the Revolution
Authors: Brown Katie
Published: January 2020

In contrast to recent theories of the ‘global’ or ‘post-national’ Latin American novel, this book reveals the enduring importance of the national in contemporary Venezuelan fiction, arguing that the novels studied respond to both the nationalist and populist cultural policies of the Bolivarian Revolution and Venezuela’s literary isolation. The latter results from factors including the legacy of the Boom and historically low levels of emigration from Venezuela. Grounded in theories of metafiction and intertextuality, the book provides a close reading of eight novels published between 2004 (the year in which the first Minister for Culture was appointed) and 2012 (the last full year of President Chávez’s life), relating these novels to the context of their production. Each chapter explores a way in which these novels reflect on writing, from the protagonists as readers and writers in different contexts, through appearances from real life writers, to experiments with style and popular culture, and finally questioning the boundaries between fiction and reality. This literary analysis complements overarching studies of the Bolivarian Revolution by offering an insight into how Bolivarian policies and practices affect people on an individual, emotional and creative level. In this context, self-reflexive narratives afford their writers a form of political agency.
Poetics of Palliation
Authors: Pladek Birttany
Published: January 2020

In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.
Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction
Authors: Thiess Derek J.
Published: January 2020

Sport and Monstrosity in Science Fiction examines fantastic representations of sport in science fiction, both cataloguing this almost entirely unexamined literary tradition and arguing that the reason for its neglect reflects a more widespread social suspicion of the athletic body as monstrous. Combining scholarship of monstrosity with a biopolitically focused philosophy of embodiment, this work plumbs the depths of our abjection of the athletic body and challenges us to reconsider sport as an intersectional space. In this latter endeavour it contradicts the image presented by both the most dystopian films such as Deathrace and Rollerball as well as social criticism of sport that limits its focus to an essentially violent masculinity. The book traces an alternative tradition of sport sf through authors as diverse as Arthur C. Clarke, Steven Barnes, and Joan Slonczewski, exploring the way the intersectional categories of gender, race, and age in these works are negotiated in, for example, a solar wind sailing race or futuristic anti-gravity boxing. These complex athletic bodies display the social mobility that sport allows and challenge us to acknowledge our own monstrously animal bodies and our place in a “cycle of living and dying.”
A CONSTRUCTIVIST MODEL OF BANK BRANCH FRONT-OFFICE EMPLOYEE EVALUATION: AN FCM-SD-BASED APPROACH
Authors: Paes Paes de Faria Ana C. C. , Ferreira Fernando A.F. , Dias Paulo J.V.L. , Çipi Amali
Published: January 2020

The banking sector is one of the primary drivers of economic development. This sector has been affected by various crises throughout its
history – most recently, the 2008 financial and economic crisis. In response, banking institutions have had to make diverse changes to their procedures and deal
with new concerns related to changes within markets. One of the main recent developments in this sector is the new commercial function assigned to bank branch
front-office employees, who have become responsible for selling financial products and services, as well as recruiting and retaining clients. As a result, the
sector needs new employee performance evaluation methods in line with banks and staff members’ requirements. This study combined fuzzy cognitive mapping techniques
and the system dynamics (SD) approach to develop a well-informed performance analysis system for assessing bank branch front-office employees. The proposed system
was validated by the Business Process Management Competence Center director at Millennium BCP – a Portuguese private banking corporation. The main difference between
the model constructed in the present research and current evaluation practices is that the criteria were collected directly from multiple specialists working at different
commercial banks, who deal daily with this decision problem. The model’s theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.
ECONOMY-WATER NEXUS IN AGRICULTURAL SECTOR: DECOMPOSING DYNAMICS IN WATER FOOTPRINT BY THE LMDI
Authors: Su Weihua , Chen Sibo , Baležentis Tomas , Chen Ji
Published: January 2020

Traditional economic activities induce environmental pressures. In order to ensure sustainable economic growth,
one needs to decouple it from the environmental pressures. Sustainable growth of the agricultural sector is topical in the sense that economic
activity supports rural populations, whereas the resulting environmental pressures may affect diverse groups of population. Thus, the analysis
of water footprint related to crop farming is important in the sense of efficient resource use and sustainable development of agriculture
in general. In this paper, we focus on Lithuanian crop farming and the related green and grey water footprints. Specifically, we decompose
the changes in the water footprints during 2000–2016 by exploiting the Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index. Due to the expansion of the areas harvested,
the scale effect appeared as an important driver of growth in green and grey water footprints. The shifts in spatial distribution of area harvested
virtually had no influence on the dynamics in either of the water footprints. The crop-mix effect was much higher for the grey water footprint
(51% over the period of 2000–2015) than it was the case for the green water footprint (21%). The yield growth induced growth in both green
and grey water footprints.
Cosmological Simulation of Galaxy Groups and Clusters. I. Global Effect of Feedback from Active Galactic Nuclei
Authors: Kar Chowdhury Rudrani , Chatterjee Suchetana , Lonappan Anto. I. , Khandai Nishikanta , Di Matteo Tiziana
Published: January 2020

In this study we quantify the properties of the gas and dark matter around active galactic nuclei (AGNs) in simulated galaxy groups and clusters and analyze the effect of AGN feedback on the surrounding intracluster (group) medium. Our results suggest downsizing of AGN luminosity with host halo mass, supporting the results obtained from clustering studies of AGNs. By examining the temperature and density distribution of the gas in the vicinity of AGNs we show that due to feedback from the central engine, the gas gets displaced from the center of the group/cluster resulting in a reduction of the density but an enhancement of temperature. We show that these effects are pronounced at both high and low redshifts and propose new observables to study the effect of feedback in higher-redshift galaxies. We also show that the average stellar mass is decreased in halos in the presence of AGN feedback confirming claims from previous studies. Our work for the first time uses a fully cosmological hydrodynamic simulation to evaluate the global effects of AGN feedback on their host dark matter halos as well as galaxies at scales of galaxy groups and clusters.
Young Stars near Cometary Globule CG 30 in the Tumultuous Gum Nebula
Authors: Yep Alexandra C. , White Russel J.
Published: January 2020

We have conducted a high-dispersion (R ∼ 34,000) optical spectroscopic study of 10 young stars near the cometary globule CG 30 in the Gum Nebula, a diffuse H ii region home to at least 32 cometary globules. All 10 spectroscopically observed stars at the nebula’s northern edge are of low mass (spectral types M4.5–K5), have broad Hα emission, and show spectral veiling. Eight of the 10 are classical T Tauri stars. We spectroscopically measure the photospheric properties of CG 30 IRS 4 inside CG 30. Though embedded, CG 30 IRS 4 is T Tauri–like, with relatively slow projected rotation and moderate veiling. Undepleted Li absorptions, strong Hα emissions, and positions well above the main sequence on an H-R diagram suggest that the 10 stars are ≲1 Myr old. Using our measurements, previous spectroscopy, and previous photometry of 11 other young stars in the area, we determine stellar, kinematic, and accretion properties of a total of 21 young stars. Shared radial velocities, proper motions, distances, and ages suggest that 14 of the young stars (including CG 30 IRS 4) are kinematically related to CG 30. From Gaia DR2 distances to six of these stars, we derive a distance of 358.1 ± 2.2 pc to the cometary globule complex CG 30/31/38. The CG 30 association has an accretor fraction of 29% ± 14%, low for quiescent clusters of similar age but consistent with other irradiated clusters. The Gum Nebula’s moderate radiation environment (

at CG 30) may be strong enough to shorten disk lifetimes.
The ELM Survey. VIII. Ninety-eight Double White Dwarf Binaries
Authors: Brown Warren R. , Kilic Mukremin , Kosakowski Alekzander , Andrews Jeff J. , Heinke Craig O. , Agüeros Marcel A. , Camilo Fernando , Gianninas A. , Hermes J. J. , Kenyon Scott J.
Published: January 2020

We present the final sample of 98 detached double white dwarf (WD) binaries found in the Extremely Low Mass (ELM) Survey, a spectroscopic survey targeting <0.3 M
⊙ He-core WDs completed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey footprint. Over the course of the survey we observed ancillary low-mass WD candidates like GD 278, which we show is a P = 0.19 day double WD binary, as well as candidates that turn out to be field blue straggler/subdwarf A-type stars with luminosities too high to be WDs given their Gaia parallaxes. Here, we define a clean sample of ELM WDs that is complete within our target selection and magnitude range 15 < g
0 < 20 mag. The measurements are consistent with 100% of ELM WDs being 0.0089 < P < 1.5 day double WD binaries, 35% of which belong to the Galactic halo. We infer that these are mostly He+CO WD binaries given the measurement constraints. The merger rate of the observed He+CO WD binaries exceeds the formation rate of stable mass-transfer AM CVn binaries by a factor of 25, and so the majority of He+CO WD binaries must experience unstable mass transfer and merge. The systems with the shortest periods, such as J0651+2844, are signature LISA verification binaries that can be studied with gravitational waves and light.
Multiple morphological abnormalities in a blue shark Prionace glauca (Linnaeus, 1758) embryo from the Peruvian coast, southeast Pacific
Authors: Kanagusuku Keny , Romero Miguel , Ramírez-Amaro Sergio
Published: January 2020

This study reports for the first time a case of multiple morphological abnormalities in a blue shark Prionace glauca embryo collected on the Peruvian coast, southeast Pacific. External exploration and radiograph picture showed duplicated parts in the cephalic region (mouths and eye sockets) and trunk anomalies (thoracic lordosis and rolled caudal fin). The duplicate face parts in a single head seen in the embryo, suggest a diprosopia anomaly.
Nematode parasites in the striped mullet (Mugil cephalus Linnaeus, 1758) in the southern Gulf of California
Authors: Álvarez-Sánchez Ana R. , Méndez-Martínez Yuniel , Reyes-Pérez Juan José , Romo-Quiñonez Carlos R. , Hernández-Zárate Galdy
Published: January 2020

Coastal lagoons are an important component of the Gulf of California as they are considered natural ecosystems with high productivity and home to species of regional economic interest such as the striped mullet (Mugil cephalus), which, for its eating habits tends to present parasitism. The objective of the present work was to identify and determine the number of nematode parasites in the striped mullet in three lagoon systems (Navachiste, La Reforma, and Ceuta) in coastal areas of the southern Gulf of California. Thirty Mugil cephalus were randomly obtained from each of the lagoon systems. From each fish was obtained the total length, weight and condition factor (FC), next was dissected to be analyzed hepatosomatic index (HSI) and determine by direct count the prevalence, average intensity and average abundance of nematode; nematodes are identified taxonomically and molecularly. The nematode parasites found to belong to the genus Contracaecum of the family Anisakidae in all the fish sampled the parasitic prevalence was 67%. The nematode parasites found by sex indicated that 77% of the striped mullet females analyzed were parasitized, while the males presented 59%. The CF obtained was 1.17- 4.07, and the HSI ranged between 0.85 and 1.45; the average intensity for nematodes was 7.45, and the average abundance was 4.97, demonstrating that Contracaecum multipapillatum is the main nematode parasite present in all lagoon systems the southern Gulf of California.
A new record of a tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon Fabricius, 1798 breeding female in the coast of Campeche, Mexico
Authors: Gómez-Ponce Mario Alejandro , Bolaños-Martínez Nataly , Díaz-Jaimes Píndaro , Bortolini-Rosales José Luis , Castellanos Pérez Pedro De Jesús
Published: January 2020

The tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon is native to the Indo-West Pacific Ocean, covering the east coast of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Southeast Asia, Taiwan, China, the Sea of Japan, New Guinea and Australia. A new report was recorded on the capture in the wild of a female tiger shrimp P. monodon in conditions of reproductive maturity on the coast of Campeche in the Gulf of Mexico. The specimen was captured by a trawler operating near the coast of Campeche, in front of Carmen Island. The specimen was identified using dichotomous keys, additionally corroborated with analysis of the sequence of a fragment of 650 base pairs (bp) of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) gene cytochrome oxidase I (COI), and compared with the sequence of P. monodon reported in GenBank. The specimen was deposited in the National Collection of Crustaceans of the Institute of Biology of the UNAM. Histological analysis of the gonads revealed that the organism was in a reproductive condition as ovaries contained oocytes in an advanced development state. The molecular data (sequenced fragments F and R) were identical with the COI sequence of P. monodon deposited in GenBank, thus confirming the presence of P. monodon from the coasts of Isla del Carmen, Campeche.
Some hematology and blood chemistry parameters of the Pacific fat sleeper Dormitator latifrons (Richardson, 1844)
Authors: Ruiz-González Luis Eduardo , Vega-Villasante Fernando , Tintos-Gómez Adrián , Del Rio-Zaragoza Oscar Basilio , Hernández-Rodríguez Mónica , Patiño Barragán Manuel , Badillo-Zapata Daniel
Published: January 2020

Dormitator latifrons is an amphidromous fish species distributed on the Pacific coastal region from California to Peru. It has a high potential to be cultured in Mexico. However, there is very little information about its biology, physiology and culture. This research study is a contribution to the hematology and blood chemistry of this native species. Results show hematocrit values of 28%, erythrocytes 2.075×106 mm3, leukocytes 35.035×103 mm3, mean corpuscular volume 161.547 fL, NBT 0.39, glucose 51.467 mg dL-1, protein 3.936 g dL-1, albumin 1.906 g dL-1, globulin 2.391 g dL-1 and albumin/globulin ratio 0.686.