Search

This article introduces a flexible and easy-to-implement open-ended scientific inquiry activity called the Paper Towels Challenge. After experimentally determining which of three unbranded paper towels is the most absorbent, students discuss their results and methods. The teacher facilitates the discussion of epistemological issues. This activity can be used regardless of the participants' age or country to promote science understanding, NGSS science and engineering practices, and twenty-first century skills, such as critical thinking and communication. The many uses, benefits, and possible adaptations of the activity are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 21st century, there is a growing Brazilian academic interest from professors and students in researching realities from Asia, especially in postgraduate courses in Language Arts, Philosophy and Human Science. The paper aims not only to point to a broader panorama of Centers, Nuclei, Programs, Research, Study and Work Groups, Thematic Sessions and Events with Asian themes in the aforementioned academic areas in Brazil, but also to make a brief analysis of the papers carried out in Work Groups and Thematic Sessions of the ANPTECRE and PPCIR (CONACIR) national congresses dedicated to realities of Asian origin, taking into account three criteria, i.e. Religious Studies methodologies used, the genres of authorship, and the religious traditions that were approached by these papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the secretary-general of the United Nations has questioned whether the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a gap in global defenses against bioterrorism that a nefarious group may seek to exploit, the reality is that the pandemic has only underscored the folly of biological warfare, a strategy which relies on weapons – viruses, bacteria, and other pathogens – that would indiscriminately wreak havoc on the attacked and the attacker alike. Indeed, most countries in the world are part of the Biological Weapons Convention, the international treaty that – while lacking an enforcement mechanism – has successfully bolstered the near universal norms against the use of biological weapons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its launch, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the China-led economic and cultural development strategy, captured impressive media and scholarly attention and critiques. CHINA'S ASIAN DREAM: Empire Building along the New Silk RoadGEOCULTURAL POWER: China's Quest to Revive the Silk Roads for the Twenty-First Century: By Tom Miller. Miller connects the China's "Go-West" policy with the rise of infrastructure financing as a key component of the international donor community where China is taking the lead. [Extracted from the article]

The 21st century business environment is very dynamic, competitive and complex due to unpredictable changing consumer behaviour, savvy customers, globalization and the impact of technology in general. Organization managers are struggling to think and rethink of the best competitive marketing strategies that can help them to survive in the game. One of the strategies effectively utilized is branding. Organizations are struggling to build appealing, and strong brands that can help to outlive in the game and make profit. Considering that, different strategies employed by managers to invest in building strong brand equity have been promoted in literature; conceptualization of the power of internal branding in building strong brand equity is not clearly established. Therefore, this paper aims at conceptualizing internal branding as an important instrument or strategy that can help an organization to build and sustain brand equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From images of periodical subdivision and recycled papers on the move, to perfect machines, disruptive compositors, strikes and disasters, the press had many different ways of visualizing its infrastructure. Drawing on a wide range of British and Irish sources, including national, local and trade papers, quarterlies, mid-Victorian monthlies, socialist magazines, and the New Journalism of the 1890s, this article asks what was politically at stake when the press put its materiality and mobility on display. Focusing on evolutionary trees, bodies, and machines, on recycling, circuits, and networks, and on protest, disruption, and breakdown, I seek to bring nineteenth- and twenty-first century ways of seeing press infrastructure into dialogue, considering how the metaphors we use can define the object in view. The analysis concludes by linking these debates to the revolutionary collapse of capitalist newspaper production in William Morris’s ‘News from Nowhere’, serialized in the Commonweal (1890), and to the Martian destruction of press infrastructure in H. G. Wells’s Pearson’s Magazine serial ‘The War of the Worlds’ (1897). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the relationship between Nuu-chah-nulth ancestral belongings assembled on the third voyage of James Cook and a set of eighteenth-century watercolor albums produced in London by Sarah Stone. The translation of Mowachaht/Muchalaht material heritage from Nootka Sound (Vancouver Island) into watercolor image-proxies allows us to follow their storied social lives: their cultural significance prior to leaving their homelands and shorelines; their position in the collection and display of "artificial curiosities" at Sir Ashton Lever museum in Leicester Square, London; their replication by Stone, an artist who tested the boundaries of watercolor as a gendered "polite" art; and their present-day meanings for Nuu-chah-nulth creators and the descendants of those who met Cook in 1778. By attending to the various elisions between object and image, this research explores the potential of historic ethnographic archives and collections to produce a multiplicity of readings across various communities of knowledge, cultures, and time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The Mediterranean Sea is a region characterized by high seismic activity, with at least 200 tsunami events recorded from the fourth century to the present twenty-first century. Numerous studies have been conducted to understand past tsunami events, earthquake–tsunami generation, tsunami recurrence periods, tsunami vulnerability zones, and tsunami hazard mitigation strategies. Therefore, gaining insights into future trends and opportunities in Mediterranean Sea tsunami research is crucial for significantly contributing to all relevant aspects. This study aims to assess such trends and opportunities through a scientometric analysis of publications indexed by Web of Science from 2000 to 2023. Results: Based on a selection of 329 publications, including research articles, review articles, book chapters, and conference papers, published between 2000 and 2023, Italy has the highest number of publications and citations in this field. The number of publications has increased significantly, especially after the 2004 Indian Ocean, 2011 Tohoku, and 2018 Palu tsunamis. According to the keyword analysis, the terms "tsunami", "earthquake", "hazard", "wave", "Mediterranean", "coast", and "tectonic" were the most frequently used in these publications. Research themes consist of four classifications: motor themes, such as seismic hazard; specific but well-developed themes, like tsunamiite; emerging or disappearing themes, for example, climate change; and general or basic themes, such as equations and megaturbidite. The number of publications related to the motor theme classification continued to grow throughout 2000–2023. Topics from 2011–2023 are more complex compared to 2000–2010, characterized by the emergence of new keywords such as evacuation planning, risk reduction, risk mitigation, building vulnerability, coastal vulnerability, climate change, probabilistic tsunami hazard assessment (PTVA-3 and PTVA-4). However, topics that were popular in the 2000–2010 period (e.g., paleotsunami deposits, earthquake, and tsunami propagation analysis) also increased in 2011–2023. Conclusions: Research topics with high centrality and density such as seismic hazard will continue to develop and prospect. The cluster network of this topic includes seismoturbidites, sedimentary features, tsunami modeling, active faults, catalog, and historical earthquakes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democratic erosion in the EU's Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states has confounded EU policy-makers. In this paper, we investigate the assumptions behind the climate of optimism about CEE democratization that prevailed in EU decision-making before and after the 5th and 6th enlargements, and the extent to which political science participated in this intellectual climate. Based on a qualitative analysis of EU decision-making in the early twenty-first century and a quantitative analysis of 500 randomly sampled papers published between 2000 and 2015, we find that both policy makers and the most influential research in political science shared a bias towards optimism structured by common assumptions: A procedural understanding of democracy, a rational institutionalist belief in the EU's capacity to bring these procedures about with the use of incentives and the related assumption that sociocultural dimensions of democracy would eventually follow institutions. We argue that these common assumptions help to explain both the EU's failure to pre-empt and respond proportionately to democratic erosion, and the failure of our discipline to check that optimism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians know a great deal more about the laws and policies that first created unauthorized status than the people who had to live within these constraints. What if we tell the history of the undocumented as a history of a people, rather than a history of a state-constructed category? Scholars have noted that unauthorized status exerts broad effects on the conditions of migrants' everyday lives, but they have focused primarily on Latinx migrants in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The case of unauthorized migrants produced by the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943) demonstrates how the study of the undocumented must begin a century earlier. In order to denaturalize the conditions of the present, we must interrogate the shifting nature of undocumented life in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the pen-name of A.S. Hardy, Arthur Joseph Steffens was one of the leading writers of boys' football stories in the first decades of the twentieth century. Building upon the work of John Springhall, Kelly Boyd, Ernest Turner, Dave Russell and Ali Melling, this article seeks to broaden our knowledge of how football fiction first developed. It does this by exploring the life and stories of A.S. Hardy, as well as some of his contemporaries at the Amalgamated Press. The principal sources are original boys' papers held at the British Library and census records. The article explores three key areas. Firstly, an overview is provided of Hardy's life and career, placing his work within the wider growth of boys' story papers and the success of the Amalgamated Press in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Secondly, it explores how Hardy successfully pioneered the writing of stories placed within the contemporary world of professional football. Finally, it addresses how established conventions of masculine and heroic behaviour were adapted and explored within football stories. It will be argued that Hardy played an important part in developing and popularising the fictional football story in its modern format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, Korean central government has concentrated increasing attention on welfare policy. Welfare payment which is delivered by local government relies on the national subsidy. The national subsidy, however, is a kind of conditional grants which is needed to match some financial resource of local governments. For this reason, the fiscal conditions of local governments may become worse off, as the amount of national subsidy increases. This phenomenon is called the ‘fly-paper effect’, and may be caused inefficiency of the intergovernmental grants. In this paper, we test whether there is any fly-paper effect in the national subsidy and, then, the asymmetry in the fly-paper effect. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece is an imagined email correspondence between three renowned international relations scholars, E. H. Carr, Hedley Bull and Coral Bell, who are discussing the Australian 2016 Defence White Paper. The purpose of such an exercise is to reflect on the 'big-picture' international relations questions posed by what might otherwise be thought of as a relatively technical defence policy document. In particular, the correspondence between the three focuses on the central importance of the White Paper's assumptions of a 'rules-based global order' and the relationship between this order and US power. In their time, all three authors spoke directly to questions of power, law and order in their scholarly work, which had been deeply influenced, in all three cases, by periods spent working at the 'coalface' of these issues in government in Britain and Australia. As such, Carr, Bull and Bell have much to say about how Australia is positioning itself for a post-unipolar world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current centralised healthcare models pose many challenges, particularly for developing countries such as South Africa, where travel and time costs make it difficult for patients to seek healthcare, even when urgently needed. To address this issue, point-of-care (PoC) tests, which are performed at or near the site of clinical care, have gained popularity and are actively being developed. Microfluidic systems, in which small volumes of fluids can be processed, provide an ideal platform on which to develop PoC diagnostic solutions. Specifically, the emerging field of paper-based microfluidics, with advantages such as low-cost, disposability and minimal external equipment requirements, provides unique opportunities for addressing healthcare issues in developing countries. This work explores the field of paper-based microfluidics, with step-by-step instructions on the design, manufacture and testing processes to realise paper-based devices towards diagnostic applications. Paper-based microfluidic and electronic components are presented, as well as the integration of these components to provide smart paper-based devices. This serves as an educational tool, enabling both beginners and experts in the field tofast-track development of unique paper-based solutions towards PoC diagnostics, with emphasis on the South African context, where both the need for and impact of these solutions are great. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Restaurator is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Some nomads have their own websites and are on Facebook, which might be worth exploring. There is no typology of these nomads; some have regularity, some on highly ad hoc (just hitting the road) ventures, and some using websites, Facebook, and Internet gatherings to construct a community. Bruder mentions the I RV Daily Report i , the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, roving GTG (get togethers), FreeCampsites.net, Kampgrounds of America, Amazon's CamperForce, and Craigslist (for job opportunities). [Extracted from the article]