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In the paper, the role of a citizen, a public official, and an observer in the reproduction of bribery as a social norm are each analyzed. To make the analysis of this cellular-social form of corruption, three variables are incorporated: the agent's perception of how widespread the corruption is, the agent's available resources with which to act, and the role of moral values. Later, some scenarios of normalization and denormalization of corruption are explored, making different assumptions regarding the analysis and assignment of agents to different roles in the interactions. What was found is that power relations among corrupt and non-corrupt agents are key for understanding the social reproduction of bribery, where inequality might facilitate the social reproduction of corruption. The role of the observer of the interaction of bribe-givers, bribe-takers, and bribe-resisting agents was also found to potentially tip the balance in the direction of normalization or denormalization of bribery. Hence, giving the observer tools to intervene in these interactions becomes essential to combat corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research in sociology and organization studies has consistently documented the tendency for organizations to develop wrongdoing practices that are at odds with the legal and moral frameworks of society. Often, this wrongdoing acquires a degree of normalization where it is endorsed, encouraged, and accepted throughout the organization. Such normalized wrongdoing can have severe negative effects on the whistleblowing opportunities of employees. While these effects are intuitively easy to understand, we still lack an understanding of the significant variation that exists across situations of normalized wrongdoing and how that variation may affect potential whistleblowers. To advance such an agenda, the paper analyzes 14 whistleblower autobiographies. Building on work on normalized wrongdoing within corruption, fraud, and management studies and Niklas Luhmann's theories on organization, the analysis finds that normalized wrongdoing in the autobiographies appears in different intensities that depend on the role of management, the benefits organizations obtain from wrongdoing, and the extent to which wrongdoing norms are internalized by employees. The paper builds on these distinctions to suggest a continuum of normalized wrongdoing from 'weak' to 'strong.' Understanding this variation offers a new set of tools to assess the organizational realities that concerned employees must navigate in when they attempt to resist and address situations of normalized wrongdoing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Story Makers Press (SMP) is a University-based publisher which co-constructs stories with under-represented groups of children in order to diversify representation in children's literature and disrupt the way adult perceptions of normality pattern children's literature (aetonormativity). In this paper we analyse six drama and creative writing workshops run by SMP with Czech and Slovak Roma children from an inner city primary school in the north of England to co-construct a story about climate change. Our analysis identifies how in developing the story, the children were often reluctant to draw upon their funds of knowledge relating to their Roma backgrounds, instead Westernising their protagonists and settings. We also explore how the children disrupt aetonormativity by interweaving magical elements into realistic narrative about climate change in order to establish a genre of magical realism. Finally, we identify how this genre of magical realism is problematic when considering stereotypical depictions of Roma characters in children's literature and how changes were made to our story in light of a critical race theory reading of the first draft. As well as helping SMP to refine its processes, this analysis suggests that minority groups such as Roma need to be able to draw upon more literary representations of Roma in order to shape their creative outputs and that the curriculum needs to focus on developing children's critical responses to the representation of minority ethnic groups in children's literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper questions the dominance of market-based mechanisms (MBMs) as the primary means of climate change mitigation. It argues that, not only they are unsuccessful on their own terms, but also they actually make the task more difficult by the unintended consequence of normalising the act of polluting and crowding out alternatives. The theoretical contribution of the paper is to draw a link between two bodies of literature. The first is the business ethics literature on the dominance of market-based rather than direct regulation, and the second is the literature on market ethics, particularly the work of Michael Sandel on how MBMs crowd out non-market norms. The empirical contribution is to use the international maritime transport sector to illustrate the way market-based regulation renders alternatives such as direct regulation and supply-side approaches invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a soil layer identification method using probabilistic collaborative representation–based classification (ProCRC). The representative parameters (cone tip resistance qt, pore pressure u2, and pore pressure ratio Bq) are selected from the CPTu data acquired through numerous engineering sites for normalization. Then, the salient features of the data are extracted based on a sparse automatic encoder, and the optimal solution of the test data was obtained. At that point, the soil layer identification and classification can be carried out by combining the ProCRC algorithm. The proposed method was adopted to identify the soil layers in four different kinds of sites and compared with other existing methods. The classification results were analyzed by regression analysis, and it was observed that the proposed method exhibits higher precision and validity than other methods. The underlying soil stratigraphy including interbeds and mixed layers can be well determined via the ProCRC method with CPTu data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The normalization of gender-based violence (GBV) consists of all those cultural beliefs and values that sustain, justify, or minimize GBV perpetration. Acknowledging the lack of instruments addressing the normalization of GBV and its constitutive sociocultural dimensions, this article presents the conceptual development and initial validation of the Normalization of gender-based violence against women scale. This 18-item instrument could be used to assess the normalization of violence against women in GBV survivors of various cultural contexts. The scale has been developed through a sizeable mixed-methods study. This paper reports the qualitative portion of the study that allowed the development of the instrument and assessment of its content and face validity. In particular, the method section details the process by which the assessed scale's domain has been identified through an expert panel workshop, the analysis of GBV survivor's interviews, and the review of existing scales. The assessment of face and content validity, trough expert judges' evaluation and Cognitive Interviewing, is presented. This instrument is the first normalization scale developed by a multicultural team for use with violence survivors. The techniques used to construct this scale aimed to capture cultural aspects of normalization that might be shared across women from diverse groups. Therefore, its use could enable social or health care providers worldwide to program or evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to contrast GBV by promoting a clearer understanding of cultural and social norms that sustain the acceptance and normalization of violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee set the 'modernization of the state governance system and governing capacity' as the overall objective of 'comprehensive deepening reform,' which has become an important political aspect of the 'New Normal' in Xi Jinping's era. Since then, the research on the theory and practice of the state governance model, state governance capacity, and social governance has become popular. By defining the concept of governance and investigating social governance model in China, this article analyses the institutional foundation restricting the transition of the social governance model in China, expounds the connotation and development goal of social governance alongside the state governance system modernization, and argues that the new development trend of 'social governance' is to make the transition to the self-governing model based on democracy and rule of law, and pluralistic cooperation between state and society. The main function of the government is not to exercise administrative intervention and control over the society, nor to replace societal actions or to take on everything by itself, rather it is to steer, standardize, support, and serve the social self-governance by exercising laws, rules, and regulations, democratic consultation, and social policies. This article suggests that further deepening political restructuring and achieving the transformation of government functions is the necessary condition to foster and promote social governance capacity and to achieve the transformation of the governance model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance reform has emerged as an element of the Chinese Communst Party's development strategy in the era of the 'new normal.' This article examines the implementation of online consultation, a prominent instrument of governance reform-institutionalized under Hu Jintao and championed by Xi Jinping-in which officials provide interested parties with opportunities to offer feedback on proposed public policies. The research assembles original data regarding the online consultation practices of more than one hundred central government ministries and provincial governments. The analysis demonstrates that online consultation practices are more developed in provincial governments than central government ministries. Online consultation is more advanced in the disclosure of proposed policies than in the circulation of feedback submitted in response to draft laws and regulations. Finally, online consultation is primarily utilized by organizations with substantial resources, as well as organizations operating in environments not characterized by fundamental political sensitivities. These results suggest that, within well-specified limits, online consultation increases information disclosure and public participation in government decision making and, therefore, holds promise as a Party-led, incremental administrative response to the governance challenges of China's 'new normal.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the prediction value (PV) of player i as the difference between the conditional expectations of v( S) when i cooperates or not in a probabilistic TU game. The latter combines a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. The PV reflects the importance of information about a given player's behavior for predicting, e.g., committee decisions that are subject to opinion interdependencies. The PV is characterized by anonymity, linearity, a consistency requirement and two normalization conditions. Every multinomial probabilistic value, hence every binomial semivalue, coincides with the PV for a particular family of probability distributions. So the PV can be regarded as a power index in specific cases. Conversely, some semivalues-including the Banzhaf but not the Shapley value-can be interpreted in terms of informational importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major social and human problem today is the extreme number of refugees, e.g., politically determined, from various conflicts zone around the world. The European Union currently discusses the possible distribution and relocation of these refugees among the member states. The European Commission suggested keys to the distribution based on aggregated indicators, which for obvious reasons has its pitfalls. Here distribution keys based on a partial ordering approach is discussed. The choice of indicators apparently is crucial due to the relative importance of the single indicators. Two approaches are applied to derive distribution keys, both taking the onset in the average ordering of the 28 EU countries. In the first simple approach, independently of the choice of indicators among the here applied, five countries, i.e., Denmark, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden and The United Kingdom consequently are found among the Top-10 countries that should receive the major parts of refugees. In a second approach, applying a normalization based on population size the bigger countries with fairly solid economies are suggested to receive the majority of accepted refugees. The eventual choice of indicators as well as the normalization process is a political discussion and is not part of the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The magnitude of China's energy needs and global energy acquisitions, and their recent emergence as key features of the international system, raise many sensitive questions: will China adapt to or reshape the international system as historically defined by the hegemonic West, and what is the role of its energy policy, politics, and resource nationalism in a possible new Great Game? While much of the current literature posits an either/or approach (China adapts to energy market or tries to redefine them as a part of a wider political plan), our hypothesis is that China is essentially a pragmatic actor who reacts to the forces in presence, rather than a revisionist power with a grand plan to realign the world order to suit its needs and satisfy some kind of pre-established grand vision. We posit that China goes beyond conformity with or resistance to the established energy market and the power relations they underpin: While local circumstances may be considered variables, its fixed objective is a stable international order and the pragmatic satisfaction of its energy needs in order to insure continued economic growth and general stability at home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2010 the Human Development Index (HDI) was revised with several major changes. Many of its problems were tackled, although some drawbacks still persist. This paper proposes a multi-criteria approach to measure human development, propounding two innovations for the computation of the HDI: (1) the introduction of a double reference point scheme in the normalization; (2) an aggregation function which deals with the problem of substitutability between components. In particular, for each component of the HDI the value of each country is normalized by means of two reference values (aspiration and reservation values) by using an achievement scalarizing function that is piecewise linear. Aggregating the new normalized values, we calculate a range of indices with different degrees of substitutability: (1) a weak index that allows total substitutability; (2) a strong index that measures the state of the worst component and allows no substitutability; and (3) a mixed index that is a combination of the first two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practice-based interprofessional education (IPE), a key feature in developing a collaboration-ready workforce, is poorly integrated in healthcare curriculums. This study aimed to synthesise educator perspectives on implementing practice-based IPE and develop recommendations to inform sustainable practice-based IPE. An ethnographic case study was carried out at a school of allied health. Data collection involved six observations, 11 interviews and a review of eight documents. Reflexive thematic analysis, informed by Normalisation Process Theory, established two key themes. First, we found that strategic planning is needed, with a coherent implementation agenda and planned reflection on activities. Second, building partnerships with placement partners was identified as essential. This can be achieved by supporting and championing practice-based IPE activities developed by placement sites and establishing how university and clinical educators can work collaboratively to deliver sustainable practice-based IPE. These conditions create a favourable environment for normalising practice-based IPE in healthcare curriculums, benefitting students, patients, and the overall healthcare service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although attention is known to increase the gain of visuocortical responses, its underlying neural computations remain unclear. Here, we use fMRI to test the hypothesis that a neural population's ability to be modulated by attention is dependent on divisive normalization. To do so, we leverage the feature-tuned properties of normalization and find that visuocortical responses to stimuli sharing features normalize each other more strongly. Comparing these normalization measures to measures of attentional modulation, we demonstrate that subpopulations which exhibit stronger normalization also exhibit larger attentional benefits. In a converging experiment, we reveal that attentional benefits are greatest when a subpopulation is forced into a state of stronger normalization. Taken together, these results suggest that the degree to which a subpopulation exhibits normalization plays a role in dictating its potential for attentional benefits. Attention is known to enhance relevant information in our environment, yet its underlying neural computations remain unclear. Here, the authors provide evidence that the degree to which a neural population can normalize itself results in greater potential for attentional benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the 2008 financial crisis in Iceland through the lens of Donaldson's concept of normalization of questionable behavior. We study the report published by the Special Investigation Commission, an investigation initiated by the Icelandic Parliament near the end of 2008. The report provides a detailed and systematic account of the processes leading up to the crisis. Our aim is to determine the extent to which the behaviors of professionals in the Icelandic financial sector can be explained as a gradual fading of moral concerns to the point that they perceived the sale of high-risk products to unassuming customers for their own short-term benefit to be morally unproblematic. In doing so, we consider both character and circumstance explanations of moral misbehavior. We expand on Donaldson's initial description of normalization of questionable behavior by applying the concept of moral neutralization, which is defined by criminologists Sykes and Matza as the process of convincing oneself that an option that initially conflicted with one's own moral beliefs is actually morally acceptable. We find indications that individuals in the Icelandic financial sector did engage in moral neutralization in their attempts to frame their own actions in an acceptable light. In our study, we identify one way of neutralizing away moral dissonance not captured in the original theoretical framework. Icelandic bankers justified their behavior by claiming that they did not break any relevant rules or regulations when they engaged in what were later labeled questionable activities. Our name for this kind of justification is claim of having breached no rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The objective of this study was to develop a social impact quantification framework for the resource extraction industry. The framework was developed to incorporate two approaches—scale-based and quantitative approaches. It aimed to be used for assessing upstream social impacts for products incorporating mined materials to produce a full social life cycle assessment (S-LCA). Methods: The framework consists of measurable indicators and impact assessment methods. The quantitative approach simulates S-LCA by applying a two-step impact assessment: (1) calculation of impact scores at the social topic level, and (2) normalization and aggregation to the social theme and stakeholder level. Results and discussion: The framework was demonstrated via a case study to compare one material issue—health and safety—from the material extraction phase of two major photovoltaic (PV) technologies in the USA: poly-Si and CdTe PV under stakeholder workers. A temporal analysis on a key mineral was performed. The results showed large variations in the social impact scores for selected topics on key raw materials associated with the two PVs. While the case study is limited in deriving practical implications due to preset assumptions, the framework itself can be extended and integrated with a whole product S-LCA to enhance the understanding of and promote social sustainability of the resource extraction industry. Conclusions: A framework to measure both positive and negative social impacts was developed to follow the S-LCA methodology. The framework was illustrated by comparing two dominant PV technologies in the USA for the social theme of health and safety. Our case study demonstrated inspiring patterns for assessing upstream social impacts from the resource extraction industry, especially when incorporating a temporal analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Illumination processing is a challenging task in face recognition. This paper proposes a novel illumination normalization method that aims to remove illumination boundaries and improve image quality under dark conditions. Firstly, to improve the image quality, an adaptive illumination preprocessing algorithm is adopted. Then we modify the Weber-Face model by suppressing the components which are greatly affected by the illumination. Experimental results on both Extended Yale B and CMU-PIE databases show that the proposed method can obtain high performance under complex illumination conditions. The accuracy on the Extended Yale B database is 93.02% and on the CMU-PIE database is 70.44%, which is the highest among the similar approaches. This method not only greatly improves the face recognition rate but also keep the computational complexity in low compared with several state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optical fiber pre-warning system (OFPS) is often used to monitor the occurrence of disasters such as the leakage of oil and natural gas pipeline. It analyzes the collected vibration signals to judge whether there is any harmful intrusion (HI) events. At present, the research in this field is mainly focused on the constant false alarm rate (CFAR) methods and derivative algorithms to detect intrusion signals. However, the performance of CFAR is often limited to the actual collected signals distribution. It is found that the background noise usually obeys non-independent and identically distribution (Non-IID) through the statistical analysis of acquisition signals. In view of the actual signal distribution characteristics, this paper presents a CFAR detection method based on the normalization processing for background noise. A high-pass filter is designed for the actual Non-IID background noise data to obtain the characterization characteristic. Then, the background noise is converted to independent and identically distribution (IID) by using the data characteristic. Next, the collected data after normalization is processed with efficient cell average constant false alarm rate (CA-CFAR) method for detection. Finally, the results of experiments both show that the intrusion signals can be effectively detected, and the effectiveness of the algorithm is verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Weighting is one of the steps involved in LCIA. This enables us to integrate various environmental impacts and facilitates the interpretation of environmental information. Many different weighting methodologies have already been proposed, and the results of many case studies with a single index have been published. LIME2 (Itsubo et al. Int J Life Cycle Assess 17(4):488-498, 2012) developed weighting factors for four different areas of protection that reflect environmental awareness among the Japanese public. This method has already been widely used in Japan, but difficulties exist universally using the Japanese weighting factors around the world. It is presumed that the weighting varies depending on economic, cultural, and social conditions, and there are still few cases in which weighting factors have been specifically invented or studied in consideration of variance in these elements. This study attempted to develop weighting factors applicable to the Group of Twenty (G20) countries with a view toward developing those that could be used in different countries. In the study, a survey was conducted with a uniform questionnaire in G20 countries to compare the weighting factors calculated for different countries, along with an investigation on development and utilization of global weighting factors.Methods: A conjoint analysis was conducted to give a weighting between the four areas of protection defined by LIME: human health, social assets, biodiversity, and primary production. The analysis is suitable for measuring the value of each of the multiple attributes of the environment. This study conducted a questionnaire in all the G20 member states. The survey puts priority on making the questions understood by the respondents and minimizing bias, adopting interviews, visiting surveys, and surveys in venues in the 11 emerging countries. In the developed countries, Internet surveys were conducted after confirming that their results are statistically significant from the pretest results in these states. In both surveys, random sampling was performed to take 200-250 samples (households) in each of the emerging countries and 500-600 samples in each of the developed countries. The surveys collected a total of 6400 responses. Statistical values based on this model can be considered to reflect the variability between each individual’s environmental thoughts. The calculated results can then be used to compare the variety of environmental thoughts in developed and emerging countries.Results and discussion: The study was able to obtain two different kinds of results: dimensionless weighting factors and economic indicators using the amount of willingness to pay. This paper solely presents the former. The weighting factors in the entire G20 community, in the group of developed countries (G8) and in the group of emerging countries (G20 states excluding the G8) and those in the individual G20 countries, were estimated. The calculated values were significant statistically at the 1 % level (all p values for the safeguard subject coefficients were less than 0.0001), with the exception of monetary attributes for several emerging countries. Converted into dimensionless values, so that the total sum for the four subjects equals 1, the weighting factor was the highest for human health in the entire G20 circles, at 0.34, followed by biodiversity at 0.29, and primary production at 0.23. The weighting for social assets was relatively poor, at 0.13. In the G8 developed states, the figures of biodiversity and primary production were relatively higher than those of the same two subjects in the full G20. Biodiversity had the highest value, at 0.34, and was followed by human health at 0.30. On the other hand, in emerging countries, the weighting of health impacts was particularly significant, at 0.44, whereas the three other subjects had almost equivalent weightings—biodiversity at 0.19, social assets at 0.18, and primary product at 0.18. The weighting factors by country and the variance of preference intensities by country showed minor differences among developed countries while they reflected considerable differences among emerging countries.Conclusions: Accurate weighting factors representing the environmental attitudes of the world and national public are needed in order to conduct general purpose LCA. This study is the world’s first to conduct surveys with the use of the same questionnaire not only in developed countries but also in emerging countries, and to compare the findings. A total of 6400 responses were obtained via interviews and Internet surveys. The survey thus gained a statistically significant result on all the environmental attributes including the weighting factors for the G20 circles, G8 states, emerging countries exclusive of the G8 states, and individual countries in which surveys took place. The results have revealed a relatively minor difference in weighting factors and variation coefficients between the areas of protection in the developed countries whereas a considerable difference was observed between those subjects in emerging countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing diffusion of standardized assessments of students’ competences has been accompanied by an increasing need to make reliable data available to all stakeholders of the educational system (policy makers, teachers, researchers, families and students). In this light, we propose a multistep approach to detect and correct teacher cheating, which decreases the quality of student data offered by the Italian Institute for the Educational Evaluation of Instruction and Training. Our method integrates the “mechanistic” logic of the fuzzy clustering technique with a statistical model-based approach, and it aims to improve the detection of cheating and to correct test scores at both the class and student level. The results show a normalization of the scores and a stronger correction on data for Southern regions, where the propensity to cheat appears to be highest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on the extensive literature of the rank reversal issue in multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques. It is a continuation of the study of Sayed et al. (Soc Indic Res 123(1):1-27, 2015) that exhibited this problem in the human development index (HDI) framework. The proposed methodology, the Goal Programming Benefit-of-the-Doubt (GP-BOD), aims to overcome this problem and obtain consistent and stable rankings. For investigating the credibility of the proposed method in solving this issue, it has been applied to the HDI dataset in 2012. The resulted HDI rankings are compared with those evaluated from eleven overlapping sub-groups that are internationally categorized based on geographic regions and income levels. The results show a solution to the ranking contradictions problem. Among other merits, the results prove two additional features of the proposed GP-BOD model. First, the resulted countries’ rankings are distinguishable and absolutely tie-free. This enhances the discriminating power of the proposed rank preservation model. Second, the GP-BOD weights are evaluated on a common base to compare all countries on the same scale. Moreover, a lower bound is endogenously imposed on these weights to avoid the problem of zero weights. Finally, the validity of the proposed GP-BOD technique has been thoroughly examined using sensitivity tests. The results show stability in the rankings when different methods of normalization and weighting are applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: To assess acute muscle tears in professional football players by diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and evaluate the impact of normalization of data.Methods: Eight football players with acute lower limb muscle tears were examined. DTI metrics of the injured muscle and corresponding healthy contralateral muscle and of ROIs drawn in muscle tears (ROItear) in the corresponding healthy contralateral muscle (ROIhc_t) in a healthy area ipsilateral to the injury (ROIhi) and in a corresponding contralateral area (ROIhc_i) were compared. The same comparison was performed for ratios of the injured (ROItear/ROIhi) and contralateral sides (ROIhc_t/ROIhc_i). ANOVA, Bonferroni-corrected post-hoc and Student's t-tests were used.Results: Analyses of the entire muscle did not show any differences (p>0.05 each) except for axial diffusivity (AD; p=0.048). ROItear showed higher mean diffusivity (MD) and AD than ROIhc_t (p<0.05). Fractional anisotropy (FA) was lower in ROItear than in ROIhi and ROIhc_t (p<0.05). Radial diffusivity (RD) was higher in ROItear than in any other ROI (p<0.05). Ratios revealed higher MD and RD and lower FA and reduced number and length of fibre tracts on the injured side (p<0.05 each).Conclusions: DTI allowed a robust assessment of muscle tears in athletes especially after normalization to healthy muscle tissue.Key Points: • STEAM-based DTI allows the investigation of muscle tears affecting professional football players. • Fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity differ between injured and healthy muscle areas. • Only normalized data show differences of fibre tracking metrics in muscle tears. • The normalization of DTI-metrics enables a more robust characterization of muscle tears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opinion dynamics in network structures of special type are considered. Each node consists of two agents interacting with each other. The properties of consensus arising in such structures are studied using the DeGroot model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Identification of environmentally preferable alternatives in a comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) can be challenging in the presence of multiple incommensurate indicators. To make the problem more manageable, some LCA practitioners apply external normalization to find those indicators that contribute the most to their respective environmental impact categories. However, in some cases, these results can be entirely driven by the normalization reference, rather than the comparative performance of the alternatives. This study evaluates the influence of normalization methods on interpretation of comparative LCA to facilitate the use of LCA in decision-driven applications and inform LCA practitioners of latent systematic biases. An alternative method based on significance of mutual differences is proposed instead. Methods: This paper performs a systematic evaluation of external normalization and describes an alternative called the overlap area approach for the purpose of identifying relevant issues in a comparative LCA. The overlap area approach utilizes the probability distributions of characterized results to assess significant differences. This study evaluates the effects in three LCIA methods, through application of four comparative studies. For each application, we call attention to the category indicators highlighted by each interpretation approach. Results and discussion: External normalization in the three LCIA methods suffers from a systematic bias that emphasizes the same impact categories regardless of the application. Consequently, comparative LCA studies that employ external normalization to guide a selection may result in recommendations dominated entirely by the normalization reference and insensitive to data uncertainty. Conversely, evaluation of mutual differences via the overlap area calls attention to the impact categories with the most significant differences between alternatives. The overlap area approach does not show a systematic bias across LCA applications because it does not depend on external references and it is sensitive to changes in uncertainty. Thus, decisions based on the overlap area approach will draw attention to tradeoffs between alternatives, highlight the role of stakeholder weights, and generate assessments that are responsive to uncertainty. Conclusions: The solution to the issues of external normalization in comparative LCAs proposed in this study call for an entirely different algorithm capable of evaluating mutual differences and integrating uncertainty in the results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Xi Jinping became General Secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 2012 he faced the major tasks of fighting corruption, getting beyond the stymied collective leadership of Hu Yaobang, structural reform of the economy, and promoting the rule of law. In his first term Xi has made significant progress in all these areas through his presidential style of leadership, though not without problems. The key task of his likely second term (the 19th Central Committee (CC), 2017-2022) will be to establish a 'new normal' of leadership structure and habits that will provide political continuity for a moderately prosperous China and a CPC entering its second century. The changes are foreshadowed in the documents of the Sixth Plenum of the 18th CC released in November 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private business is among the many things that comprise the 'new normal' in Xi Jinping's China. Given the Communist Party's socialist transformation of the private sector in the 1950s and its concerted suppression of 'tails of capitalism' over the next 20 years, it was surprising that it began to legitimize private business in 1978. It did this to address a number of pressing social and economic problems. After a slow start, micro enterprises began to increase in numbers and scale, and the party passed several amendments to the state constitution and revised its ideological stance to make private business a normal and legitimate component of the economic field, and to recruit private entrepreneurs into the party. Nonetheless, the 'new' normal continues to evolve and China's new capitalists walk a vague line between acceptance and vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a new technique to extract a noise robust representation of speech signals called spectro-temporal power spectrum. This technique is based on applying a simple 2-D filter to the speech spectrogram to highlight the movements of spectral peaks. As speech spectral peaks constitute the regions of high-SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) values in the speech spectrogram, we expect that applying our filter will improve the recognition performance. In addition, by applying the 2-D filter, the spectro-temporal information around each frequency component is encoded into the frequency representation of speech signal. This information will help the recognizer to better identify the true state to which each frame should be allocated. Experimental results on the Aurora 2 task show that error rate improvements of about 40 and 35 % are obtained for test sets A and B, respectively, in comparison with the baseline system when combined with cepstral mean and variance normalization. Also, further improvement was achieved when the proposed features were extracted from enhanced spectra obtained by applying advanced front-end routine. Moreover, phone recognition task evaluated on TIMIT database showed the preference of the proposed method over the baseline methods. The obtained improvement by the proposed method is made with a very simple and easy-to-implement routine which makes it suitable for practical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of soil line can be to describe the temporal distribution of spectral characteristics of the bare soil surface. In this case, the soil line can be referred to as the multi-temporal soil line, or simply temporal soil line (TSL). In order to create TSL for 8000 regular lattice points for the territory of three regions of Tula oblast, we used 34 Landsat images obtained in the period from 1985 to 2014 after their certain transformation. As Landsat images are the matrices of the values of spectral brightness, this transformation is the normalization of matrices. There are several methods of normalization that move, rotate, and scale the spectral plane. In our study, we applied the method of piecewise linear approximation to the spectral neighborhood of soil line in order to assess the quality of normalization mathematically. This approach allowed us to range normalization methods according to their quality as follows: classic normalization > successive application of the turn and shift > successive application of the atmospheric correction and shift > atmospheric correction > shift > turn > raw data. The normalized data allowed us to create the maps of the distribution of a and b coefficients of the TSL. The map of b coefficient is characterized by the high correlation with the ground-truth data obtained from 1899 soil pits described during the soil surveys performed by the local institute for land management (GIPROZEM). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rising number of individuals diagnosed with autism and other developmental disabilities comes an increased need for effective assessment and treatment options. Previous research has indicated that applied behavior analytic techniques are among the most empirically supported and utilized treatments for this population; however, curriculum and assessment tools rooted in utilizing these techniques have very little empirical support for their reliability and validity. The current studies sought to assess the performance of both a normative sample and a sample with autism on one such assessment tool: The PEAK Generalization Module. Altogether, 183 typically developing children participated in study 1 and 84 children with a diagnosis of autism participated in study 2. The results indicated that the normative sample demonstrated a strong positive correlation between the PEAK Generalization Assessment and age, whereas the sample with autism demonstrated no significant relationship between the two. Further analysis indicates that the PEAK Generalization Assessment may be an appropriate tool for assessing individuals with autism across a wide range of ages, and provides a preliminary benchmark against which to measure both current functioning and progress in individuals with developmental disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have shown that the inhibition of Na,K-ATPase during its long-term incubation with amyloid beta (Aβ), an Alzheimer's disease protein, is caused by the change in the thiol redox status of cells leading to induction of glutathionylation α-subunit of Na,K-ATPase. To restore the activity of Na,K-ATPase, it is proposed to use reducing agents, which promote normalization of the redox status of cells and deglutathionylation of the protein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Korea was among the first countries to report both an abnormally high sex ratio at birth (SRB) and its subsequent normalization. We examine the role of son preference in driving fertility intentions during a period of declining SRB and consider the contribution of individual characteristics and broader social context to explaining changes in intentions. We employ data from the National Survey on Fertility, Family Health and Welfare that span 1991-2012. We find that reported son preference declined to a great extent but remained substantial by the end of the observation period, and that the intention to have a third child still differed by sex of existing children. Change in individual-level factors does not explain the decline in son preference, suggesting that broad social changes were also important. This study provides a better understanding of how son preference evolves in the post-transitional context of very low fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study explores a possible benefit of conforming book income to taxable income. We expect that increased book-tax conformity can reduce audit fees by simplifying tax accruals and increasing tax authorities' monitoring, which reduce audit workload and audit risk, respectively. Consistent with our expectations, we find that a higher country level of required book-tax conformity leads to lower audit fees. Moreover, firm-level book-tax differences are positively associated with audit fees. We also find that the negative association between country level of required book-tax conformity and audit fees is mitigated among firms with larger book-tax differences. Our findings are robust to including country-level legal investor protection or other extra-legal institutions. Overall, our results suggest that one benefit of increasing book-tax conformity is the reduction in audit fees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilizes the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and normalization to give an analysis of the debate surrounding the controversial administration of the HPV vaccine to adolescents. My intention is not to solve the problem, rather to utilize a Foucauldian framework to bring various facets of the issue to light, specifically the way the vaccine contributes to strategies of power in reference to how young adults develop within relationships of power. To begin, the article provides an overview of the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and normalization, including how these two strategies of power were present in the administration of the smallpox vaccine in the 19th century. Next, information about HPV and the history of the current controversy in the United States is presented. Lastly, the article presents an analysis of the strategies of biopower and normalization present in the debate on HPV, including an emphasis on how the vaccination is similar to, and different from, 19th century smallpox vaccination. It also explores the way that mechanisms of disease control affect and are affected by individual subjects, in this case, adolescents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All researchers should consider the theoretical basis for their studies very early on in the planning stage. The aim of this paper is to describe and discuss how theory (a 'comprehensive explanation of some aspect of nature that is supported by a body of evidence') can inform and improve the quality and relevance of pharmacy-based research. Theories can be applied at many stages of quantitative and qualitative (and mixed) research processes, including: providing rationale for the study; defining the aim and research questions; considering the methodological stance; developing data collection and generation tools; providing a framework for data analysis, and interpretation. The focus of the paper is on the use of theoretical lenses, their selection and application. Two key theoretical lenses and their potential applications are described: the Theoretical Domains Framework in studies of behavioural change, and Normalization Process Theory in implementing, embedding and integrating interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Normalisation is an optional step of a life cycle assessment, supporting the interpretation of the results of the characterization in terms of relative environmental relevance of the impacts. Normalisations factors (NFs) are calculated as results of regional/global inventories of emission and resources characterized through impact assessment methods. Several methodological assumptions are needed for building the inventory, as presented in Sala et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ). NFs for EU27 have been calculated for 2010 compliant with ILCD recommendations defining a methodological approach for sources selection and the use of proxy indicators. Qualitative and quantitative uncertainty evaluation is needed for assessing the robustness of final figures. The present work aims at quantifying the influence of key methodological choices on the variability of the normalisation factors. Materials and methods: Five sources of uncertainty have been analyzed in this work: (F1) the selection of the sources of data; (F2) the classification of data as life cycle inventory (LCI) elementary flows; (F3) the classification of substances for characterization; (F4) the specification of the emission compartments and (F5) the use of spatially differentiated characterization factors. The sensitivity of the normalization factors to such uncertainties were assessed through a global sensitivity method, for the impact categories acidification (ACID), terrestrial eutrophication (ET), marine eutrophication (EM), photochemical ozone formation (POF), respiratory inorganics/particulate matter (RIPM) and water depletion (WD). Results and discussion: The results demonstrate the need of thorough uncertainty and sensitivity analysis for supporting the use of NFs. Uncertainties are high for the impact categories respiratory inorganics (RIPM) and water depletion (WD) and improvement of these categories is a priority. For RIPM this is explained by the high variability amongst the characterization factors for PM and PM, together with the contextual lack of information about the height of the emission source in the inventory. For WD this is explained by variability of the regionalized factors available within the ILCD. For ACID, ET and EM the uncertainty is relatively low and generally completely led by factors F1 and F2. However, regionalized characterization factors were not tested for ACID and ET, therefore the results might be underestimating the overall uncertainty. For what concerns POF, the main source of uncertainty-amongst those included in the analysis-is the selection of the data source. Overall, improvements in the spatial resolution of the inventory are needed in order to confine uncertainty. This would allow the use of characterization factors specific for emission source typology and geographical location. Conclusions: The uncertainty associated with the methodological choices made for calculating normalization factors (Sala et al. in Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ) was assessed. Generally, the value calculated by Sala et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ) compare well against average and median values estimated in this analysis for ACID, ET, EM and POF. Instead, the impact categories RIPM and WD show different patterns. For RIPM, although the average value is very similar to the normalization factor reported by Sala et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ), the median value is far lower. For what concerns WD, the median value is much higher. Future improvements of the normalization factors should therefore prioritize the development of more detailed inventories of emissions by including higher substance resolution, height of emission as well as the use of spatially differentiated characterization factors. To support the interpretation of normalized results, we recommend that the normalization factors from Sala et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ) are applied together with two additional sets of normalization factors i.e. the 'median values' and the set of 'average + standard deviation' values, so to better capture their uncertainty. Similarly, the interpretation of the results should build on the qualitative estimates of robustness provided by Sala et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess 20:1568-1585, ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic costs imposed by climatic extremes have been increasing over the years and are expected to follow a similar trend in the coming years as well. Such costs are incurred due to two factors: (1) natural climate variability and anthropogenic climate change and (2) exposure and vulnerability of socio-economic factors. The impact of these factors as identified separately through a 'normalisation technique' is analysed in the existing normalisation studies conducted mostly in developed country contexts; these have produced mixed results. However, one needs to enquire about the influence of the above two factors in a developing country context where the anticipated impacts of climate extremes are significant. This study, therefore, makes an attempt to adjust impact data, in terms of the reported population affected and economic damages of three extreme events, namely cyclones, floods and droughts, together for societal changes between 1972 and 2009 in Odisha in eastern India. Further, the second component is analysed in two ways: (1) assuming that exposed socio-economic factors are equally vulnerable similar to the other normalisation studies, i.e. no adaptation and (2) incorporating adaptation in the existing normalisation methods-which has attracted less attention so far in the literature. The results suggest that: (a) both the natural climate variability and the socio-economic factors influence the increasing damages in the recent decades, and (b) when adaptation is introduced in the normalisation model, economic losses have reduced significantly compared to the estimates using the existing normalisation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses issues in social normality with respect to the common or normal behavior of humans. She cites the Oscar Wilde play "The Importance of Being Earnest" to examine the issues. Also tackled are such topics as descriptive sociology, the works of sociologists Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim on the common or normal behavior within a specific society, and the Gaussian normality distribution.

Regional security studies of the Asia-Pacific commonly center upon China's rise, leaving other actors underresearched. Among these is Japan, whose ongoing reinterpretation of its pacifist constitution may destabilize the region. This article employs Social Identity Theory, a social psychology theory of group behavior, to develop a unique framework that accounts for both the domestic and international constraints acting upon Japan's foreign policy makers. By analyzing Japan's foreign policy evolution through the lost decade of the 1990s into the changed landscape of the post-September 11th world, this article identifies a prevailing trend toward 'normalization'. It is argued that Japan is on course to further distance itself from the pacifism embodied in Article 9 of its constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feature selection methods are the mostly used dimensional reduction methods in speech emotion recognition. However, most methods cannot preserve the manifold of data and cannot use the information provided by unlabeled data, so that they cannot select a good sub feature set for speech emotion recognition. This paper presents a semi-supervised feature selection method that can preserve the manifold structure of data, preserve the category structure, and use the information provided by the unlabeled data. To further deal with the manifold of speech data influenced by factors such as emotion, speaker and sentence, a new speaker normalization method is also proposed, which can achieve a good speaker normalization result in the case of a small number of samples of a speaker available. This speaker normalization method can be used in most real application of speech emotion recognition. The conducted experiments validate the proposed semi-supervised feature selection method with the speaker normalization in terms of the effectiveness of the speech emotion recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pitch normalization algorithm is proposed for addressing the pitch mismatch between adults' and children's speech for children's automatic speech recognition (ASR). Motivated by the appearance of pitch-dependent distortions in the smoothed mel spectral envelope for high-pitched children's speech, the algorithm modifies the mel filterbank during MFCC feature extraction to improve ASR performance. Relative improvements of 16 % and 9 % are obtained over the corresponding baseline in children's mismatched ASR performance on a connected-digit recognition task and a continuous speech recognition task. The improvements obtained in ASR performance with the proposed pitch normalization algorithm are also found to be additive to that obtained with existing speaker normalization techniques, VTLN and CMLLR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Network analysis can help uncover meaningful regularities in the organization of complex systems. Among these, rich clubs are a functionally important property of a variety of social, technological and biological networks. Rich clubs emerge when nodes that are somehow prominent or 'rich' (e.g., highly connected) interact preferentially with one another. The identification of rich clubs is non-trivial, especially in weighted networks, and to this end multiple distinct metrics have been proposed. Here we describe a unifying framework for detecting rich clubs which intuitively generalizes various metrics into a single integrated method. This generalization rests upon the explicit incorporation of randomized control networks into the measurement process. We apply this framework to real-life examples, and show that, depending on the selection of randomized controls, different kinds of rich-club structures can be detected, such as topological and weighted rich clubs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the traditional formulation of rent-seeking games, increasing returns to effort are characterized by an exponent r>1. However, when the value of the rent is normalized to 1, the players' effort levels A and B will typically be less than 1. Thus, when A<1 and r>1, the value of A decreases as r increases, contradicting the interpretation of r>1 as representing increasing returns to effort. This apparent defect in the mathematization of the problem seems to suggest that a different interpretation of r is required whenever A<1, upsetting the uniformity and elegance of the model. In this short note, we demonstrate that the perceived problem is illusory, and that the usual interpretation of r is satisfactory for all values of A. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In handwritten Chinese character recognition, the performance of a system is largely dependent on the character normalization method. In this paper, a visual word density-based nonlinear normalization method is proposed for handwritten Chinese character recognition. The underlying rationality is that the density for each image pixel should be determined by the visual word around this pixel. Visual vocabulary is used for mapping from a visual word to a density value. The mapping vocabulary is learned to maximize the ratio of the between-class variation and the within-class variation. Feature extraction is involved in the optimization stage, hence the proposed normalization method is beneficial for the following feature extraction. Furthermore, the proposed method can be applied to some other image classification problems in which scene character recognition is tried in this paper. Experimental results on one constrained handwriting database (CASIA) and one unconstrained handwriting database (CASIA-HWDB1.1) demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the start-of-the-art methods. Experiments on scene character databases chars74k and ICDAR03-CH show that the proposed method is promising for some image classification problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undrained shear strength of a soil at the liquid limit water content can be considered to be around 1.7 kPa according to several researchers. Plasticity index of soils has been defined by one school of thought as a range of water content producing a 100-fold variation in their undrained shear strength. This has led to the redefinition of the plastic limit as the water content at which undrained shear strength is 170 kPa. The undrained shear strength-water content relationship has been found to be linear in the log-log plot for a wide range of water contents beginning from around the plastic limit to near the liquid limit. Normalization of undrained shear strength—water content relationship in a log-log plot has led to the conclusion that the water content at the liquid limit and at the plastic limit, obtained by cone penetration, could also be uniquely related. This contradicts the original understanding of Atterberg limits, namely liquid and plastic limits which are two independent parameter not related at all. It is more suitable to call this value of plastic limit from cone method as PL100 to differentiate it from Casagrande's plastic limit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the management of patients with rheumatic diseases has evolved substantially over the past 20 to 30 years, lifestyle changes (such as weight reduction, physical activity and medication adherence) remain an important and unmet challenge in improving patient outcomes. The field of behavioural economics considers the many ways that individuals behave irrationally and uses the predictability of these patterns to create opportunities to anticipate and avoid or harness these behaviours to improve patient outcomes. Existing among other motivational approaches, the concepts in behavioural economics have only been applied to health care in the past 10 to 15 years. Although few published examples have applied behavioural economic concepts in the management of patients with rheumatic diseases specifically, these concepts have been applied in other chronic diseases, and such interventions could also be applicable in rheumatology. In this Perspectives article, we introduce six principles in behavioural economics (loss aversion, framing effect, present bias, status quo bias, time inconsistency and social normalization), discuss how these concepts have been addressed in other fields and examine their potential application in rheumatology. Using physical activity as an example, we describe how these concepts could be applied to promote healthy behaviour in patients with inflammatory arthritis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]