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This article is a practice-led analysis of a series of connected creative projects that re-told Icelandic family sagas in ways that adapted and transformed these stories and the storytelling modes of their early composition and performance. It argues that the formal qualities of the family sagas that developed through their multi-modal nature as sources can be represented in an iterative creative process that incorporates compositional features such as performance, situated storytelling, polyphonic narration, and compilation. The article contributes to our understanding of how creative engagement with medieval narratives can celebrate and explore their variability, form, and textual instability as narratives rather than seeking to tie them to singular or stable points of origin and authorial design.

Evidence supports a link between handwriting and aspects of literacy, including both reading and writing. Most evidence, however, pertains to children from grade one and above, once foundation skills known to support emerging literacy have been established. The purpose of this systematic review is to synthesise the extant literature concerning measurement of handwriting and literacy and the relationships between these measures for kindergarten students (the first year of formal instruction). Following a systematic search of the literature, 17 studies involving 3343 participants were identified. Handwriting measures could be grouped into two categories—letter writing fluency and perceptual motor skills, while literacy measures addressed one or more of letter name and sound knowledge, phonological skills, word reading, writing composition, and spelling. Strong evidence was found for the impact of letter writing fluency on writing composition, and letter name and sound knowledge. In addition, there was moderate evidence for a relationship between letter writing fluency, spelling, word reading and phonological skills. Weaker evidence was found for the impact of perceptual motor skill proficiency on letter knowledge and spelling, word reading and phonological skills. However, as all intervention approaches focusing on letter forming fluency included perceptual motor skill practice or exposure, an important role for perceptual motor skill in both letter writing fluency and literacy may be inferred. This review has found preliminary evidence to support the facilitating impact of handwriting on the foundations of literacy in kindergarten. Further research into the effects of handwriting interventions on kindergarten literacy is indicated.

Colors and visual design are the main visual languages for expressing the emotions and content of a webpage. The layout of a webpage is crucial to website aesthetics and affects user preference. A webpage’s title, image, colors, and structure affects the design style of its visual interface. This study consisted of two experiments. Experiment 1 focused on the color emotional characteristics of multimedia webpage color combinations and identified the most popular dual-tone color designs for multimedia webpages. Experiment 2 involved an examination of the optimal visual effect design for multimedia webpage composition. Ten types of geometric shapes were selected and combined with dynamic pictures, and the combined products were then used to conduct a multimedia dynamic pictorial webpage experiment; the purpose of the experiment was to test the effects of geometrical dynamic shapes on webpage psychology and determine the most popular multimedia dynamic picture visual design style. The researchers used semantic differential and Likert scales to conduct psychological tests aimed at measuring psychological reactions to various webpage colors and visual designs. The results indicated that the most popular color combinations for multimedia webpages are cyan and gray, cyan and black, and blue violet and gray. The most suitable graphic shape for multimedia visual designs is the oval and square dynamic picture composition. The results of the multimedia webpage color and visual effect design experiments can serve as a reference for webpage design-related research and to webpage designers.

Military exercises are a significant and conspicuous part of the security landscape in Europe. Although attention is typically focused on the force composition and scope of these exercises, this study finds that exercises’ adherence (or lack thereof) to the Confidence- (and Security) Building Measures (C(S)BMs) regime, established to provide an acceptable framework for such activities, is of greater significance to NATO’s perceptions of threat. Through an analysis of NATO’s response to Soviet and Russian exercises between 1980 and 2017, this study demonstrates the unique significance of perceived Soviet and Russian breaches of the C(S)BM regime in shaping NATO’s understanding of their intent and potential threat. NATO paid close attention to the military capability displayed within Soviet and Russian exercises and remained wary of the potential for an exercise to be transformed into an invasion. However, the physical components of the exercises themselves rarely further enhanced belief in the overwhelming capability or non-benign intent of the exercising force and did little to spur NATO into concerted reactive action. Instead, NATO’s primary and consistent source of concern around exercises was motivated by perceived Soviet and Russian breaches of the letter and spirit of the C(S)BM regime. The regime, therefore, represents a tripwire, with the perceived breach of its terms understood to signal a lack of commitment to rules-based interaction, driving an impression of non-benign intent that is of greater significance to threat perception and NATO-Soviet and NATO-Russian relations than an exercise’s scope and composition.

The vast majority of well-informed philosophers of science and scientists who are clearly (uncontroversially) scientists are able to extensionally differentiate between almost all scientific and non-scientific practices, disciplines, theories, attitudes, modes of procedure, etc., and do so or would do so in much the same way. This legitimately leads to the conclusion that the main problem of scientific demarcation has already, in a sense, been solved, although an explicative integrated account of that solution has not yet been given. Doing so is the goal of the project proposed in Fernandez-Beanato (Journal for General Philosophy of Science 51(3):375–391, 2020b). To advance toward the solution of the scientific demarcation problem, this article executes part of that project: a first step for scientific demarcation is the composition of a broad “list” (set) of accepted characteristics, conditions, or properties of science, or indicators of scientificity (most of them, by themselves, unnecessary and insufficient) which might be collectively used to establish a demarcation between those theories, cognitive fields, practices, etc. which are scientific and those which are not. This article deals with feng shui as a clear case of a non-science. It defines feng shui and then lists properties of science that feng shui possesses and properties of science that it lacks. This article then shows that the proposed demarcatory list demarcates feng shui as non-scientific, in agreement with the current philosophical and scientific consensus.

Ethnography is a rich research tradition originating from sociocultural anthropology that aims to vividly represent cultural meaning through fieldwork and thick description. Ethnographic fieldwork is known for unearthing surprises, and ethnographers are often convinced that, had they used another approach, they would have been unable to explain fully what was going on in the research setting. Ethnography in nonprofit studies is increasing, but sparse. This article argues that introducing more tales of the nonprofit field could deepen the analysis of how nonprofit organizing works, bridge the nonprofit research–practice divide, challenge the Western ethnocentricity of nonprofit studies, bring the sector’s periphery to the forefront and enhance nonprofit management education. However, to benefit from ethnographic work, the nonprofit field must embrace alternative norms of composition and rigor. The starting point is conversation and community among nonprofit ethnographers to foster such work.

With the proliferation of the Semantic Web technologies, more and more spatial knowledge bases are being published on the Web. Discovering spatial links among spatial knowledge bases is crucial in achieving real-time applications such as reasoning and question answering over spatial linked data. However, existing approaches rely on numerous high-cost Dimensionally Extended Nine-Intersection Model (DE-9IM) computations which lead to inefficient spatial link discovery. To address this problem, we propose a novel approach for discovering topological relations based on the spatial link composition, namely DORIC. Different from conventional spatial link discovery methods, DORIC further reduces the required number of DE-9IM computations by composing existing spatial links. Specifically, we first propose a spatial link composition (SLC) model to infer new spatial links of topological relations from existing or intermediate links. We replace part of high-cost DE-9IM computations with relatively low-cost SLC, and it leads to reduced spatial link discovery time. Then to maximize the utility of SLC during the process of DORIC, we design two effective strategies for deciding the discovery and access orders. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that the proposed DORIC outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of the spatial link discovery time.

How do religious and cultural sensibilities influence attitudes towards congregational involvement in the arts? Although religion’s role in constructing symbolic boundaries influences adherents’ behaviors both inside and outside of sacred spaces, a predominant focus on economic and cultural factors in the scholarship on cultural tastes and practices has tended to relegate religion to a marginal position in the literature. Theories of class-based cultural tastes and omnivorousness have only rarely been applied to the study of religion and even less so to the intersection between tastes or practices and the sacredness of congregational contexts. This study aims to bridge the gap between the sociology of religion and of culture by showing how considerations about congregational spaces present a complex set of boundaries for practitioners when it comes to the arts, such that acceptance or rejection of the latter is conditioned by the form it takes. The study also examines the extent to which the inclusionary effects of cultural omnivorousness, by volume and composition, apply to attitudes about these sacred spaces. This study uses data from the Arts and Religion Survey to run logistic regressions on attitudes towards a range of forms of congregational participation in the arts. The results show that religious conservatism and such attitudes are not intrinsically opposed. Instead, conservatism is consistently negatively related only when artistic inclusion does not have well-defined symbolic boundaries (i.e., is culturally atypical). Cultural omnivorousness also has varied effects. Omnivorousness by volume but not by composition predicts openness to congregational involvement in the arts, albeit only for well-defined and recognizable artistic forms. It is cultural atypicality (rather than variety) that is antithetical to conservative conceptions of the sacred. Moreover, because religious conservatism offers specifically religious understandings of legitimacy for sacred spaces, omnivorousness by composition, which deals in matters of (cultural) legitimacy, has little to offer, and it is only omnivorousness by volume that extends its inclusivity to attitudes about congregational involvement in the arts. The study concludes with a discussion of data limitations and recommendations for further research.

This article reviews and critically assesses the large and diverse literature on top management teams (TMTs) that has focused on international business (IB) issues. We apply an organizing framework that centers around four key elements of TMTs – TMT composition, structure, processes, and governance – and the most commonly studied IB-related choices and outcomes. This framework allows us to synthesize the contributions of the literature on TMTs in IB and identify opportunities for future research. The contributions of our review are threefold. First, we offer a roadmap for navigating the large and diverse literature on TMTs in IB. Second, we provide a systematic and critical evaluation of the key empirical and theoretical developments in this literature. Third, we highlight opportunities for future research to make theoretical and empirical advancements in each of the areas of our organizing framework. In these future research opportunities, we draw particular attention to the need to further contextualize TMT research in IB by proposing opportunities to more systematically incorporate the unique nature of the MNE and the external environment in which the MNE operates.

Semantic feature production norms are a useful tool for researchers to have empirically collected data about the semantic representations of a particular population. As older adults have been shown to have certain differences in their semantic knowledge organization in comparison with younger adults, it is relevant for them to have their own normative data. Thus we present here the first Spanish semantic feature production norms for older adults. They contain information about the feature composition of 400 concrete concepts. We also provide information about some feature and concept variables as well as comparisons between young and old adults on these variables.

A large body of studies was conducted on lifestyle in housing, but no comprehensive model has been designed and presented to address all components of lifestyle-related housing. To this aim, a systematic review study was selected in this study. A list of articles with housing and lifestyle was identified by searching the databases. The reviewers identified 41 studies that met our inclusion criteria. The quality of the selected articles was evaluated using the CASP checklist. The selected articles were coded by content analysis method through which 34 lifestyle components in the form of eight cultural, psychological, ideology, demographic, economic, social, behavioral and political indicators and 21 residential components in the form of three indicators related to the attribute building, exterior structure and interior structure of the building were extracted. Then using the Shannon entropy method, the components of geographical location, type of house, and neighborhood about housing and household composition, activity, and type of occupation in lifestyle were most important. Based on the findings, less attention was paid to residents' cultural and psychological issues. Issues such as furniture design, home decoration, and the relationship between the interior spaces with lifestyle are less explored than other residential components.

This article explores the kinds of children's books—literary and informative—that can help young readers concern themselves with ecological matters; also the extent to which children’s literature can be employed for the development of an ecological awareness in young readers. Can children’s literature, beyond its inherently anthropocentric basis, also have an ecocentric orientation? Drawing on an example from Greece’s present-day book production and from the category of picturebooks that express environmental concerns, it examines representations of nature within a cultural context as well as narrative composition through two semiotic systems (words and images) in search of emerging ecological messages. In the picturebook selected as a sample—Across the Way by Thodoris Papaioannou and illustrated by Irida Samartzi—(2015) it seems that through the identification of the child reader with a tiny beetle, a suitable framework of narrative empathy is created that serves the ecocentric orientation of the book.

Background Many traditional biological concepts continue to be debated by biologists, scientists and philosophers of science. The specific objective of this brief reflection is to offer an alternative vision to the definition of life taking as a starting point the traits common to all living beings. Results and Conclusions Thus, I define life as a process that takes place in highly organized organic structures and is characterized by being preprogrammed, interactive, adaptative and evolutionary. If life is the process, living beings are the system in which this process takes place. I also wonder whether viruses can be considered living things or not. Taking as a starting point my definition of life and, of course, on what others have thought about it, I am in favor of considering viruses as living beings. I base this conclusion on the fact that viruses satisfy all the vital characteristics common to all living things and on the role they have played in the evolution of species. Finally, I argue that if there were life elsewhere in the universe, it would be very similar to what we know on this planet because the laws of physics and the composition of matter are universal and because of the principle of the inexorability of life.

The progressive dominance of historical-critical methods in the reading of ancient Chinese classics has led scholars to privilege micro levels of textual analysis. Consequently, the question as to whether laws of composition could be identified in this corpus has often been ignored, or considered irrelevant. Working on Chinese number symbolism as well as on rules governing “ring composition” in other cultural contexts, this article aims at fashioning anew the question of the possibility of an ancient Chinese “structural rhetoric” and at envisioning the patterns that might have governed it. It specifically applies the approach it propounds to Huainanzi 淮南子, showing how numerology frames its structure and argument, the text being built after the image of the “roundness” of the Way and of the Ruler. It then endeavors to apply these results to the unearthing of “inter-structural” patterns that would help us to locate Huainanzi, Lushi Chunqiu 呂氏春秋, the versions at hand of Zhuangzi 莊子, Lunyu 論語, or yet Laozi 老子 into a textual universe that shares correlated rhetorical features.

Applied Intelligence is one of the most important international scientific journals in the field of artificial intelligence. From 1991, Applied Intelligence has been oriented to support research advances in new and innovative intelligent systems, methodologies, and their applications in solving real-life complex problems. In this way, Applied Intelligence hosts more than 2,400 publications and achieves around 31,800 citations. Moreover, Applied Intelligence is recognized by the industrial, academic, and scientific communities as a source of the latest innovative and advanced solutions in intelligent manufacturing, privacy-preserving systems, risk analysis, knowledge-based management, modern techniques to improve healthcare systems, methods to assist government, and solving industrial problems that are too complex to be solved through conventional approaches. Bearing in mind that Applied Intelligence celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2021, it is appropriate to analyze its bibliometric performance, conceptual structure, and thematic evolution. To do that, this paper conducts a bibliometric performance and conceptual structure analysis of Applied Intelligence from 1991 to 2020 using SciMAT. Firstly, the performance of the journal is analyzed according to the data retrieved from Scopus, putting the focus on the productivity of the authors, citations, countries, organizations, funding agencies, and most relevant publications. Finally, the conceptual structure of the journal is analyzed with the bibliometric software tool SciMAT, identifying the main thematic areas that have been the object of research and their composition, relationship, and evolution during the period analyzed.

Due to the influence of sampling rate, signal-to-noise ratio and other factors on the composition rule perception algorithm of national art plane system, the performance of the composition rule perception algorithm of national art plane system is reduced. In order to improve the performance of the composition rule perception algorithm of national art plane system, a composition rule perception algorithm of national art plane system based on wireless sensor network communication technology is proposed. Initially, the cognitive device is being used to encode and sample each national art plane system's composition rule trigger. Then it is reconstructed and processed using wireless sensor network information technologies. The composition rule perception algorithm of the national art plane system is represented using the method of composition rule perception algorithm, and and also realises the understanding of the composition rules of cultural art plane system. The simulation results show that the performance of composition rule perception algorithm based on wireless sensor network communication technology is the best.

The unique six-page preface to Henry Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews (1742) has generated great acclaim for supplying an adroit analysis of classical genres and the several subspecies of comedy in its proposal that his novel should be considered a ‘comic Epic-Poem in Prose’. Judith Frank has suggested that Fielding’s preface might be “at once the most assigned and [yet] least analyzed discussion of the aesthetics of the novel in English studies”, alluding to both the importance of the preface for undergraduate conceptions of the novel genre and the inimitable vagaries of Fielding’s articulate style. Where critical understandings of the preface might therefore be disproportionate to its acclaim, and where only two articles have previously examined Fielding’s applications of formal rhetoric in his work, this paper addresses both lacunas by proposing that Fielding made use of Cicero’s scheme of topical invention (from his Topica) to assist with the composition of his preface. Cicero’s topical scheme is a system of sixteen prescribed loci or ‘topics’ (places for locating or inventing arguments) and these were promoted as a universal and comprehensive scheme for discovering the best arguments for any subject under consideration. This paper demonstrates that Fielding’s preface engages with ten out of sixteen of Cicero’s topical terms and displays an informed understanding of the logical processes pertaining to those topics. It also demonstrates that Fielding makes use of a fountain metaphor in much the same way that Cicero used a fountain metaphor in his Topica, and furthermore, that the sequence of topical terms in Fielding’s preface run in much the same sequence as promoted by Cicero in the Topica. Where the new logic and rhetoric of the eighteenth century rejected the informal processes of topical invention for their relative focus on probable arguments, the applications of Cicero’s topics in the preface to Joseph Andrews helps characterize Fielding as both a dedicated classicist and a Ciceronian rhetor.

Comprising 172 years of European history (from 1848 to 2020), the Who governs dataset provides comprehensive and highly detailed information on the partisan composition of European governments, matching these data with information on those aspects of party politics that can either help to understand the dynamics of the governmental arena or are under the direct influence of the composition of governments. Most of the variables represent fundamental and well-established dimensions of party politics, such as the number of new parties or the fragmentation of the party systems, but some, most importantly party system closure, are more novel. Variables have been designed so that they can be applied to a maximum number of cases across time. Currently the dataset includes 68 different historical democratic periods, 753 elections, and more than 1817 parties and 1586 cases of government formation.

The following proposal for research begins with the observation that in specific contexts of performance poetic language appears to allow for varying degrees of access across language boundaries. This cross-language access, if it can be verified empirically, might be attributed to distinguishing features that differentiate poetic from prosaic discourse, on the one hand, and from musical structure on the other, an important problem in its own right. To approach this research question it is recommended to begin with poetic works as they are performed for a listening audience and to prioritize, at the beginning of the research project, composition and performance from the popular culture, broadly defined, and from the traditional genres of the oral tradition. Another point of reference for this discussion, which follows from the above recommended approach, is the Lerdahl-Jackendoff proposal of analyzing poetry as a kind of musical form.

Previous studies clarified that many individuals tend to attribute themselves into the middle-class, explaining this tendency by referring to group reference theory. This article aims to explore the formation of subjective social status from a different point of view. To do so, the author analyzed the data from the Stratification and Social Psychology Interview Survey in 2010 (SSP-I 2010) and the Stratification and Social Psychology Survey in 2015 (SSP 2015), which were conducted in Japan. The results of the analyses reveal that the population can be categorized into two latent groups: one demonstrates a middle-class tendency in distributions of subjective social status, and the other demonstrates a clear class consciousness. The former group was composed of wealthy individuals, and the latter group was composed of not-wealthy individuals. Furthermore, the results also clarified that the composition rates of the two latent groups had been stable from 2010 (a period of economic stagnation) to 2015 (a period of economic boom), irrespective of socio-economic changes. Finally, the author discusses the implications of these findings.

A poor ethical culture has been considered one of the reasons for the emergence of many corporate governance scandals. In this paper, I investigate the link between ethical culture and the composition of the board of directors for a sample of Brazilian companies. My measure of ethical culture is based on a text analysis of around 50,000 employee reviews posted at Glassdoor for over 1,400 terms related to five ethical dimensions: organizational trust, ethical leadership, benevolent orientation, empathy, and speaking out & efficacy. I find partial support for the hypotheses that a higher ratio of independent directors and of women on boards are associated with better ethical culture. My strong results, in turn, refer to a corporate governance feature little discussed in the literature: the percentage of board members appointed by minority shareholders. In this case, all models exhibit a strong negative relationship between the ratio of such directors and ethical culture. To my knowledge, this is the first paper to document a link between ethical culture and corporate governance mechanisms.

Science mapping is a methodology that combines quantitative analysis, classification, and visualisation to identify the composition and inter-relationships between bibliographic objects. Although science mapping has proven useful in diverse fields, we are not aware of its application to self-compassion research, which we sought to rectify here. Specifically, we used bibliometric science mapping to identify the overarching structure of self-compassion research between 1999 and 2020. We collected all articles using the search terms “self-compassion” and “self compassion” in the Web of Science database (N = 2185 articles). Keywords co-occurrence analysis, co-citation analysis, and network centrality analysis were used to describe the knowledge base and volume of self-compassion research. Our analyses identified four general themes in the self-compassion literature: “mental health and well-being”, “clinical outcomes”, “self-perceptions”, and “physical health and family issues”. The first three themes are relatively well-consolidated and represent core areas of research on self-compassion, whereas the fourth theme is relatively less well-connected and more emergent within the broader corpus. Our results, and the provision of interactive maps and extensive tables, should allow readers to examine connections between research clusters and areas, generate novel research ideas, and more fully understand the knowledge base of self-compassion research.

In this paper, we report on an intervention across continents and disciplines that brought together differently positioned students in South Africa and the USA. A collaboration between our classes—an introductory Geographic Information Systems (GIS) class in South Africa and a composition class in the United States—was facilitated and investigated by us. The point of departure of the intervention was to service socially just and anti-racist pedagogies through experimentation. Drawing on posthumanist, feminist, and new materialist theory, we investigate the hauntings of several prejudices and stereotypical tropes that foster racism. We link the concept of hauntology to Plumwood’s (1993) theorization of dualisms. We then draw a cartography of geomatics education in South Africa, focusing on the subjectification of geomatics graduates in particular and engineering graduates in general. We then zoom to our collaboration, and focus on several interactions amongst the cohorts to show instances of hauntings that perpetuate anti-Black, anti-Muslim, and related silences. We find that analysis of dualisms can highlight racist hauntings, and can also provide guidance on how to flatten hierarchies. Our transdisciplinary activism allows us to harness the positivity of difference to trouble binaries. We conclude with some thoughts on pandemic pedagogy in an unequal world.

Some philosophers accept what I call minimalist views about composition. They either deny that composition ever occurs, or they only allow that composition occurs when some things are taken up into a life. While minimalists often take their views to be somewhat revisionary, they usually want to distinguish their views from truly radical views such as the view that there is no external world at all. They often do this by noting that, although they don’t believe that there are tables, chairs, or planets, they do believe that there are mereological simples arranged tablewise, chairwise, and planetwise. In this paper, I appeal to the nature of perceptual experience to present a problem for this move. I contend that, given some plausible assumptions, compositional minimalists cannot consistently maintain that they are justified in their minimalism and justified in believing propositions about the arrangements of mereological simples. I will argue that this commits such minimalists to external world skepticism.

This study focuses on adults who are neither preschool teachers nor professional caregivers and investigates their beliefs regarding the importance of engaging young children with numerical activities. It also examines the types of numerical activities adults report having observed children engaging with, as well as the types of activities they propose as a way for promoting counting, enumerating, recognizing number symbols, and number composition and decomposition. Findings showed that participants believed to a great extent that engaging young children with numerical activities is important. Most reported that they had observed children engaging with at least some numerical activity. In general, participants relayed more activities and more detailed activities when suggesting activities for each competency, than they did when reporting observed activities. Findings also suggested a need to enhance adults’ knowledge regarding the necessity to promote verbal counting, separate from object counting, as well as to increase adults’ awareness of number composition and decomposition. For mathematics educators wishing to plan workshops for adults, this study offers a method for investigating adults’ knowledge of early numerical activities, as well as a starting point with which to plan appropriate workshops.

This embedded case study leveraged Rendon’s (1994) validation theory as well as theories connecting self-reflection and transformative learning (e.g., Mezirow, 1990, 1997) to examine an autobiographical reading and writing course designed for low-income, first-year students in a comprehensive college transition program at an institution in the Midwest region of the United States. We used interviews with course instructors, longitudinal digital diaries with students, and course observations to understand the nature of the course and how participants experienced it. We found that building community was essential to supporting students’ learning. Within classroom communities, instructors structured opportunities for reflection, validated students’ stories, used culturally relevant texts, and encouraged sharing narratives with peers. These practices in combination cumulatively enhanced students’ writing skills, their confidence, and their sense of belonging. Participants also reported that the course deepened students’ self-awareness and fostered empathy for peers. Our participants highlighted the benefits of incorporating autobiographical reading and writing into first-year composition courses, particularly for low-income students and those with minoritized identities.

For some students enrolled in online courses, receiving tutoring may be a key component to their success. This study sought to determine if the use of an outsourced online tutoring service (OOTS) was associated with course success in online English Composition courses. The authors employed chi-square tests to analyze the relationship between tutoring usage and final grades for students in two different composition courses, English Composition I (n = 888) and English Composition II (n = 1108). The results indicate that in both courses, students who utilized the OOTS passed the course at higher rates than those who did not. For students who utilized the service at least once, 95% passed English Composition I, compared with a 57% passing rate of students who did not utilize the service. Results for English Composition II were similar with 89% of OOTS users passing the course, compared with a 58% passing rate of non-users. This research supports and discusses the importance of online tutoring for students.

Women are less likely than men to run as candidates in political elections. One reason for this is gendered upbringing, which depresses political ambition among women and strengthens such ambition among men. Furthermore, gendered upbringing can be more pronounced when parents have children of both sexes. Based on these previous findings, we therefore test the theory that both women and men have a higher likelihood of becoming a political candidate if they have sisters rather than brothers. To establish whether the likelihood of running for office is affected by sibling sex composition, we utilize the fact that nature randomly assigns the sex of the younger sibling when parents decide to have a second child. Using data covering the entire adult Danish population and every candidate in national and local elections between 1990 and 2015, we find, however, no evidence that men and women with a younger sister are more likely to run for office. These findings run counter to previous findings on the effects of siblings and gendered upbringing.

The present paper analyzes development patterns in research networks and technology as well as their co-evolution by the example of the currently highly transformative German automotive industry. We therefore introduce a consistent network-based approach for measuring change in research networks and the technological composition of patents. Our results show that the applied method is particularly useful for identifying structural similarities and main structural changes in research and patent networks. Further, the investigation of the co-evolutionary processes indicates that, regarding the German automotive industry, changes in technology lead to structural changes in the research network.

Schaffer offers us in the last section of “On What Grounds What” (2009) an applied illustration of his allegedly Aristotelian metaontological position. According to this illustration, Schaffer’s metaontological position, supplemented with a few Aristotelian theses about substance and grounding, would converge in a view remarkably similar to his priority monism (Philosophical Studies, 145, 131–148, 2009b; Philosophical Review, 119, 31–76, 2010a), the view that there is one single fundamental substance. In this paper, I will argue against Schaffer’s suggestion that priority monism represents a viable development of Aristotelian metaphysics. In particular, I will hold that the most plausible version of Schaffer’s priority monism by Aristotelian standards fails to satisfy basic Aristotelian tenets about dependence, composition, change, and persistence, and suggest that this is evidence that Aristotelians are more at home with a pluralism rather than a monism about substance.

We explore an innovative approach to learning design representations called course composition diagrams, which consist of interactive digital icons representing course elements, such as videos and quizzes. Course composition diagrams present a visual overview of course structure, including the placement and sequence of individual elements within a course. We hypothesize that providing design teams with such representations creates opportunities for reflection that may not exist otherwise, thereby potentially leading to improved design outcomes. We present a case study where design teams of Massive Open Online Courses used course composition diagrams to reflect on courses they had recently developed. Six themes emerged from our qualitative analysis: 1) affordances of representation, 2) limitations of representation, 3) opportunities for comparison, 4) congruence, 5) reflection on design choices, and 6) utility of representation. We argue that this approach holds promise for providing designers with meaningful opportunities to reflect on learning design.

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) describes a specific paradigm of computing that utilizes Web services as reusable components in order to develop new software applications. SOC allows distributed applications to work together via the Internet without direct human intervention. In this work, we propose a new SOC-based approach to ensure application development. This approach ensures the discovery, selection, and composition of the most appropriate Web services. With this approach, various requirements (both functional and non-functional) are specified by the developer to satisfy QoS, QoE, and QoBiz parameters and Web services are selected and composed to meet these requirements. Our approach is implemented using the Req-WSComposer (Requirements-based Web Services Composer) platform, whose functionalities are tested using an extended and enriched version of the OWLS-TC dataset, which includes around 10,830 semantic Web services descriptions. The results of our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach enables users to extract the most appropriate composition solution that satisfies the developer's pre-determined requirements.

Services Oriented Architecture provides Web Services (WSs) as reusable software components that can be applied to create more complicate composite services for users according to the specified QoS limitations. However, considering many WSs that may be appropriate for each task of a user-submitted workflow, finding the optimal WSs for a composite WS to maximize the overall QoS is an NP-hard problem. As a result, numerous composition schemes have been suggested in the literature to untangle this problem by using various metaheuristic algorithms. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and taxonomy of such QoS-oriented metaheuristic WS composition schemes provided in the literature. It investigates how metaheuristic algorithms are adapted for the WS composition problem and highlight their main features, advantages, and limitations. Also, in each category of the studied composition schemes, a comparison of their applied QoS factors, evaluated metrics, exploited simulators, and properties of the applied metaheuristic algorithms are explained. Finally, the concluding remarks and future research directions are summarized to help researchers in working in this area.

This study discusses a writing assessment for State University’s first year integrated experience of Technology 120: Design Thinking in Technology and English 106: First-Year Writing and the implications it provides for curriculum design. The study used Adaptive Comparative Judgment to determine whether integrated research essays that utilized design thinking were more rhetorically effective (i.e., better attuned to addressing a purpose, audience, and context) than non-integrated English composition research essays. Results showed the non-integrated research essays had a statistically significant better rating than the integrated courses; this finding was counterintuitive to our expectations, therefore we utilized NVivo to conduct a word frequency analysis on judges’ holistic comments to determine strengths and weaknesses of the essays. The word frequency analysis demonstrated writing concepts were much stronger and more effective in a standard composition course. These findings led to the development of three literature-based curriculum and pedagogical changes to ensure that integrated students achieve general education writing outcomes in concert with design thinking principles—something our results showed as lacking significantly in these courses.

A semantics of pictorial representation should provide an account of how pictorial signs are associated with the contents they express. Unlike the familiar semantics of spoken languages, this problem has a distinctively spatial cast for depiction. Pictures themselves are two-dimensional artifacts, and their contents take the form of pictorial spaces, perspectival arrangements of objects and properties in three dimensions. A basic challenge is to explain how pictures are associated with the particular pictorial spaces they express. Inspiration here comes from recent proposals that analyze depiction in terms of geometrical projection. In this essay, I will argue that, for a central class of pictures, the projection-based theory of depiction provides the best explanation for how pictures express pictorial spaces, while rival perceptual and resemblance theories fall short. Since the composition of pictorial space is itself the basis for all other aspects of pictorial content, the proposal provides a natural foundation for further pictorial semantics.

What is the most important reason for using Computer Vision methods in humanities research? In this article, I argue that the use of numerical representation and data analysis methods offers a new language for describing cultural artifacts, experiences and dynamics. The human languages such as English or Russian that developed rather recently in human evolution are not good at capturing analog properties of human sensorial and cultural experiences. These limitations become particularly worrying if we want to compare thousands, millions or billions of artifacts—i.e. to study contemporary media and cultures at their new twenty-first century scale. When we instead use numerical measurements of image properties standard in Computer Vision, we can better capture details of a single artifact as well as visual differences between a number of artifacts–even if they are very small. The examples of visual dimensions that numbers can capture better then languages include color, shape, texture, contours, composition, and visual characteristics of represented faces, bodies and objects. The methods of finding structures and relationships in large numerical datasets developed in statistics and machine learning allow us to extend this analysis to very big datasets of cultural objects. Equally importantly, numerical image features used in Computer Vision also give us a new language to represent gradual and continuous temporal changes—something which natural languages are also bad at. This applies to both single artworks such as a film or a dance piece (describing movement and rhythm) and also to changes in visual characteristics in millions of artifacts over decades or centuries.

Given prior work identifying sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization as key strategies needed to learn from multiple texts, this study examines students’ multiple text processing and written response composition under three different heuristic conditions. In particular, students were asked to engage in sourcing, corroboration, or contextualization while completing a multiple text task. Then, log data of text access, students’ notes, and written responses were analyzed across task conditions. Moreover, each sentence included in students’ written responses was linked to information in notes and in the library texts provided. Results indicate that students directed to engage in sourcing both accessed more document information and included more of such information in their notes. More generally, students’ response composition was found to be reductive in nature, with students filtering information from library texts into their notes and into the written responses that they composed; at the same time, cross-textual integration was found to be limited.

The current study explores the contributions of written vocabulary and syntax to informational writing quality in Grades 5 through 8. Various aspects of language skills (receptive to written, oral register to academic register) have differing relationships with narrative and informational writing achievement across development. In this study, we explore one relatively understudied aspect of language (written language in the oral register) during a key transition period. Specifically, we find support for the role of vocabulary and syntax skills in informational writing quality in early and later middle school; that the role may differ according to students’ skill level; and we explore the role of written vocabulary and syntax in the gender gap between girls’ and boys’ informational writing quality.

According to the widely accepted cue-utilization view, judgments of learning (JOLs) are thought to be comparative in nature, such that they are sensitive to the relative differences between stimuli. Here, we report the results of three experiments that both support and extend this tenet of the cue-utilization view by examining the impact of relative differences on metacognitive control strategies, including study-time allocation and re-study selection. By presenting word pairs of medium-difficulty intermixed with either easy or difficult word pairs we manipulated list composition to assess the impact of the relative difference between items on individuals’ JOLs (Experiments 1 and 2a), study-time allocation (Experiment 1), and re-study selection (Experiments 2a and 2b). First, our manipulation of list composition demonstrated that stimuli of equal difficulty are judged to be more or less memorable depending on the context in which they are presented, thereby confirming previous findings that JOLs are sensitive to the relative differences among items. Second, with regard to metacognitive control strategies, our results indicated that list composition may not impact all control strategies in the same fashion. Specifically, the relative differences between items did not appear to influence the amount of study time allocated to a given item, but did affect which items were selected for re-study. These findings have important applied implications, and may assist in the development of more effective guidance on how to best engage in self-regulated learning.

Purpose of review. Handwriting is a particular difficulty in DCD. Children who struggle to produce legible and sufficiently fast handwriting may under-achieve at school. Using van Galen’s model, this review examines recent research to describe the nature of handwriting difficulties in DCD. The range of assessment tools is highlighted and recommendations for intervention provided. Recent findings. Embedded in the broader skill of writing, handwriting involves more than motor skill. Children with DCD tend to produce less writing than their peers. Their slow rate of production is characterised by frequent pauses. Errors in letter formation negatively impact on legibility and the quality of written composition is also poor. Different types of assessment help to capture the range of difficulties. Summary. Comprehensive assessment helps gain a full understanding of the nature of handwriting difficulties in DCD. International recommendations and guidelines provide a valuable framework for assessment and principles for intervention.

This article is part of an ongoing series by the authors and the Deep Play Research Group, which focuses on the intersection of creativity and technology in education. In this article, Dr. Anthony Brandt, professor of composition and theory at Rice University shares his thoughts about the study of creativity. He uses his experiences as a musician and composer to highlight the important role that creativity plays in our lives, providing examples that illustrate multiple understandings of creativity. His work with neuroscientist David Eagleman is highlighted and serves to illustrate how our understanding of the brain has influenced our knowledge about the way that humans have evolved to engage in creative acts. Dr. Brandt shares his excitement about opportunities that the future will bring as researchers collaborate with scientists and use ground-breaking technological advancements to study creativity. He further offers implications for education and technology.

It’s widely accepted that we have most reason to accept theories that best fulfill the following naturalistically respectable criteria: (1) internal consistency, (2) consistency with the facts, and (3) exemplification of the theoretical virtues. It’s also widely accepted that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. I argue that if you accept the aforementioned criteria, you have most reason to reject that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. By applying the criteria to worlds that are all prima facie possible, I show that contingent local matters of particular fact partly determine which theory of composition we should accept at a world. For instance, I argue that when we apply the criteria to our world, we should accept Mereological Nihilism. Furthermore, even if you think that the worlds I mention, such as gunky worlds, are impossible, you should still reject the brute principle that metaphysical theories are necessarily true. Instead, you should only accept that a theory of composition is necessarily true if contingent local matters of particular fact at possible worlds cannot tell in favor of one theory of composition over another.

Early number sense, including subitizing and composition, is a foundation for mathematics, and bodies, especially fingers, are integral to number sense. Multi-touch technology offers innovative opportunities for developing and studying number sense, especially using conceptually congruent gestures that match the mathematics. However, there have been few investigations of the development of early number sense, particularly in embodied forms. Therefore, this mixed-methods study explores a preschooler’s development of early number sense during a month of interactions with the multi-touch digital mathematics game Fingu. Key findings related to the development of early number sense include relevance of configuration and quantity, relationships among gestures and quantities, and development of estimation and precision. This research adds new perspectives to our understandings of early number sense research and practice, calling for consideration of embodiment and conceptually congruent gestures.

The paper introduces a conceptually important, but previously unknown essay by the Russian poet, theologian and philosopher Aleksey Khomyakov. This essay, “The Slavic and Orthodox Christian Population of Austria,” was discovered in two versions: an original, previously unpublished manuscript and a later anonymous 1845 text. The author reveals an aesthetic function that certain structural elements perform in Khomyakov’s essay, encouraging the interaction between historiosophical ideas and literary creativity. The essay is emphatically philosophical in its style, as its very composition embraces the classic Hegelian triad of “Being—Nothing—Becoming.” This notion overlaps with Khomyakov’s historiosophical idea of the European Slavdom that flourished in the first millennium B.C., and that then lost its sovereignty being under German rule, and finally enjoyed a renaissance in the 19th century. The paper also shows that the distinctive feature of Khomyakov’s poetry is its prophetism. The contrastive analysis was carried out to identify the affinity between the thematic-figurative patterns of Khomyakov’s early poetry (up to 1845) and his essay on the Austrian Slavs, which revealed how the poetic thought had been accumulating and what aspect it had taken on within a philosophical and historical discourse. The author of the article puts forward the hypothesis that the difference in depicting Peter the Great in the two versions of Khomyakov’s essay can be attributed to his dispute with Konstantin Aksakov’s poem “To Peter.” This polemic between two fellow-Slavophils was driven by their diverging approaches to the problem of the ethical dilemma of ends and means.

Science identity has been widely discussed in recent years; however, research on its development in multimodal composing environments, especially in formal classroom settings, has yet to be fully investigated. This qualitative study unraveled the science identity development of sixth-grade students as they created multimodal science fiction stories in a STEAM course. Thirty-two students enrolled in the course and worked in groups of 3–5, and each student self-selected one of three roles: designer, scientist, or writer. This study focused on the students (n = 9) who took the role of scientist and examined their science identity development. Data sources include digital surveys, semi-structured group interviews, and multimodal artifacts. Our qualitative analysis suggests that (a) composing with modes of choices could drive interests in science; (b) students connected science practices in classrooms with those in professional domains through taking the role of scientist; (c) taking hybrid roles (i.e., a combination of scientist and other roles) while composing with multiple modes contributed to the recognition of science in non-science careers. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications for cultivating positive science identities and engaging early adolescents in career exploration.

In-depth studies on the design of the domes of the Octagonal Hall of the Small Baths and the Vestibule of the Golden Court at Hadrian’s Villa in Tivoli have been conducted starting from 3D surveys carried out with active and passive sensors. Through the comparison of the ichnographia and orthographia of these emblematic examples of architectural experimentation, common elements and features have emerged which, thanks to the integrated use of new measurement technologies, have allowed us to hypothesise dimensioning systems of the vertical structures together with possible criteria for defining the intrados–extrados relationship. Hadrian’s architects’ use of precise grid-based designs to facilitate the achievement of target quantities (required areas and volumes) as well as modules aimed at defining alignments of horizontal and vertical structures emerge clearly, providing useful elements for an integrated reading of the individual buildings to support the archaeological investigation.

This article turns to the issue of political representation that I argue is central to all forms of political thought and practice of the modern period. Taking political representation as its object, I argue that its crisis—that comes to a head in the travails of the Weimar Republic—provided the opportunity for forms of neoliberal representation to displace political representation with purportedly “neutral”, non-partisan and thus “fair” representational tools. In contrast, I seek to develop the idea of “self-representation” with a discussion of paths not chosen at Weimar and via Italianoperaismo’s reflections on “class composition”, which combines collective self-representation with political organization. Representing each member of a collective to another as it develops epistemic and cartographic tools, it constructs group solidarity, organization and the capacity to act as it reclaims the collectivity alienated in modern political forms of representation and excluded from neoliberal ones.