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Applying malleability to HPC systems can increase their productivity without degrading or even improving the performance of running applications. This paper presents Proteo, a configurable framework that allows to design benchmarks to study the effect of malleability on a system, and also incorporates malleability into a real application. Proteo consists of two modules: SAM allows to emulate the computational behavior of iterative scientific MPI applications, and MaM is able to reconfigure a job during execution, adjusting the number of processes, redistributing data, and resuming execution. An in-depth study of all the possibilities shows that Proteo is able to behave like a real malleable or non-malleable application in the range [0.85, 1.15]. Furthermore, the different methods defined in MaM for process management and data redistribution are analyzed, concluding that asynchronous malleability, where reconfiguration and application execution overlap, results in a 1.15 × speedup. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a reply to commentaries from Amy Kind, Casey O'Callaghan, and Wayne Wu. It features a defense and further analysis of perceptual malleability, as defended in Thinking and Perceiving. In turn, it considers the consequences of malleability for attention and the cognitive penetrability of perception, imagination and perceptual skills, and perceptual content and objectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate how tertiary humanities students' perceptions of the study environment, dropout considerations, and background variables, respectively, explain variations in dropout. Based on Tinto's Institutional Departure Model and a systematic review of the dropout literature, the study environment comprised an academic system, a social system, and teaching. Multivariate statistical analyses in the form of explorative factor analysis and logistic bivariate regressions were used on half-early register and survey data from all humanities students at a Danish university [University of Southern Denmark], matriculated in 2017–2019. This article found that students' perceptions of their study environment explained between 15.8% and 36.9% of dropout, whereas dropout considerations and background parameters explained only between 0 and 9.1% and between 7.9 and 21.4% of dropout, respectively. We hereby present and discuss the results obtained during different terms. The discussion revolves around the proposed research instrument and the longitudinal research methodology, as well as around what we could learn from this study about being a humanities student and about study environments that could help us increase the number of graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Past research has demonstrated that older adults are stereotyped as less malleable than young adults. Moreover, beliefs that people are less malleable are associated with lower confrontations of prejudice, as perpetrators are seen as less capable of changing their (prejudiced) behavior. The present research sought to integrate these lines of research to demonstrate that endorsement of ageist beliefs that older adults are less malleable will lead to a lower confrontation of anti-Black prejudice espoused by older adults. Across four experimental studies (N = 1,573), people were less likely to confront anti-Black prejudice espoused by an 82-year-old compared with a 62-, 42-, or 20-year-old, due, in part, to beliefs that older adults are less malleable. Further exploration demonstrated that malleability beliefs about older adults were held across young, middle-aged, and older adult samples. These findings demonstrate how stereotypes about older adults can impede racial equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this research, we investigate the impression management (IM) strategies used by nonnative speakers. We ask the following questions: (1) What IM strategies do nonnative speakers employ, (2) Are some IM strategies more effective than others, and (3) What determines the use of different IN strategies among nonnative speakers? Across two studies, we examine if some IM strategies are more effective than others in improving outcomes for nonnative speakers. Results from both studies revealed negative effects associated with the use of defensive strategies, and results from Study 2 demonstrated benefits associated with assertive strategies (i.e., self-promotion and flattery). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of adaptive scheduling algorithms that take advantage of malleability has become a crucial area of research in many large-scale projects. Malleable workloads can improve the system's performance but, at the same time, provide an extra dimension to the scheduling problem. This paper proposes an adaptive, performance-based job scheduling method that emphasizes the backfilling concept with malleability. The proposed method performs the malleability operations only when the estimated execution time of the involved applications is better than or equal to the execution time on the allocated resources without reconfiguration. The reconfiguration feasibility is determined by performance models considering the application scalability and reconfiguration overheads. Different policies for implementing malleability are presented, each targeting a specific workload in terms of job size and scalability. The comprehensive evaluation shows an improvement in the slowdown up to 49% compared to the non-adaptive baseline scheduling algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research introduces the "Mindfulness Mindset Scale," a concise and reliable tool designed to measure beliefs about the malleability of mindfulness skills. Study 1 (N = 285) revealed a single-factor structure through exploratory factor analysis, further validated in Study 2 (N = 286) using confirmatory factor analysis. Studies 3a (N = 266) and 3b (N = 320) revealed associations between the Mindfulness Mindset Scale and other measures of mindset, trait mindfulness, and coping, showing reasonable convergent and divergent validity. Study 4 (N = 470) showed the predictive validity of the mindfulness mindset, being correlated with behavioral persistence, effort, resilience, challenge-seeking, and academic grades. Study 5 (N = 320) supported the academic correlates of malleable beliefs of mindfulness beyond the mental health factors from Study 3 in two countries. In Study 6 (NFrench = 613, NHungarian = 524), we demonstrated that a well-established learning mindset intervention can lead to changes in mindfulness mindset in two national contexts. Finally, a brief mindfulness mindset intervention designed for Study 7 (N = 208) also led to changes in malleability beliefs about mindfulness skills. These behavioral results suggest that beliefs about mindfulness being malleable are a novel construct distinct from trait mindfulness. Such beliefs are related to adaptive psychological mechanisms relevant in educational contexts, considering students' coping, mastery behavior, and academic performance. Importantly, these beliefs can be modified by brief interventions. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This research underscores how beliefs about the malleability of mindfulness can influence educational outcomes. A brief, valid, and reliable measure can assess these beliefs. Besides grade point average, this survey can also predict mastery behaviors like resilience, effort, perseverance, challenge-seeking, and academic grades. The study also found that these beliefs can be changed through psychologically wise interventions focused on learning and mindfulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a novel feature for improving the scheduling process based on the performance prediction and the detection of CPU and I/O interference between applications. This feature consists of using malleable synthetic benchmarks – called clones – that reproduce the behaviour of applications executed in a cluster. These proxies can be used with two objectives: to build large and representative datasets that can be used to train the machine learning algorithms for modelling the platform workload, and to evaluate in advance if two executing applications can potentially produce contention hazards related to the shared use of the system resources like CPU, cache memory or I/O bandwidth. The proposed framework generates application clones based on generic-purpose performance information collected from monitoring. Unlike other works based on the use of micro-architectures or metrics obtained from simulators, in the approach presented in this work, the application clones generate similar behaviour without extracting data from the binaries, avoiding the necessity of managing code or data from the applications. One advantage of this approach is that they can be shared securely because they have not been generated using any piece of the original code. In addition, the proposed clones are malleable, so they also able to model the application behaviour under a different number of processes. In this work, we show how the use of clones contributes to improving the application scheduling by reducing the number of evaluations that is necessary to perform, and to detect performance degradation (interference) without the necessity of involving the execution of the actual applications. We evaluate the proposed clone generation approach on two sets of benchmarks (CPU and I/O oriented) and several applications. We also compare the performance obtained during the execution of the proxies and the applications to show their similarity. Finally, we include an evaluation of the interference detection using this novel approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the evolution of the free agent threads for OpenMP to the new role-shifting threads model and their integration with the Dynamic Load Balancing (DLB) library. We demonstrate how free agent threads can improve resource utilization in OpenMP applications with load imbalance in their nested parallel regions. We also demonstrate how DLB efficiently manages the malleability exposed by the role-shifting threads to address load imbalance issues. We use three real-world scientific applications, one of them to demonstrate that free agents alone can improve the OpenMP model without external tools, and two other MPI+OpenMP applications, one of them with a coupling case, to illustrate the potential of the free agent threads' malleability with an external resource manager to increase the efficiency of the system. In addition, we demonstrate that the new implementation is more usable than the former one, letting the runtime system automatically make decisions that were made by the programmer previously. All software is released open-source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malleability allows computing facilities to adapt their workloads through resource management systems to maximize the throughput of the facility and the efficiency of the executed jobs. This technique is based on reconfiguring a job to a different resource amount during execution and then continuing with it. One of the stages of malleability is the dynamic spawning of processes in execution time, where different decisions in this stage will affect how the next stage of data redistribution is performed, which is the most time-consuming stage. This paper describes different methods and strategies, defining eight different alternatives to spawn processes dynamically and indicates which one should be used depending on whether a strong or weak scaling application is being used. In addition, it is described for both types of applications which strategies benefit most the application performance or the system productivity. The results show that reducing the number of spawning processes by reusing the older ones can reduce reconfiguration time compared to the classical method by up to 2.6 times for expanding and up to 36 times for shrinking. Furthermore, the asynchronous strategy requires analysing the impact of oversubscription on application performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Malleability is defined as the ability to vary the degree of parallelism at runtime, and is regarded as a means to improve core occupation on state-of-the-art multicore processors tshat contain tens of computational cores per socket. This property is especially interesting for applications consisting of irregular workloads and/or divergent executions paths. The integration of malleability in high-performance instances of the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) is currently nonexistent, and, in consequence, applications relying on these computational kernels cannot benefit from this capability. In response to this scenario, in this paper we demonstrate that significant performance benefits can be gathered via the exploitation of malleability in a framework designed to implement portable and high-performance BLAS-like operations. For this purpose, we integrate malleability within the BLIS library, and provide an experimental evaluation of the result on three different practical use cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Grocer’s Dilemma is a legal writing (and thinking) assignment that can help undergraduate students interested in law school as well as first-year law students beginning their legal study better understand how legal rules are not fixed but are instead malleable—uncertain, flexible, and somewhat indeterminate. It asks students to consider, based on a grocer’s preference, where to place produce inside a grocery store. In this process, students must consider “precedents”—other produce—that contribute to the rule. Those precedents, however, do not have a fixed meaning. Instead, their meaning is malleable. Malleability is a threshold concept in the law. As such, when students become aware of and more comfortable with the concept of malleability, they can begin moving through the liminality of legal education and begin their journey across the threshold between legal novice and lawyer-expert. The Grocer’s Dilemma assignment focuses students on a nonlegal context for examining malleability, making it easier for students to focus on the complexities of reasoning about a malleable rule rather than the legal rules themselves.

Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity‐based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including "the field" and "the anthropology seminar." Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleability—and its limits—allows us to imagine and produce a more sensitive anthropology. A more sensitive anthropology would expand the discipline's understanding of who counts as an anthropologist and what counts as anthropological praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we investigate how tertiary humanities students’ perceptions of the study environment, dropout considerations, and background variables, respectively, explain variations in dropout. Based on Tinto’s Institutional Departure Model and a systematic review of the dropout literature, the study environment comprised an academic system, a social system, and teaching. Multivariate statistical analyses in the form of explorative factor analysis and logistic bivariate regressions were used on half-early register and survey data from all humanities students at a Danish university [University of Southern Denmark], matriculated in 2017–2019. This article found that students’ perceptions of their study environment explained between 15.8% and 36.9% of dropout, whereas dropout considerations and background parameters explained only between 0 and 9.1% and between 7.9 and 21.4% of dropout, respectively. We hereby present and discuss the results obtained during different terms. The discussion revolves around the proposed research instrument and the longitudinal research methodology, as well as around what we could learn from this study about being a humanities student and about study environments that could help us increase the number of graduates.

The teaching and learning of science should consider learners' sociocultural backgrounds as this can significantly impact their academic performance and engagement. Namibian rural schools, in particular, face unique challenges in this regard due to the diversity of cultural and linguistic backgrounds of learners. To address this issue, teachers should be trained on how to incorporate culturally relevant and responsive pedagogies in their science teaching. It is against this backdrop that this study critically explored the use of Indigenous Knowledge (IK) in a rural science classroom where learners were allowed to work with traditional materials to explain the scientific concepts regarding iron smelting. The study used an interpretivist paradigm and lenses of Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory (SCT) and Ogunniyi's Continuity Argumentative Theory (CAT) to analyse data collected through participatory observation and reflections. The interpretive paradigm was appropriate in the study as it allowed for a deep understanding of how learners interact with IK practices and make sense of scientific concepts. The traditional iron smelting (Mudukuto) was mobilised to achieve the integration of IK with Westernised science. Vygotsky's SCT and CAT were used to observe social interactions and analyse argumentation during learning. The study involved 36 Grade 9 Physical Science learners and one resourceful IK holder. The learners were exposed to the indigenous practice of traditional iron smelting and their interaction and participation were observed. The study was limited to only one Grade 9 class of learners, and therefore, the findings cannot be generalised to represent all Physical Science learners in the Kavango West region. The study's data analysis suggests that learners' status of argumentation, as assessed by CAT, shifted from dominant, suppressed and assimilated to emergent and equipollent after the intervention of the indigenous practice. The findings indicate that learners became aware of the relevance of IK practices, and this was evident in their active participation and probing questions connecting these practices to Western science concepts in the classroom. To make science more accessible and relevant to learners, the study suggests that teachers should try to integrate IK practices into the science curriculum. One way to do this is by bringing community members who are the custodians of IK into the science classroom to share their expertise with learners. Alternatively, teachers can bring traditional technology into the classroom and demonstrate how it works, enabling learners to connect it with Western science concepts. Overall, the study provides evidence that the integration of IK into the science curriculum can spark learners' interest in science and make science more meaningful in their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cryptosystems employing a synchronous binary-additive stream cipher are susceptible to a generic attack called 'bit-flipping', in which the ciphertext is modified to decrypt into a fraudulent message. While authenticated encryption and message authentication codes can effectively negate this attack, encryption modes can also provide partial protection against bit-flipping. PudgyTurtle is a stream-cipher mode which uses keystream to encode (via an error-correcting code) and to encipher (via modulo-2 addition). Here, we describe the behavior of this mode during bit-flipping attacks and demonstrate how it creates uncertainty about the number, positions, and identities of decrypted bits that will be affected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effects of Heat Treatment on Microstructure and Mechanical Properties of D-6A AISI Medium-Carbon Low-Alloy Steel were investigated under different heat treatment processes. The investigation heat treatment processes centered on as received, normalized, annealed, water quenched, and tempered conditions. The investigation included D-6A AISI Medium-Carbon Low-Alloy Steel microstructure, hardness, malleability coefficient, and cold work ratio of the metal tests. The mechanical properties were putting all selected samples into an electrical furnace, and permitted to be heated up to 850℃. The tempering temperatures are 200℃, 400℃, and 600℃. Specimens undergoing annealing, normalizing, quenching and tempering revealed various microstructure and hardness. Regarding to Results, the highest hardness recorded with quenched steel of about 614 HV, while best property in malleability coefficient value recorded with normalized and annealed steel of 15.3 and 30 respectively, and that hardness decreases with increase in tempering temperature. Highest cold work ratio recorded with annealed of about 25, and the cold work ratio increases with the increase of tempering temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneous magnesium (Mg) matrix nanocomposite with dispersed soft phase exhibits high strength and toughness. Herein, the deformation behavior and failure process were investigated to reveal the unique mechanical behavior of the heterogeneous microstructure under compression. The extensive plastic deformation is accompanied by the flattening and tilting of the soft phase, inhibiting strain localization and leading to strain hardening. Moreover, a stable crack multiplication process is activated, which endows high damage tolerance to the heterogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposites. The final failure of the composite is caused by crack coalescence in the shear plane along a tortuous path. The presence of dispersed soft phases within the hard matrix induces a noticeable change in mechanical response. Especially, the malleability of the heterogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposite is two and ten times higher than that of pure Mg and the homogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposite, respectively. The current study provides a novel strategy to break the trade-off between strength and toughness in metal matrix nanocomposites.

Spatial cognition is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, but our understanding of its developmental trajectory across the life span is limited. Here, we applied game-based assessment on mobile devices to engage a large sample from China (N = 216,713) with a wide age range (from under 10 years old to above 60) in multiple participations of a mental rotation task, a typical measure of spatial cognition. We found that spatial ability developed asynchronously with its malleability. Whereas mental rotation performance peaked at the age of 28, with males performing better than females, the effect of training from repeated participation peaked at 18, probably laying the foundation for the development of spatial ability. In contrast, children showed particularly low malleability, and a follow-up experiment revealed that the underdeveloped ability of mirror-image discrimination likely hindered the malleability of spatial cognition during this period. The intermingled relation of ability and malleability illustrates dynamics in the development of spatial cognition, inviting broad research on the development of other cognitive functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sur les terrains de l'aide internationale, les projets mis en place, dont les dispositifs de soin psychiques, dépendent des dimensions locales, internationales et des financements. Ils doivent également se penser en référence à la clinique et à ses spécificités subjectives et culturelles. La combinaison de ces facteurs pluriels peut influer sur les dispositifs mis en place et leurs évolutions. Par un retour d'expériences d'une recherche-action menée au Cambodge, nous questionnons les évolutions et adaptations d'un dispositif thérapeutique auprès d'enfants abusés. Durant un an, un dispositif sur la base de médiations a été proposé pour dix enfants accueillis au sein d'une ONG locale de protection de l'enfance. Nous retraçons ici sa mise en place et son évolution sur le terrain. La mise en place du dispositif a été vecteur de différentes rencontres. Les aménagements se sont joués en lien avec le contexte institutionnel, les rencontres avec les acteurs locaux ainsi que les spécificités de la clinique. Les évolutions du dispositif thérapeutique semblent venir signifier des processus en jeu, tant sur la scène institutionnelle qu'intersubjective. Au regard de ces retours de terrain, la malléabilité des dispositifs thérapeutiques semble étayer dans ces contextes l'expression et l'évolution processuelle, permettant un travail d'élaboration psychique. In the field of international aid, the projects set up, including psychological care systems, must respond to international and local requirements regarding their financing and sustainability. In these contexts, clinical questions intersect with those of the systems and culture. The traumatic dimension remains prevalent, and these contexts often must deal with multiple local and international requirements. These dimensions can influence the devices set up and their evolution. Through feedback from an action-research conducted in Cambodia, we question the evolutions and adaptations of a therapeutic device with abused children. For one year, a device based on mediation was proposed for 10 children hosted within a local child protection NGO. We describe here its implementation and its evolution in the field. The setting up of the system was a vector of different meetings. The adjustments were made in relation to the institutional context, the meetings with the local actors and the specificities of the clinic. The evolutions of the therapeutic device seem to signify the processes at play, both on the institutional and intersubjective scene. Regarding these field returns, the malleability of the therapeutic devices in these contexts seems to support the expression and the processual evolution, allowing a work of psychic elaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Le présent article prend pour objet He Done Her Wrong, l’ouvrage hors norme publié en 1930 par le dessinateur américain Milt Gross. Cette œuvre est surtout connue pour son caractère muet, singularité formelle qui a fréquemment valu à He Done Her Wrong d’être associé à Gods’ Man, l’imposant roman sans paroles publié une année plus tôt par Lynd Ward. Après avoir interrogé la pertinence de cette connexion, l’article s’attache à explorer, au travers de micro-lectures, le système spatio-topique mis au point par Milt Gross. De cet examen, il ressort que l’inventivité dont le dessinateur fait montre en la circonstance est essentiellement affaire de malléabilité graphique — une malléabilité appliquée à l’ensemble des données fondatrices de la représentation (cadre, case, page). C’est dans cette malléabilité généralisée que semble devoir résider le caractère profondément expérimental de l’œuvre en question.

Malleability, the ability to adapt materials to specific shapes, is necessary in applications where a form closure is requested. The material should be easily deformable between desired stable shapes. Such stability can be obtained through bistable elements that act as memory in metamaterials. Herein, a material with memory behavior programmed by the local temperature is presented. The behavior can be switched between a permanent shape change and a complete elastic recovery after removing an applied mechanical load. Additionally, a deformed material can be forced to recover its shape by heating. Through an adaption of the mesostructure and the used polymers, the characteristic behavior (switching time and temperature) can be adjusted. Furthermore, heating can be applied locally that only certain parts are able to change. A unit cell design based on analytical and numerical analyses is demonstrated that considers not only the mesostructure but also the combination of polymeric materials with specific thermoresponsive mechanical behavior. Unit cells and structures of several cells are additively manufactured to validate the programmable behavior. The concept is extended to indirect heating with an alternating magnetic field, using a compound made from a polymeric material and magnetic particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Institute of Drug Addiction has promoted the Brain Disease Model of Addiction (BDMA) for several decades, believing it will have a positive impact on drug-related social policies. Per research, neither understanding nor accepting the BDMA positively influences social behavior and decision making related to decreased stigma or increased support for treatment and funding for substance use disorders. An alternative model, the Malleability Model, focuses on the changeability of psychopathology associated with psychiatric disorders, and is associated with decreased hopelessness and increased prognostic optimism. The Moral Weakness Model focuses on moral character as the reason for addiction and is associated with punitive responses to use disorders. The current study sought to identify whether Malleability values were more predictive of willingness to vote for harm reduction (HR) policies than BDMA and Moral values (H1); and if agreement with Malleability values were more predictive of willingness to fund such policies than agreement with BDMA and Moral values (H2). Contrary to hypotheses, results indicated the Malleability Model failed to predict votes and donations, while agreement with the Moral Weakness Model and conservative political affiliation was predictive of lower HR donations. Agreement with the BDMA did not reliably predict votes and donations to policies; the associations reflected were tenuous and should be interpreted with caution. Overall, results indicated the Malleability Model did not increase votes and donations to HR policies, while agreement with Moral Weakness Model and conservative affiliation consistently predicted votes and donations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Argument (2067-4252) is the property of Universitatea de Arhitectura si Urbanism "Ion Mincu" Bucuresti and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The evolution of parallel architectures points to dynamic environments where the number of available resources or configurations may vary during the execution of applications. This can be easily observed in grids and clouds, but can also be explored in clusters and multiprocessor architectures. Over more than two decades, several research initiatives have explored this characteristic by parallel applications, enabling the development of adaptive applications that can reconfigure the number of processes/threads and their allocation to processors to cope with varying workloads and changes in the availability of resources in the system. Despite the long history of development of solutions for adaptability for parallel architectures, there is no literature reviewing these efforts. In this context, the goal of this paper is to present the state of-the-art on adaptability from resource and application perspectives, ranging from shared memory architectures, clusters, and grids, to virtualized resources in cloud and fog computing in the last twenty years (2002-2022). A comprehensive analysis of the leading research initiatives in the field of adaptive parallel applications can provide the reader with an understanding of the essential concepts of development in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heterogeneous magnesium (Mg) matrix nanocomposite with dispersed soft phase exhibits high strength and toughness. Herein, the deformation behavior and failure process were investigated to reveal the unique mechanical behavior of the heterogeneous microstructure under compression. The extensive plastic deformation is accompanied by the flattening and tilting of the soft phase, inhibiting strain localization and leading to strain hardening. Moreover, a stable crack multiplication process is activated, which endows high damage tolerance to the heterogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposites. The final failure of the composite is caused by crack coalescence in the shear plane along a tortuous path. The presence of dispersed soft phases within the hard matrix induces a noticeable change in mechanical response. Especially, the malleability of the heterogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposite is two and ten times higher than that of pure Mg and the homogeneous Mg matrix nanocomposite, respectively. The current study provides a novel strategy to break the trade-off between strength and toughness in metal matrix nanocomposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper investigates how an institution can be maintained over a long period of time through adaptations to the material artefact which instantiates it. To illustrate our argument, we conduct a historical case study of the Guimard Metropolitan railway entrances, a material artefact which instantiates the Belle Epoque institution from 1914 to 2000. Based on our findings, we develop a process model of institutional maintenance based on the malleability of a material artefact. Supported by three types of interrelated institutional work – damage, preservation and transferability work – we illustrate how adaptations to the material form, meaning and location of an artefact allow an institution to address the evolving environment and its associated challenges and thus to be maintained over time. Our study expands our understanding of long-term institutional maintenance by capturing the importance of the malleability of an artefact and in offering a more positive view on damage work. It also has some implications for studies on materiality in highlighting the multidimensionality of artefacts and the role of transferability and relocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment of fire effects in Aleppo pine forests is crucial for guiding the recovery of burned areas. This study presents a methodology using UAV-LiDAR data to quantify malleability in three burned areas (1970, 1995, 2008) through the statistical analysis of tree height and Profile Area Change (PAC) metrics. Significant differences in vegetation height (99th percentile) among the three fires, with specific maximum absolute differences (D) depending on the fire year, have been identified. Positive PAC values in 2008 indicate deeper LiDAR penetration, resulting in lower regeneration, while values close to 0 in 1970 suggest more uniform regeneration. The use of LiDAR metrics and uni-temporal sampling between burned sectors and controls aids in understanding community resilience and identifying recovery stages in P. halepensis forests.

Introduction: Recent studies showed that VR is a valid tool to change implicit attitudes toward outgroup members. Here, we extended this work by investigating conditions under which virtual reality (VR) is effective in changing implicit racial attitudes. Methods: To this end, participants were embodied in a Black or White avatar and we manipulated the perspective through which they could see their virtual body. Participants in one condition, could see their virtual body both from a first-person perspective (i.e., by looking down toward themselves) and reflected in a mirror placed in front of them in the VR environment. Participants in another condition could instead see their virtual body only from a first-person perspective (i.e., by looking down toward themselves) as no mirror was placed in the VR environment. Implicit racial attitudes were assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) before and immediately after the VR intervention. Results: Results showed that when White participants were embodied in a Black avatar compared to a White avatar, they showed a decrease in their implicit pro-White attitudes but only when they could see their virtual body both from a first-person perspective and in a mirror. Discussion: These results suggest that, in immersive virtual reality interventions, the possibility for participants to see their body also reflected in a mirror, might be a critical factor in changing their implicit racial attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The malleability of Industrial Sheet Margarine (ISM) is essential for the formation of consistent layered structures of pastry products. However, there is limited reporting on how to improve the malleability of ISM with zero trans fatty acids (TFA) at an industrial production scale. Therefore, herein, Shea Olein (SHOL), rich in stearic acid C18:0, was employed as a value-added formulation ingredient to replace palm olein (POL) in palm-based formula (palm stearin:palm kernel olein:palm olein, 50:15:35, w/w/w) and the chemical interesterification (CIE) fat as ISM material was performed to improve the application performance. The addition of SHOL improved the crystallization characteristics by increasing the β' crystal content from 70.86% to 92.29% compared with a POL-added formula. The hardness of the two formulations after CIE decreased by 60% and 65%, respectively, compared with that before CIE due to the decrease of PPP and POP, and the increase of POS and PSS triacylglycerols. Melting profiles, polymorphism, and crystal structures systematically proved the bending and sheeting features and functional properties. The bending abilities and malleability of ISM with SHOL and CIE fats were significantly improved, resulting in a more conducive application performance. The study provided a practical approach to improving the malleability of ISM in industrial-level production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]