Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTThis study employs data on chamber dominance of legislative conferences involving two House‐Senate committee pairs to study the phenomenon of first acting chamber victories. Previous research has concluded that the second acting chamber tends to win in conference, because the committee of the first acting chamber dominates the pre‐conference shaping of the legislation, leaving its conferees a powerful incentive to compromise differences with the conferees of the second acting chamber in order to ensure that a conference version of the legislation in question can be agreed on. However, previous research has also shown that the first acting chamber inexplicably wins 25 percent of all conferences for which a winner can be determined.This study finds that the critical common factor in these countertrending conferences was the successful attachment of non‐committee amendments on the floor of the second acting chamber. Such successful floor amendments seem to substantially mitigate the strategic advantage of the second acting chamber in conference.

A Time to Train.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of contents -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- The neuro-turn in religious studies -- Cognitive science of religion -- Consciousness studies -- Overview of the chapters -- The direction forward -- Chapter 1 The supernatural: A range of neurocultural phenomena -- The supernatural is everywhere -- The supernatural as a range of complex cultural phenomena -- The supernatural as a complex cultural concept -- The complexity of supernatural research: Transcendental and non-transcendental theories -- Taking subjects seriously -- The supernatural is natural and real -- Scientific study of the supernatural -- Concluding remarks -- References -- Chapter 2 Supernatural and the invisible: A biogenetic structural account -- Introduction -- Biogenetic structural theory -- Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology -- Merleau-Ponty, Mandelbaum and Michotte on the experience of causality -- The invisible, causality and the brain -- Superstition, chance and the Navajo moccasin game -- Sitting in the shade -- Revealing the invisible in ASC -- Revealing the invisible and the origin of myth -- Conclusion -- Notes -- References -- Chapter 3 The evolutionary origins of the supernatural in ritual behaviours -- Introduction -- Biogenetic origins of ritual -- Ritualisation, displays, and fixed action patterns -- Primate displays and religiosity -- Ritualised hominid displays for group integration -- Hominin ritual baseline: Costly displays -- Mimesis in the development of culture and religion -- The evolution of hominin ritual -- Shamanism as a cross-cultural phenomenon -- Homologies of chimpanzee displays and shamanic ritual -- The evolution of shamanic ritual -- Ecological stress and social alliances: Ritual as an emotional modulation technology -- Shamanism and ritual healing.

This study investigated what features undergraduate EFL learners perceive as affecting the difficulty of model paragraphs. Four hundred and seventy-five Vietnamese undergraduates participated in a partial least squares structural equation model design. They ranked five paragraphs from easiest to most difficult and responded to a 10-point Likert questionnaire regarding 11 features (titles, paragraph length, vocabulary, vocabulary in context, rhetorical organization, paragraph structure, sentence length, punctuation, signal words, interest, background knowledge). The results showed that eight variables (titles, vocabulary, vocabulary in context, sentence length, rhetorical organization, paragraph structure, interest, background knowledge) had a significant direct effect and four variables (vocabulary, sentence length, rhetorical organization, background knowledge) had mediating effects. The model accounted for 0.508 R2 of students' perceptions, with a moderate to high predictive relevance ( Q2 = 0.35). The paper also discusses the results' implications for those in writing studies and the publishing industry. Suggestions for future study are also presented.

Although scholars have long known that most Americans are woefully ignorant of foreign affairs (Almond 1960; Kriesberg 1949), they are uncertain about how the U.S. public's knowledge of international politics compares to that of people in other countries. We address this uncertainty with a study of citizens' knowledge of foreign affairs in five western democracies: Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. The focus is on the roles each country's mass media play in the process by which citizens learn about international politics. The study found that Germans are the most knowledgeable about international politics, citizens in Britain, Canada, and France displayed moderate knowledge, and Americans had the least knowledge. We conclude that people learn about foreign affairs due to their opportunity, defined by their location in the social structure, and their motivation, indexed by attention paid to news accounts of world politics. The better educated and more politically attentive citizens also proved to be more informed in each country, whereas citizens who most often watched popular television entertainment programs proved to be less informed about foreign affairs.