Suchergebnisse

L'homme est dépositaire du capital génétique du vivant et représente une espèce dans la lignée évolutive. Mais l'espèce humaine innove. Au lieu de s'adapter au milieu, elle l'a adapté à ses exigences et c'est la seule espèce qui est capable d'influencer son évolution. Durant la première période de sa vie, développement et maturité sexuelle, l'homme s'inscrit dans le processus évolutif en transmettant son capital génétique et en élevant sa progéniture ; la seconde période n'a pas de finalité apparente. Cette période comprend le vieillissement – un processus propre à l'humain – et dans cette perspective pourrait se comprendre comme le fruit d'une adaptation au nouvel environnement que l'homme s'est créé. Au cours du vieillissement, le potentiel cérébral sculpté durant la période de développement et de maturité, optimalise la structuration de l'espèce humaine dans le temps socio-culturel. Cette structuration est d'abord individuelle, car chaque individu est caractérisé par la spécificité de l'information qu'il porte, mais elle est aussi collective, car à chaque génération, la connaissance doit être partagée. Cette structuration est favorisée par la coexistence, au sein d'une même population, d'individus d'âges très diversifiés, porteurs d'informations à des états différents de maturation.

Scholars of political parties and elections around the globe have devoted extensive study toward understanding how party polarization affects the criteria voters use to determine their party preferences in elections. In American politics, previous empirical research suggests that congressional job performance ratings do not affect public attitudes toward parties and therefore have no significant ramifications for the electoral fortunes of parties. Building on the existing literature from American and comparative traditions, I demonstrate that congressional performance evaluations can be important for American parties and elections, but this depends on the extent of party polarization in Congress. First, when congressional parties are more distinct, congressional performance evaluations have a greater effect on the relative favorability of the majority party brand: when citizens like how Congress is performing under the leadership of the majority party, this boosts the favorability of that party overall. Second, because partisan polarization increases the effect of congressional performance evaluations on party brand favorability, partisan polarization also increases the role played by congressional performance evaluations in a variety of elections outside of Congress. These results inform our understanding of public opinion, parties, and elections, both in the U.S. and from a comparative perspective.

Acknowledging that both analysts and practitioners face problems of meaningful categorization of social order in general, and the European political-administrative system in particular, this article suggests a conceptual frame through which European administrative order may be understood. Providing such a frame is important, because the catalogue of categories of the European Union (EU) polity developed so far fails to acknowledge its administrative dimension. Given that the ongoing political transformation in the EU implies ever more administrative interaction between political levels in order to coordinate, manage and implement policies, this administrative dimension becomes ever more important. This article thus sets out a threefold agenda: First, it offers a supplementary conceptual frame that takes the 'administrative dimension' seriously. It is suggested that the European politico-administrative organism should be conceived as a European multilevel administrative system (MLA) consisting of three dimensions: Institutional independence, integration and cooptation. Second, the article suggests how the MLA approach differs from one of its main conceptual rivals – the multilevel governance approach (MLG). Finally, the article offers some empirical illustrations of the value of the developed MLA approach for our understanding of the contemporary European administrative system.

AbstractIn this article, we address the public issue of mandatory Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) retail food labeling in the U.S., first by reviewing the policy arguments both in support and against labeling food containing GMOs; second, by describing the existing U.S. federal regulatory system pertaining to GMO labeling, and why it does not presently require labeling of food containing GMOs; third, by reviewing and interpreting the results of studies of American consumer attitudes toward mandatory GMO retail food labeling; fourth, by evaluating, through the utilization of issue life cycle analysis in the nonmarket environment, where the issue of GMO retail food labeling stands in the national public policy process; fifth, summarizing the state of scientific evidence addressing the safety of GMO foods and the existing regulatory and public policy environment for this issue; and sixth, offering legislative and litigation strategies for the mainstream food nonmarket strategy framework to formally assess the GMO industry to protect their interests and those of American consumers not concerned with GMO food ingredients, while offering a voluntary labeling strategy for firms responding to and recognizing the "rights" of American consumers who "choose" to purchase non‐GMO food products.

AbstractWe examined the return–volatility relationship for USO ETF oil price return and CBOE Crude Oil ETF Volatility Index, OVX. The data for the USO and OVX covers the period covering May 11, 2007 to February 28, 2013. Our OLS regression results suggest evidence of regular feedback and leverage effects. When we employ linear quantile regression techniques, we find evidence of regular and inverse feedback effects. The inverse feedback effects being noticeable in the upper quantile region of the oil return distribution. There is also support for a regular leverage effect in USO prices. We also examined the return–volatility relationship using quantile regression copula methods for measuring the degree of asymmetry in the relationships between the oil price return and implied volatility. The results of the analysis indicate, first, that there exists a negative relationship between contemporaneous oil VIX and USO ETF oil returns. Second, that the relationship between oil returns and implied volatilities depends on the quartile at which the relationship is being investigated. Third, there exists an inverted U‐shaped dependency relationship between returns and implied volatilities across quantiles. Fourth, though an inverted U‐shape exists, the shape is different from those observed in stock markets.

This special issue of the Journal of Educational Media, Memory and Society
explores memory practices and history education. The first point of
departure for the texts collated here is that memory (whichever concept
we use from the current range including collective memory, cultural
memory, social memory, connected memory, prosthetic memory, multidirectional
memory, travelling memory and entangled memory) is a site
of political contestation, subject formation, power struggle, knowledge
production, and community-building. Our second point of departure is
that history education is a site where teachers and pupils as members of
distinct generations engage with textbooks and other materials as specific
forms of memory texts that guide what should be passed on to the
younger generation. As editors, we solicited papers that investigate how
what counts as "worth remembering" in a given context is reproduced,
negotiated and/or interrupted in classrooms and other educational practices.
This introduction aims to sketch the overarching understanding of
memory practices which guide the contributions, to point to the purchase
of attending explicitly to the "doing" of memory, to highlight the difference
between our approach to history education and approaches focusing
on historical thinking, and to introduce the six articles.

AbstractA dynamic Nelson–Siegel model is adopted to estimate three time‐varying factors of yield curves, the level, the slope and the curvature, and a vector autoregressive model is built to study interactions between macro variables and the yield curve. Results show that, first, money supply growth is a more effective instrument to curb inflation than the monetary policy interest rate; however, the central bank also adjusts the interest rate to stabilize money supply. Second, investment is an important measure to stimulate the Chinese economy, but it also pushes up money supply growth, which results in higher inflation. Third, the yield curve reacts significantly to innovations to investment growth and money supply growth. The segmentation of China's bond market hinders the efficient implementation of monetary policy, and the monetary policy transmission mechanism is still weak in China. Finally, interactions between the yield curve and the macroeconomy in China are nearly unidirectional. Macroeconomic variables reshape the yield curve, but direct adjustments of the yield curve do not significantly change macroeconomic variables. Due to the incomplete liberalization of financial markets, there exists a wide disjunction between the real economy and financial markets in China.

ABSTRACTIn today's complex and dynamic supply chain markets, information systems are essential for effective supply chain management. Complex decision making processes on strategic, tactical, and operational levels require substantial timely support in order to contribute to organizations' agility. Consequently, there is a need for sophisticated dynamic product pricing mechanisms that can adapt quickly to changing market conditions and competitors' strategies. We propose a two‐layered machine learning approach to compute tactical pricing decisions in real time. The first layer estimates prevailing economic conditions—economic regimes—identifying and predicting current and future market conditions. In the second layer, we train a neural network for each regime to estimate price distributions in real time using available information. The neural networks compute offer acceptance probabilities from a tactical perspective to meet desired sales quotas. We validate our approach in the trading agent competition for supply chain management. When competing against the world's leading agents, the performance of our system significantly improves compared to using only economic regimes to predict prices. Profits increase significantly even though the prices and sales volume do not change significantly. Instead, tactical pricing results in a more efficient sales strategy by reducing both finished goods and components inventory costs.

This article argues that after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Yugoslav rock music lost little cultural value and is still a prominent trigger of vernacular memories of the socialist Yugoslav past, as well as a vehicle of socio-political commentary in post-Yugoslav contexts. In this view, music is understood as a galvaniser of affective relationships to that past and to post-Yugoslav presents. In the first part of the article, the author discusses the theoretical and practical implications of digitally mediated music as immersive affective environments, working within the framework of media archaeology and a digital archives approach. It is argued that Yugoslav rock has retained its potency and appeal, where today, in a post-Yugoslavia context, it presents an outlet for the recomposition of musical preferences through nostalgia and opposition to the post-1991 socio-political developments. In the second part of the article, focusing on Facebook and YouTube, the author investigates how Yugoslav rock has been reframed in social media and how fragments of the country's past are reframed in digital media environments. A qualitative multimodal discourse analysis is employed here to investigate a selection of fan pages of rock musicians and bands.

Purpose– In the competitive e-marketplace today, sellers are using an increasing number of signals to entice customers to make online purchases. However, how differential these signals are in terms of their capacity to improve sales performance has not yet been investigated. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approach– Drawing on signaling theory and grounded in the context of China's largest e-marketplace, Taobao, this study investigated the different effects of five commonly used signals on the sales performance of e-marketplace sellers.Findings– The authors find that warranty has the highest effect on sales performance, followed by overall rating, mean detailed seller rating, percent of positives, and web site quality.Originality/value– First, this study builds on signaling theory and contributes to the e-marketplace literature by providing new insights into how specific signals differentially affect sales performance in the e-marketplace (with evidence from a large-scale empirical analysis). Second, the study extends the applicability of signaling theory to the e-marketplace domain by incorporating distinctive features of the e-marketplace into the original signaling theory. Finally, the findings lend practical support to e-marketplace sellers' investment decisions on signals and provide guidelines for deployment of such signals.

There are two essential elements to this paper. In the first instance, we explore the specific details of revenue and expenditure trends for local authorities over the last decade. The analysis is framed against a longer-term political context of forty years which focuses especially on the weakness of local government in Ireland. Despite an official narrative of financial overdependence on central government, the comparative examination of budgetary records of local authorities reveals considerable diversity in both the revenue and expenditure patterns of authorities across the state. While some authorities are heavily reliant on central government funding, others have a much stronger base of local funding, and indeed the financial crisis since 2008 may have increased these differences. The second dimension to the research is an exploration of the impact of the great recession from 2008 on local government finance in Ireland. Using a framework of new institutionalism, we identify the crisis as another critical moment for local government. We consider the political, economic and administrative variables which have brought local government to a financial crossroads, and we explore the potential for long-lasting financial change in local government, as well as speculating on the nature and outcome of that change.

This study investigates stakeholder pressures on corporate climate change-related accountability and disclosure practices in Australia. While existing scholarship investigates stakeholder pressures on companies to discharge their broader accountability through general social and environmental disclosures, there is a lack of research investigating whether and how stakeholder pressures emerge to influence accountability and disclosure practices related to climate change. We surveyed various stakeholder groups to understand their concerns about climate change-related corporate accountability and disclosure practices. We present three primary findings: first, while NGOs and the media have some influence, institutional investors and government bodies (regulators) are perceived to be the most powerful stakeholders in generating climate change-related concern and coercive pressure on corporations to be accountable. Second, corporate climate change-related disclosures, as documented through the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), are positively associated with such perceived coercive pressures. Lastly, we find a positive correlation between the level of media attention to climate change and Australian corporate responses to the CDP. Our results indicate that corporations will not disclose climate change information until pressured by non-financial stakeholders. This suggests a larger role for non-financial actors than previously theorized, with several policy implications.

Using data from 138 independent samples, we meta-analytically examined three research questions concerning the roles of personality and network position in organizations. First, how do different personality characteristics—self-monitoring and the Big Five personality traits—relate to indegree centrality and brokerage, the two most studied structurally advantageous positions in organizational networks? Second, how do indegree centrality and brokerage compare in explaining job performance and career success? Third, how do these personality variables and network positions relate to work outcomes? Our results show that self-monitoring predicted indegree centrality (across expressive and instrumental networks) and brokerage (in expressive networks) after controlling for the Big Five traits. Self-monitoring, therefore, was especially relevant for understanding why people differ in their acquisition of advantageous positions in social networks. But the total variance explained by personality ranged between 3% and 5%. Surprisingly, we found that indegree centrality was more strongly related to job performance and career success than brokerage. We also found that personality predicted job performance and career success above and beyond network position and that network position partially mediated the effects of certain personality variables on work outcomes. This paper provides an integrated view of how an individual's personality and network position combine to influence job performance and career success.

The cultivation of 'cultural literacy' in students from multicultural backgrounds may occur outside schooling practices in the US due to curricular framing and a lack of interest in integrating cultural education at schools. 'Cultural literacy' warrants student participation and requires a conducive learning environment where multiethnic students can seek inspiration through exploration. The San Antonio Writing Project organizes literacy project called the Kahani Project, and it fosters creativeness and facilitates authentic expression of cultural funds of knowledge of Indian American students. Performing arts including dance and music engage Indian students and enable them to learn about their culture, heritage, and religion. The Kahani Project is culturally contextualized writing activity, where Asian Indian American students write about their generational practices that may not addressed in schools in the US. This qualitative study explores two narratives written for the Kahani Project. The study utilized Leiblich et al., holistic content analysis to arrive at themes, categories, and meta categories. The findings revealed Indian students' willingness to preserve their culture through writing about Indian dance and music. The second inference of this study was that Indian students' heritage is neglected and excluded in US curriculum.

ABSTRACTMotivated by wind energy applications, we consider the problem of optimally replacing a stochastically degrading component that resides and operates in a partially observable environment. The component's rate of degradation is modulated by the stochastic environment process, and the component fails when it is accumulated degradation first reaches a fixed threshold. Assuming periodic inspection of the component, the objective is to minimize the long‐run average cost per unit time of performing preventive and reactive replacements for two distinct cases. The first case examines instantaneous replacements and fixed costs, while the second considers time‐consuming replacements and revenue losses accrued during periods of unavailability. Formulated and solved are mixed state space, partially observable Markov decision process models, both of which reveal the optimality of environment‐dependent threshold policies with respect to the component's cumulative degradation level. Additionally, it is shown that for each degradation value, a threshold policy with respect to the environment belief state is optimal if the environment alternates between two states. The threshold policies are illustrated by way of numerical examples using both synthetic and real wind turbine data. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 395–415, 2015