Suchergebnisse

An important component of change of direction speed is the ability to decelerate. Objective methods to examine this quality have been rarely reported in the literature. The aim of this study was to investigate the within- and between-session reliability (intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), coefficient of variation (CV), standard error of measurement (SEM) and smallest detectable difference (SDD)) of using a laser Doppler device (LAVEG—LAser VElocity Guard) to quantify deceleration ability in 20 amateur rugby union players. Each player performed one familiarisation and two experimental sessions (seven days apart) consisting of three maximal 15 m sprints from a standing start, with an immediate deceleration to a complete stop upon hearing an audible cue at the 15 m mark. Deceleration was evaluated by determining the distance required to decelerate to 75%, 50%, 25% and 0% ('stopping distance') of the velocity achieved at 15 m of the maximal sprint. Within-session relative reliability was moderate to good (ICC = 0.64–0.83) with borderline acceptable variation (CVs = 10.51%–16.71%) across all variables. Between-session reliability reported good to excellent relative reliability (ICC = 0.79–0.93) with acceptable absolute reliability, particularly for stopping distance (SEM: 6.54%; SDD: 9.11%). The assessment shows promise as a method to quantify deceleration ability in athletes.

Conjoint analysis is a common tool for studying political preferences. The method disentangles patterns in respondents' favorability toward complex, multidimensional objects, such as candidates or policies. Most conjoints rely upon a fully randomized design to generate average marginal component effects (AMCEs). They measure the degree to which a given value of a conjoint profile feature increases, or decreases, respondents' support for the overall profile relative to a baseline, averaging across all respondents and other features. While the AMCE has a clear causal interpretation (about the effect of features), most published conjoint analyses also use AMCEs to describe levels of favorability. This often means comparing AMCEs among respondent subgroups. We show that using conditional AMCEs to describe the degree of subgroup agreement can be misleading as regression interactions are sensitive to the reference category used in the analysis. This leads to inferences about subgroup differences in preferences that have arbitrary sign, size, and significance. We demonstrate the problem using examples drawn from published articles and provide suggestions for improved reporting and interpretation using marginal means and an omnibus F-test. Given the accelerating use of these designs in political science, we offer advice for best practice in analysis and presentation of results.

Immigration has been the focus of much contention in the United States in recent years. Indeed, concerns persist with regard to how the foreign-born will adapt and integrate into U.S. society and core institutions, including the economy and labor market. Despite the considerable insights of prior research, however, our understanding of contemporary racial/ethnic stratification remains limited, especially in terms of how race/ethnicity and sex intersect with immigrant status. Using pooled 2012–2016 American Community Survey data, we investigate wage differences and near-poverty status by race/ethnicity, sex, and nativity (among full-time, full-year workers) in five dynamic majority-minority U.S. labor markets and high-volume immigrant destinations (Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York City). Findings demonstrate that assimilative and human capital attributes matter. Yet our analyses reveal discernible group-level inequalities suggestive of depressed mobility, blocked opportunity, and race/ethnic- and sex-based hierarchy—patterns that highlight the embedded character of assimilation and economic outcomes within contexts of constraint. We find significant inter- and intragroup variation in these regards—particularly for near-poverty. We discuss our findings in light of their empirical and theoretical implications toward understanding minority group incorporation and economic inequality.

A crisis can severely tarnish a company's image and attempts to restore the damaged image may negatively affect postcrisis recruitment efforts. Because company image plays an important role in job seeker attraction, and company crises are on the rise, we examined the effects of postcrisis image restoration on job seeker attraction. We applied image restoration theory to a repeated-measures 2 (negative or neutral company information at Time 1) × 3 (two types of image restoration, and neutral for the same company at Time 2) factorial experimental design. We used the psychology of apologies to understand the underlying mechanisms by which a company's image changes in the context of image restoration. Results showed that Time 2 ratings of image were more positive after restoration attempts; however, there was no significant difference between the two types of restoration or with the neutral condition. We also found that attraction to the organization assessed at Time 2 fully mediated the relationship between perceptions of image and intentions to pursue a job opportunity. The implications of our findings are that the valence of image restoration influences job seekers' pursuant behavior more than what is said within image restoration.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyze whether higher education institutions (HEIs) in EU Member States are aware of the relevance of the ongoing reforms in public sector accounting (PSA) and the need to prepare their students to become expert professionals in that area. It particularly assesses whether these organizations currently provide, or will provide in the near future, education on International Public Sector Accounting Standard (IPSAS)/EPSAS, so that a sufficient number of graduates will be ready to match the foreseeable demand for experts in IPSAS/EPSAS.Design/methodology/approachAdopting a purposive sample, the paper compares the situation in four EU countries (Germany, Italy, Portugal and Spain). Data have been obtained through a questionnaire provided to selected professors in relevant HEIs in the selected countries.FindingsHEIs are giving only limited room to PSA and financial management, with differences in terms of program offerings and coverage of topics among the four countries. Furthermore, in most cases, the programs are adapted to the national budgetary and accounting standards and courses are seldom focused on the IPSASs.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the literature on PSA harmonization, through an innovative analysis of PSA and financial management teaching, both at national and international levels.

It is often claimed that Adam Smith and Edmund Burke held similar views on matters relating to political economy. One area of tension in their thought, however, was the institutional credibility of Britain's East India Company. They both argued that the Company corrupted market order in India, but while Smith supported the termination of the firm's charter, Burke aspired to preserve it. This article examines why they arrived at such divergent conclusions. It argues that the source of Burke and Smith's friction arose from the dissimilar frames of reference through which they assessed the credibility of the Company. Burke examined the corporation's legitimacy through the lens of British prescriptive, imperial, and constitutional history, yet Smith evaluated it as part of his larger attack on the mercantile system. These different frames of reference were responsible for the further incongruities in their thought on the Company relating to the role of prescription and imperial honor in political communities, the qualifications of traders to rule, and the appropriate tempo of policy reform. This article concludes that, even with such differences, the two thinkers' respective criticisms of the Company illustrate the threat that monopolies pose to the liberal order.

We extend the experimental analysis of sorting and effort effects of high‐powered contracts on welfare to situations with negative externalities. Participants solve brainteasers from Raven's matrices. The difference between right and wrong answers represents our measure of welfare per capita. We compare two contract schemes: fixed‐wage and bonus contracts that reward subjects for the number of correct answers, regardless of the number of wrong answers. With fixed wages, selfish individuals have no effort incentive. With bonuses, they have incentives to answer as many questions as possible. The two contract schemes are further separated depending on whether participants self‐select or are randomly assigned to a contract. The self‐selection treatments correspond to cases where countries do not regulate contracts. The random assignment treatments mimic situations where countries either offer only bonuses or ban them. We find that bonuses generate lower welfare per capita than fixed wages as the higher effort incentives are outweighed by the detrimental effect of answering too many questions. However, due to productivity sorting, a general ban on bonuses does not increase welfare per capita compared to offering both contract schemes.

Faces blurring is one of the important complex processes that is considered one of the advanced computer vision fields. The face blurring processes generally have two main steps to be done. The first step has detected the faces that appear in the frames while the second step is tracking the detected faces which based on the information extracted during the detection step. In the proposed method, an image is captured by the camera in real time, then the Viola Jones algorithm used for the purpose of detecting multiple faces in the captured image and for the purpose of reducing the time consumed to handle the entire captured image, the image background is removed and only the motion areas are processed. After detecting the faces, the Color-Space algorithm is used to tracks the detected faces depending on the color of the face and to check the differences between the faces the Template Matching algorithm was used to reduce the processes time. Finally, thedetected faces as well as the faces that were tracked based on their color were obscured by the use of the Gaussian filter. The achieved accuracy for a single face and dynamic background are about 82.8% and 76.3% respectively.

Behavioral scientists use mediation analysis to understand the mechanism(s) by which an effect operates and moderation analysis to understand the contingencies or boundary conditions of effects. Yet how effects operate (i.e., the mechanism at work) and their boundary conditions (when they occur) are not necessarily independent, though they are often treated as such. Conditional process analysis is an analytical strategy that integrates mediation and moderation analysis with the goal of examining and testing hypotheses about how mechanisms vary as a function of context or individual differences. In this article, we provide a conceptual primer on conditional process analysis for those not familiar with the integration of moderation and mediation analysis, while also describing some recent advances and innovations for the more experienced conditional process analyst. After overviewing fundamental modeling principles using ordinary least squares regression, we discuss the extension of these fundamentals to models with more than one mediator and more than one moderator. We describe a differential dominance conditional process model and overview the concepts of partial, conditional, and moderated moderated mediation. We also discuss multilevel conditional process analysis and comment on implementation of conditional process analysis in statistical computing software.

China's role as an emerging aid provider and the concept of a social plan in Africa has led to polarised responses in the West. Several say that this "productivist" strategy is much less determined by the concepts of citizenship, legal, social rights, and much more regarding building functions. The purpose of this study is to examine whether the welfare and social policy ideas that characterize Chinese aid in Africa are influencing traditional donors and becoming global. The article utilised a qualitative study that has two main components. First, a comprehensive content analysis of over 50 key Sino-African, Chinese and Western policy documents from 2000 (since cooperation between Beijing and African countries first became institutionalised). Second, there were semi-structured interviews with Chinese, African and Western stakeholders in Addis Ababa, (Ethiopia), who was directly involved in the relationship between China and Africa and related development issues. The result of documentation and interview analyses show that there are currently significant differences between Chinese and Western approaches. China has made much stronger and more explicit links between development aid and economic activity than most Western donors. The aid is usually implemented through specific projects rather than broader programs or policies.

This article empirically assesses the relationship between government use of the web, service performance, and cost‐effectiveness. It tests and challenges the assumption, prevalent in government thinking and in the Digital Era Governance (DEG) quasi‐paradigm, that the delivery of web‐based public services is associated with better outcomes. English local government is used as a test case, for which (uniquely) good‐quality full‐population time‐series data for council performance, cost, and web quality are available. A new panel data set is constructed covering 2002–2008, allowing the actual relationship between web performance and council cost and quality to be estimated using dynamic regression models which control for both general changes over time and the time‐invariant differences between councils. Consistent growth is shown in the scope and quality of local government web provision. Despite this, and governmental enthusiasm for bringing services online, no association is found between web development and performance, or cost‐effectiveness. The article concludes that governments' enthusiasm for citizen‐facing digital government is not supported by this empirical data, and that a skeptical view is warranted of DEG's advocacy of digitalization as a core focus for service improvement.

ObjectiveWe examine the language content of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to consider how features of online content unequally structure access to capital‐enhancing uses of the Internet and contribute to digital divides.MethodologyThis study adopts a mixed‐methods approach using descriptive statistics to examine the distribution of language content among MOOCs, and qualitative content analysis to understand the motivations, resources, and methods behind initiatives to create MOOC language content.ResultsThe availability of MOOCs varies significantly by language, with a preponderance of English‐language courses available compared to other world languages. Furthermore, a qualitative content analysis of initiatives to expand MOOC language content reveals a diverse ensemble of actors whose varied motivations, resources, and methods may widen existing inequalities structuring access to online learning despite expanding the availability of MOOCs in non‐English languages.ConclusionBy revealing the availability of online content structuring access to capital‐enhancing uses of the Internet, studies of online content can help explain sociodemographic differences in Internet accessibility and usage, and can delineate digital divides along lines of inequality, when content is available to some people but not others, as well as inequity, when content is available but not useful in people's contexts of use.

The canine mammary tumor is the neoplasia that most commonly affects intact female dogs (not spayed) in routine veterinary practice. Canine mammary tumor therapy is a challenge because only few effective treatments have been described for high-grade tumors in veterinary medicine. One such therapeutic option that slows down tumor growth is metronomic chemotherapy (MC), a therapeutic modality that acts by decreasing tumor angiogenesis. Quantification of intratumoral microvessel density (MVD) has been proposed as a means to evaluate the effectiveness of MC in human and canine tumors. In this study, MVD is proposed as a predictive factor for the effectiveness of MC in canine mammary tumors. Twenty female dogs with mammary carcinoma were equally distributed into a mastectomy group treated only with mastectomy, and a MC group treated with MC (cyclophosphamide and piroxicam) orally and daily for 28 days followed by mastectomy. Mammary tumors were classified and graded histologically. MVD was ascertained by CD31 immunostaining. The analysis showed statistically significant difference in MVD scores between groups, corroborating a quantitative reduction in tumor microvasculature in the group treated with MC. Our findings suggest that MVD may be an important predictive factor for the selection of female dogs with malignant mammary tumors that may benefit from MC.

Few research on the entomofauna associated to forest plantations with Swietenia macrophylla (King) in Brazil has been reported. The aim of this study was to analyze the Coleoptera communities in forest ecosystems with S. macrophylla, Brazilian mahogany, with emphasis on the diversity of families and the main functional groups. The insects were collected through pitfall traps in three forest ecosystems: monoculture, consortium and forest enriched with Brazilian mahogany, during dry and rainy periods in two consecutive years. The identification of the captured insects occurred in the entomology laboratory of the Federal Rural University of Amazonia. The analysis was performed through Past Paleontological Statistic 3.14 and ANAFAU, where the difference was considered significant only when p ? 0.05. 11,358 specimens from 21 families were captured, of which 8,058 were sampled in the rainy season and 3,299 in the dry season. There was influence of seasonality and types of forest ecosystems during collection. The families Nitidulidae, Staphylinidae, Carabidae and Meloidae presented greater abundance and richness in the complex ecosystems. Anobiidae, Cerambycidae, Bostrichidae, Brentidae, Buprestidae, Curculionidae, Elateridae, Chrysomelidae and Lagriidae were considered to be pests and common to all studied ecosystems; however, the families Nitidulidae, Scarabaeidae, Tenebrionidae and Passalidae had the function of decomposers; Carabidae, Coccinellidae, Histeridae, Meloidae, Staphylinidae, Cantharidae and Hydrophilidae were the predators.

The paper examines the place of Schumpeterian idea of creative destruction in endogenous growth models, as well as its relevance for national competitive strategies under the 'new normal' situation. The difference between Schumpeterian growth models and the model elaborated by P. Romer is revealed. The paper analyzes modern interpretation of creative destruction as a process displacing low-performing firms by high-performing ones, as well as old products and technologies by more innovative ones through a market competition. It is shown that this process accelerates the dynamics of firms and the turnover of resources in an economy, thus leading to reallocation of investments and knowledge to the most productive agents. The paper highlights the importance of sustaining a dynamic balance between measures stimulating a firm-level innovation activity and measures supporting a barrier-free environment for an effective resource allocation in the economy. We consider cases of several developed and developing countries, which demonstrate negative implications of underutilized advantages of creative destruction and the risks of selective supporting policies towards exclusively high-growing firms. We conclude that without restarting the process of creative destruction in the Russian economy the national efforts to enhance competitiveness and growth may turn unproductive.