Christina Schwenkel's absorbing study explores how the American War is
remembered and commemorated in Vietnam today -- in official and unofficial histories
and in everyday life. Schwenkel analyzes ...visual representations found in monuments
and martyrs' cemeteries, museums, photography and art exhibits, battlefield tours,
and related sites of trauma tourism. In these transnational spaces, American and
Vietnamese memories of the war intersect in ways profoundly shaped by global
economic liberalization and the return of American citizens as tourists, pilgrims,
and philanthropists.
Phenological gaps exert a significant influence on the growth of dwarf bamboos. However, how dwarf bamboos respond to and exploit these phenological gaps remain enigmatic. The light environment, soil ...nutrients, leaf morphology, maximum photosynthetic rate, foliage dynamics, and branching characteristics of Sasa kurilensis were examined under the canopies of Fagus crenata and Magnolia obovata. The goal was to elucidate the adaptive responses of S. kurilensis to phenological gaps in the forest understory. The findings suggest that phenological gaps under an M. obovata canopy augment the available biomass of S. kurilensis, enhancing leaf area, leaf thickness, and carbon content per unit area. However, these gaps do not appreciably influence the maximum photosynthetic rate, total leaf number, leaf lifespan, branch number, and average branch length. These findings underscore the significant impact of annually recurring phenological gaps on various aspects of S. kurilensis growth, such as its aboveground biomass, leaf morphology, and leaf biochemical characteristics. It appears that leaf morphology is a pivotal trait in the response of S. kurilensis to phenological gaps. Given the potential ubiquity of the influence of phenological gaps on dwarf bamboos across most deciduous broadleaf forests, this canopy phenomenon should not be overlooked.
The web radically changed the dissemination of information and the global spread of news. In this study, we aim to reconstruct the connectivity patterns within nations shaping news propagation ...globally in 2022. We do this by analyzing a dataset of unprecedented size, containing 140 million news articles from 183 countries and related to 37,802 domains in the GDELT database. Unlike previous research, we focus on the sequential mention of events across various countries, thus incorporating a temporal dimension into the analysis of news dissemination networks. Our results show a significant imbalance in online news spreading. We identify news superspreaders forming a tightly interconnected rich club, exerting significant influence on the global news agenda. To further investigate the mechanisms underlying news dissemination and the shaping of global public opinion, we model countries' interactions using a gravity model, incorporating economic, geographical, and cultural factors. Consistent with previous studies, we find that countries' GDP is one of the main drivers to shape the worldwide news agenda.
•Lower risk perception of driving after cannabis use (DACU) is associated with higher likelihood in engaging in DACU.•Sociodemographic and psychological factors, substance use and driving behaviors, ...and peer influence shape risk perception related to DACU.•Low-risk perception DACU can be changed by modifying social norms and attitudes among cannabis users.
Modifying risk perceptions related to driving after cannabis use (DACU) could deter individuals from enacting this behavior, as low-risk perception is associated with DACU engagement. This study identified sociodemographic characteristics, substance use, other driving behaviors, peer norms, and psychological characteristics that are associated with lower risk perception regarding DACU.
Canadian drivers aged 17–35 who have used cannabis in the past year (n = 1,467) completed an online questionnaire. A multivariate linear regression model allowed for identifying variables associated with the low-risk perception of DACU (i.e. believing it to be safe as one's driving ability is not impaired by cannabis or by being high).
Lower risk perception of DACU was associated with identifying as male, weekly to daily cannabis use, engagement in DACU, general risky driving behaviors, being a passenger of a driver who engages in DACU, number of friends who engage in DACU, and peer approval of DACU. Having driven under the influence of alcohol, living in urban areas, having received traffic tickets in the past three years, and declaring past-week irritability and cognitive problems were associated with holding a higher risk perception related to DACU.
Road education and prevention programs should target attitudes and perceptions regarding risks shaped by sociocultural norms and past risky driving experiences. They need to reach out more specifically to drivers with the identified characteristics associated with the low-risk perception of DACU. These interventions can potentially help reduce the rate of individuals who engage in this behavior.
Value orientations used to explain or justify conservation have been rooted in arguments about how much and in what context to emphasize the intrinsic versus instrumental value of nature. Equally ...prominent are characterizations of beliefs known as the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP), often used to help explain pro-environmental behaviour. A recent alternative to these positions has been identified as 'relational value'-broadly, values linking people and ecosystems via tangible and intangible relationships to nature as well as the principles, virtues and notions of a good life that may accompany these. This paper examines whether relational values are distinct from other value orientation and have potential to alleviate the intrinsic-instrumental debate. To test this possibility, we sought to operationalize the construct-relational values-by developing six relational statements. We ask: 1) Do the individual statements used to characterize relational values demonstrate internal coherence as either a single or multi-dimensional construct? 2) Do relational value statements (including those strongly stated) resonate with diverse populations? 3) Do people respond to relational value statements in a consistently different way than NEP scale statements? Data for this work is drawn from an online panel of residents of northeastern US (n = 400), as well as a sample of Costa Rican farmers (n = 253) and tourists in Costa Rica (n = 260). Results indicate relational values are distinct as a construct when compared to the NEP.
Political responsibility refocused Michaelis, Loralea; Fuji Johnson, Genevieve
Political responsibility refocused,
2013., 20131030, 2013, 2014, 2013-10-30
eBook
Political Responsibility Refocusedexplores the theoretical foundations and practical implications of individual and collective responsibility towards those who are spatially or temporally separate ...from us.
Thomas Weber's 2004 book comprises a series of biographical reflections about people who influenced Gandhi, and those who were, in turn, influenced by him. Whilst previous literature tended to focus ...on Gandhi's political legacy, Weber's book explores the spiritual, social and philosophical resonances of these relationships, and it is with these aspects of the Mahatma's life in mind, that the author selects his central protagonists. These include friends such as Henry Polak and Hermann Kallenbach, who are not as well known as those usually cited, but who left a deep impression nevertheless, and motivated some of Gandhi's major life changes. Conversely, the work of luminaries such as E.F. Schumacher and Gene Sharp reveal the Mahatma's influence in arenas which are not traditionally associated with his thinking. Weber's book offers intriguing insights into the life and thought of one of the most significant figures of the twentieth century.
Allen Shelton explores physical, historical, and social landscapes of northeastern Alabama. His homeplace near the Appalachian foothills provides the setting for a rich examination of culture, a ...place where the language of place and things resonates with as much emotional urgency as the language of humans. Shelton demonstrates how deeply culture is inscribed in the land and in the most intimate spaces of the person—places of belonging and loss, insight and memory.
Influence Maximization (IM) plays an essential role in various social network applications. One such application is viral marketing to trigger a large cascade of product adoption from a small number ...of users by utilizing “Word-of-Mouth” effect in social networks. IM aims to return a set of users that can influence the largest fraction of a network, such as the early user who demonstrates the good features of a product in marketing. The traditional IM algorithms treat all users equally and ignore semantic context associated with the users, though it has been studied previously. To consider the semantics, we introduce a semantics-aware influence maximization (SIM) problem. The SIM problem integrates semantic information of users with influence maximization by measuring influence spread based on semantic values under a given model, and it aims to find a set of users that maximizes the influence spread, shown to be NP-hard. Generalized Reverse Influence Set based framework for SIM problems (GRIS-SIM) is used to solve SIM with different semantics, which provides a (1−1/e−ε)-approximation solution for each SIM instance. To our knowledge, the guarantee is state-of-the-art in the IM studies. GRIS-SIM enables auto-generation of sampling strategies for various social networks. In this study, we also present three sampling strategies that can be generated to achieve the best approximation guarantee, and one of the three is proved to be the optimal strategy by having the same performance guarantee within the optimal time. Furthermore, in order to show the generality and effectiveness of the proposed GRIS technique, we apply it into solving other IM problems (e.g., the distance-aware influence maximization, DAIM). Extensive experiments on both real-life and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability of our methods. The results on large real data show that GRIS-SIM is able to achieve 58% improvement on average in expected influence compared with rivals, and the method adopting GRIS can achieve 65% improvement on average.
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