Relatedness, industrial branching and technological cohesion in US metropolitan areas, Regional Studies. Work by evolutionary economic geographers on the role of industry relatedness for regional economic development is extended into a number of methodological and empirical directions. First, relatedness is measured as the intensity of inputoutput linkages between industries. Second, this measure is employed to examine industry evolution in 360 US metropolitan areas. Third, an employment-weighted measure of metropolitan technological cohesion is developed. The results confirm that technological relatedness is positively related to metropolitan industry portfolio membership and industry entry and negatively related to industry exit. The decomposition of technological cohesion indicates that the selection of related incumbent industries complements industry entry and exit as the main drivers of change in metropolitan technological cohesion.

Human adenoviruses (HAdVs) are non-enveloped DNA viruses, currently comprising 52 serotypes which are divided into seven species, designated A to G. The HAdVs are associated with a number of diseases affecting respiratory, urinary, gastrointestinal tracts and the eye. Human AdVs have increasingly been recognized as important pathogens in immunocompromised individuals. Human AdVs are ubiquitous in the environment resulting in the possible contamination of treated and untreated drinking water supplies by human secretions and excretions. As AdVs do not have an envelope, they are extremely resistant to inactivation, allowing for prolonged survival in the environment. The presence of AdVs in water sources is considered important, as they are exceptionally resistant to selected water treatment processes. Precise typing of HAdVs is, therefore, essential for epidemiological surveillance and the understanding of infection chains. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence and genetic heterogeneity of HAdVs circulating in communities in selected regions of Africa compared to the rest of the world. It is also important to determine the genetic relationship between HAdVs strains occurring in water sources and those detected in human clinical specimens, as this may give some indication as to whether or not water sources are a potential source of infection. As part of ongoing surveillance in southern Africa of treated and untreated water sources for enteric viruses, 765 water samples were tested using a nested polymerase chain reaction (nPCR) for HAdVs. Of these samples, 65 (8.6%) water samples were positive for HAdVs, and selected samples were characterised. In the untreated water, HAdV-F was the dominant species (65.6%) and HAdV-D was second-most common (21.9%) species identified. Species HAdV–B, -A and –C were identified amongst the rest of the strains. From treated water, HAdV-D and –F were identified in one isolate each. Analysis of diarrhoeal stool specimens for HAdVs identified HAdV-F as the predominant species, comprising 77.8% of the identified strains, with species HAdV-C and –A less common, identified in 11.1% specimens. In the respiratory specimens from the same region, HAdV-C was identified in 28.6% of the specimens. Comparative genetic analysis of HAdVs from water sources and clinical specimens showed genetic relatedness between the strains. Water may therefore play an important role as source of infection in the surrounding communities. In developing countries, diarrhoea is a major cause of morbidity and mortality and after rotaviruses HAdVs are considered to be the second-most important cause of viral infantile diarrhoea. Samples also were available from Kenya, where there are very little data on the prevalence and distribution of HAdV serotypes associated with diarrhoea in paediatric patients. From Kenya, 278 stool specimens were analysed, of which 104 (43 diarrhoea; 61 non-diarrhoea) were from an urban hospice for human immunodefiency virus (HIV)-seropositive children, 94 from selected urban clinics and 80 from the rural setting. From these, the detection of HAdVs in diarrhoeal and non-diarrhoeal stool specimens was 43.3% and 16.4%, respectively. In the urban hospice setting, 43.3% of the stool specimens from HIV-seropositive children tested positive for HAdV. The overall detection of HAdVs species and genotypes in the stool specimens showed HAdV-D to predominate, being detected in 36.1% of specimens with HAdV-C (29.5%), HAdV-F (16.4%), HAdV-B (13.1%), and HAdV-A (6.5%) present in lower numbers. This study provided valuable new data on the prevalence and distribution of HAdV genotypes in diarrhoeal stool specimens in Africa. In this study where nucleotide sequence comparison was used to determine the genetic relatedness of African HAdVs to those from the rest of the world, it was noted that in most cases the African strains differed from those from the rest of the world. The use of molecular techniques for the detection and characterisation of HAdVs, especially in Kenyan cohorts, was of importance, as it provided new baseline data for further burden of disease studies which are necessary for future prevention and treatment programmes. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Medical Virology / unrestricted

While pragmatics, through its integration of situational awareness and real world relevant knowledge, offers a high level of analysis that is suitable for real interpretation of natural dialogue, semantics, on the other end, represents a lower yet more tractable and affordable linguistic level of analysis using current technologies. Generally, the understanding of semantic meaning in literature has revolved around the famous quote ``You shall know a word by the company it keeps''. In this thesis we investigate the role of context constituents in decoding the semantic meaning of the engulfing context; specifically we probe the role of salient concepts, defined as content-bearing expressions which afford encyclopedic definitions, as a suitable source of semantic clues to an unambiguous interpretation of context. Furthermore, we integrate this world knowledge in building a new and robust unsupervised semantic model and apply it to entail semantic relatedness between textual pairs, whether they are words, sentences or paragraphs. Moreover, we explore the abstraction of semantics across languages and utilize our findings into building a novel multi-lingual semantic relatedness model exploiting information acquired from various languages. We demonstrate the effectiveness and the superiority of our mono-lingual and multi-lingual models through a comprehensive set of evaluations on specialized synthetic datasets for semantic relatedness as well as real world applications such as paraphrase detection and short answer grading. Our work represents a novel approach to integrate world-knowledge into current semantic models and a means to cross the language boundary for a better and more robust semantic relatedness representation, thus opening the door for an improved abstraction of meaning that carries the potential of ultimately imparting understanding of natural language to machines.

An outgroup can be defined as that which is perceived as different or dissimilar from oneself. The Interspecies Model of Prejudice (TIMP) predicts that negativity to human outgroups align with animal negativity. Human-centered and anti-egalitarian beliefs have shown to correlate with outgroup rejection. Experiencing a close relationship to nature has, on the other hand, been linked to outgroup acceptance. The aim of this study was to investigate the valuation of animal charismatic appeal overall, and as a function of outgroup acceptance - rejection. An online survey collected data on animal image ratings, attitude instruments, psychosocial and demographic factors from 231 high school senior students in the greater Stockholm area. Images of human-similar (anthropomorphic highcharismaticmammals) versus human-dissimilar (feral low-charismatic insects) animals were used to, respectively, predict the attitudes anthropocentrism, ethnocentrism and nature relatedness. Overall, mammals were rated significantly more positively than insects. The findings also suggest support for TIMP. It may be inferred that animal charismatic appeal is linked to individual differences in outgroup cognitions. Anthropocentrism and ethnocentrism associated negatively with general animal liking, and were predicted by insect negativity once significant covariates adjusted the models. Nature relatedness correlated positively with animal liking and was predicted by insect positivity. Our valuation of animal charisma may, thus, be linked to our appraisal of their more or less human-like qualities. Our valuations are proposed as underlied by identification mechanismsthat may guide our varying tendencies to divide the world into ‘us and them’. The findings could be informative of psychological factors involved in intergroup behaviors and environmental concerns.

There is an ongoing need for educational psychologists, researchers, policymakers, educators, and parents to continue to identify and understand the academic and nonacademic factors that influence academic achievement. Recent studies have documented the steady decline in the academic performances of students from Grades 7 to 9. The purpose of this study was to examine the statistical relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction in relationship with caregivers, mindsets of intelligence, and academic achievement among secondary school students in the Commonwealth of Dominica. This study was grounded in the self-determination theory and mindsets of intelligence theory. A non-experimental correlational design using survey methodology was used for this study. Participants were 143 3rd year secondary school students ages 11 through 15. The participants’ academic achievement, mindsets of intelligence and their basic psychological needs satisfaction in relationship with their caregivers, were measured. The data were analyzed using standard multiple regression. The results of the study found a significant inverse relationship between the relatedness component of psychological needs satisfaction and academic achievement. Additionally, higher mindset of intelligence scores significantly predicted higher scores in math, English, and science in the participants first and second years of secondary school. The positive social change implications of this study may equip policymakers, teachers, and parents with the relevant information needed to design and implement programs aimed at improving the academic achievement of secondary school students

In international and highly-multilingual environments, it often happens, that a talk, a document, or any other input, needs to be translated into a massive number of other languages. However, it is not always an option to have a distinct system for each possible language pair due to the fact that training and operating such kind of translation systems is computationally demanding. Combining multiple target languages into one translation model usually causes a de- crease in quality of output for each its translation direction. In this thesis, we experiment with combinations of target languages to see, if a specific grouping of them can lead to better results than just randomly selecting target languages. We build upon a recent research on training a multilingual Transformer model without any change to its architecture: adding a target language tag to the source sentence. We trained a large number of bilingual and multilingual Transformer models and evaluated them on multiple test sets from different domains. We found that in most of the cases grouping related target languages into one model caused a better performance compared to models with randomly selected languages. However, we also found that a domain of the test set, as well as domains of data sampled into the training set, usu- ally have a more...

The aim of my work is at first characterized show female and male characters in the work named Orodovnice of feminist writer Jana Juranova and at second means of characterizing interpret and analyze what can be images of femininity and masculinity, this work offers to us through archetypal analysis and analysis of the relational nature of each character. Bacis hypothesis of this work is, that to us work offers a subversive potential in the context of contemporary social and cultural discursive practises and values. Task of this thesis is using gender analysis of the subversive potential to detect, interpret and explain in what are the possible subversive effects on the minds of people not only in literature and what possible new ways of perceiving and imaging may entail. The theoretical part is devoted to the concept and presentation of concepts in the context of feminism and literature, which considers relevant due to the focus and objective of this thesis. A separate chapter is devoted to a critical analysis of the archetype and archetypal imagery and their possible applications in the context of contemporary feminist literature. The analytical part is devoted to gender analysis of the image of male and female characters in the context of their mutual relational nature and then interpreting the...

This study is interested in investigating discursive practices in early mother-infant interactions in diverse cultural settings and relating them to prevalent cultural models of child care. It examines mother-infant interactions from two cultural contexts previously described as prototypically independent (German white middle class families in the city of Muenster) and interdependent (farming Nso families in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon). The data corpus consists of video material and transcriptions of 20 Nso and 20 Muenster mother-infant dyads at the infant s age of 12 weeks. The data are analyzed using strategies from discourse analysis, conversation analysis and documentary method. Systematically different patterns of co-constructing mother-infant interactions were found: whereas the Münster mother-infant interactions comprise (1) co-operative, (2) narrative-biographical, (3) individual-centered repertoires, the Nso interactions are characterized by (1) hierarchical, (2) rhythmic synchronous, (3) socially oriented discursive strategies. The results point to the possibility of innate characteristics of protoconversation as well as culture-specific manifestations of their phenotype. The results are discussed with regard to the specificities of the relevant local socio-cultural contexts and possible implications for the development of culture-specific world views and self-construals. The thesis concludes by arguing that infants narrative envelope is a powerful medium to transmit cultural knowledge, even in interactions with pre-verbal infants. Main implications of the study s findings for theory and practice are discussed. It is suggested that what is healthy and pathological development needs to be (re-)defined for each specific cultural context. Further studies from socio-cultural contexts that have so far been neglected in academic research are needed that systematically relate infant-care practices with cultural models of child care.

No description available.

No description available.