Yingbo Li, Zihan Wang, Mariano Andres Imbert Rodriguez
et al.
Abstract This study establishes a theoretical framework linking organized R&D (ORD) and mission-oriented innovation (MOI) through a collective action lens. MOI performance is evaluated using three key indicators: academic publications, Science and Technology Awards (STA), and granted patents. ORD dimensions are operationalized through research teams, human resources, academic milieu, and public funding. Leveraging survey data and archival records from 23 Chinese universities, we employ baseline regressions and structural equation modeling (SEM) to elucidate ORD’s influence pathways on MOI performance. Results indicate that research teams serve as significant mediators linking public funding, academic milieu, and human resources to MOI outcomes as well as the heterogeneous roles of ORD determinants in MOI performance. This study specifically highlights how the scale and allocation mechanisms of public funding more actively facilitate MOI performance outcomes through ORD. By integrating macro-micro connections between MOI and ORD, this research provides policymakers with targeted and actionable recommendations for enhancing MOI in higher education institutions.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Abstract This study examined how phonology, specifically word stress, influences the masked processing of English-suffixed words by non-native speakers. The study included four prime types: TP+ (visualize-VISUAL), TP− (temptation-TEMPT), FP+ (example-EXAM), and FP− (entertain-ENTER). Primes in TP+ (semantically transparent and phonologically congruent) and FP+ (form and phonologically congruent) conditions matched their targets regarding primary stress, whereas primes in TP− (semantically transparent and phonologically incongruent) and FP− (form and phonologically incongruent) conditions exhibited phonological variations compared to their targets. Two groups of English-Chinese bilinguals with different levels of English proficiency (advanced vs lower-intermediate) participated in the study. The results indicated that advanced Chinese–English bilinguals exhibited significant priming effects across all conditions, with TP+ producing a stronger priming effect than TP− and FP+. In contrast, lower-intermediate Chinese–English bilinguals only displayed priming effects for two form-related conditions. Additionally, advanced Chinese–English bilinguals demonstrated more robust priming effects for TP+ than lower-intermediate bilinguals. These findings suggest that in bilingual masked morphological processing, phonological effects facilitate early visual word recognition, while morpho-semantic relationships and L2 proficiency moderate both morphological and phonological effects during early morphological decomposition. These findings challenge the localist view of morphology as a discrete unit in the mental lexicon and support the connectionist view of morphological representations being distributed across spelling, sound, and meaning.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls to experience romance that culminated in marriage, following the societal traditions of the time. Montgomery managed this dichotomy by having many characters experience a suspended romance, delaying the romantic aspect of the relationship for as long as possible. Arts-based practice is a mode of analysis and offers the opportunity to find a new way of understanding and communicating Montgomery’s type of suspended romance. Music is, in many ways, considered romantic, so it is an appropriate medium to communicate Montgomery’s romantic narrative structures. This paper investigates Montgomery’s use of suspended romance in her novels and how this delay provided her characters with time to develop other areas of their lives. An arts-based methodology was used to identify and analyse recurring themes in Montgomery’s work, as the question is not can Montgomery’s theme of romance be musically represented but how. The result of this creative experimentation is a new musical composition that articulates these suspended romances using six different musical devices. This creative work exemplifies the intertextual link that exists between Montgomery’s work and new musical compositions.
<p>The author examines the concept of ingrowing in Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology. The theoretical significance of his metaphors of ingrowing and gardening, and the connection between the terms “ingrowing” and “interiorisation” are revealed. The plain criterion for evaluating the success of ingrowing higher psychological functions is found in the development of verbal thinking. By analysing the concepts of interpsychic and intrapsychic function, the author shows how Vygotsky understands the process of transformation of one function into another: (i) types of ingrowing and (ii) the nature of changes in the structure of higher psychological functions during the transition of interpsychic forms of behaviour into the child’s consciousness. The controversy between Vygotsky and Aleksei Leontiev on the ingrowing of word meanings is discussed. Special attention is paid to the ingrowing scientific concepts at school age. The epilogue briefly outlines the fate of the concepts of ingrowing and interiorisation in Russian cultural-historical psychology.</p>
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
School-museum relations have gained considerable attention in the academic literature in recent decades. However, there still needs to be more research on their role in enhancing science education. This work reports the outcomes of the recovery, study, and valorization of the 18th-century geo-mineralogical collection belonging to the Collegio Nazareno, now housed at the Istituto San Giuseppe Calasanzio in Rome. The project consisted of four phases: 1) the securing of more than 1720 specimens; 2) their cataloging using the Italian national catalographic standards for the mineralogical and petrological heritage; 3) the establishment of new exhibit and storage areas; 4) the development of a self-instructive exhibition itinerary. The project, which was participated by the students enrolled in the fourth and fifth high school classes, revealed fascinating and unique specimens such as the ones collected by prominent Italian naturalists –e.g., Scipione Breislak (1750–1826) and Carlo Giuseppe Gismondi (1762–1824) – or those comprising the mineralogical collection donated by the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (1741–1740) to the Mineralogical Cabinet of the Collegio Nazareno in 1785. This work thus offers significant insights into the importance of natural history school museums as useful (and oft-forgotten) learning tools in science education.
The collection of works by Yuri Shevchenko, Doctor of Medical Sciences and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, includes speeches and articles from different years, which were delivered on memorable dates or published in medical journals inaccessible to a wide range of readers. The materials describe the history of medicine from the time of Ancient Egypt to the present day, the development of anatomy and surgery, including the history of the formation and advancement of methods for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. A number of publications are devoted to the famous Pirogov Center in Moscow, the history of its creation and the current state. The book presents a number of short biographies of famous Russian and foreign doctors who made a significant contribution to the development of cardiovascular surgery during the period of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is worth mentioning a number of articles about the life, worldview, pedagogical, administrative and medical activities of Nikolay Pirogov, Sergey Botkin, there are also articles on the history of Russian military medicine of the 19th century included in the collection.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
New knowledge originates from the old. The various types of elements, deposited in the training history, are a large amount of wealth for improving learning deep models. In this survey, we comprehensively review and summarize the topic--``Historical Learning: Learning Models with Learning History'', which learns better neural models with the help of their learning history during its optimization, from three detailed aspects: Historical Type (what), Functional Part (where) and Storage Form (how). To our best knowledge, it is the first survey that systematically studies the methodologies which make use of various historical statistics when training deep neural networks. The discussions with related topics like recurrent/memory networks, ensemble learning, and reinforcement learning are demonstrated. We also expose future challenges of this topic and encourage the community to pay attention to the think of historical learning principles when designing algorithms. The paper list related to historical learning is available at \url{https://github.com/Martinser/Awesome-Historical-Learning.}
Gradient-based meta-learning techniques aim to distill useful prior knowledge from a set of training tasks such that new tasks can be learned more efficiently with gradient descent. While these methods have achieved successes in various scenarios, they commonly adapt all parameters of trainable layers when learning new tasks. This neglects potentially more efficient learning strategies for a given task distribution and may be susceptible to overfitting, especially in few-shot learning where tasks must be learned from a limited number of examples. To address these issues, we propose Subspace Adaptation Prior (SAP), a novel gradient-based meta-learning algorithm that jointly learns good initialization parameters (prior knowledge) and layer-wise parameter subspaces in the form of operation subsets that should be adaptable. In this way, SAP can learn which operation subsets to adjust with gradient descent based on the underlying task distribution, simultaneously decreasing the risk of overfitting when learning new tasks. We demonstrate that this ability is helpful as SAP yields superior or competitive performance in few-shot image classification settings (gains between 0.1% and 3.9% in accuracy). Analysis of the learned subspaces demonstrates that low-dimensional operations often yield high activation strengths, indicating that they may be important for achieving good few-shot learning performance. For reproducibility purposes, we publish all our research code publicly.
Approximate inference in Gaussian process (GP) models with non-conjugate likelihoods gets entangled with the learning of the model hyperparameters. We improve hyperparameter learning in GP models and focus on the interplay between variational inference (VI) and the learning target. While VI's lower bound to the marginal likelihood is a suitable objective for inferring the approximate posterior, we show that a direct approximation of the marginal likelihood as in Expectation Propagation (EP) is a better learning objective for hyperparameter optimization. We design a hybrid training procedure to bring the best of both worlds: it leverages conjugate-computation VI for inference and uses an EP-like marginal likelihood approximation for hyperparameter learning. We compare VI, EP, Laplace approximation, and our proposed training procedure and empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal across a wide range of data sets.
The purpose of the article is to show how two authors, one Serbian and the other Bulgarian, saw the great Serbian ruler and how they composed his biography. Even though the authors were not contemporaries, their work exhibits similar pattern. However, they write in different styles, and their views and opinions differ. In this article, we will try, with a comparative method, to reliably present the life of Stefan Dečanski from the point of view of two great medieval writers. We set the goal to research biographies of Stefan Dečanski as accurately, neutrally, and objectively as possible, which were written by Danilo's student and by Grigorij Camblak. Our task is to identify all the parts in the biographies that are similar, and then those that are mentioned only in one of the listed works. Given the complexity of the topic, we used a set of methods of which the comparative is dominant. The article consists of two parts - the first gives an overview of ancient Serbian literature and explains medieval biography as a genre, while the second talks about Danilo's student and Grigorij Camblak, the similarities and differences in their work, and then compares what they wrote about. In the end, we concluded everything that was said. The beginnings of authorial literature and works, which are the subject of the article's research, brought with them a new approach to the process of writing, which reached a higher level of artistic formation of biographies. Even though the authors wrote within the canon and observed, to a greater or lesser extent, the stylistic features of everyday literature, they participated in the creation of reality and the spiritual world, as well as a selection of excerpts from the biography of the ruler. Old Serbian literature is rich in genres such as biographies, words of praise, prayers, liturgical songs, messages, etc. The genres of Serbian literature of the Middle Ages and the new century do not match: in the old Serbian literature, there are no novels, stories, historical stories, which we will display in this article. Our research does not stop at the fact that Danilo's student writes in one way about a great historical figure, while Grigorij Camblak writes differently about the same person. We set out to show, through a genre definition, the extent to which these two writers differ and what their view of Stefan Dečanski was. We will try to explain that both authors created their works for certain reasons, which are mostly different, but sometimes similar. Both wrote intending to create a cult of the Serbian king. This article will try to achieve this goal - to answer the question and show the result of a comparative analysis of the works of two authors with the same topic.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
Humanitarian concerns owing to the dreadfulness and impact of human trafficking prompted several stakeholders under the umbrella of the United Nations (UN) to approve legal measures to criminalize this menace. Several states that are parties to the UN anti-trafficking protocols and conventions have domesticated some of the provisions of these regulations by enacting comprehensive laws that criminalize the various components of human trafficking. Unfortunately, this approach has not brought about any significant reduction in the crime. This article adopted a qualitative approach and drew from the findings of a broader doctoral study. It evaluates the efficacy of current South African anti-trafficking legislation in the fight against human trafficking in the country. Findings indicate, among others, that anti-trafficking legislation is at best a stop-gap strategy in combating the crime, and not all-encompassing. It concludes that an effective response to human trafficking transcends the enactment of laws. Moreover, laws do not thrive in a vacuum, but rely on a range of factors, particularly the political will to address the underlying causes of a crime, and effective law enforcement capacity.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Abstract Vaccine hesitancy is a significant barrier to reaching herd immunity and exiting the Covid-19 pandemic. This study examines the potential effectiveness of monetary incentives in conjunction with informational treatments about vaccine efficacy, lack of side effects, and zero costs. We elicit monetary valuations (both positive and negative) for the coronavirus vaccine by conducting an online randomized experiment on a representative sample of 2461 individuals across the US. The study elicits vaccination uptake, then participants’ valuations (willingness to pay (WTP) or the willingness to accept (WTA)) for the vaccine based upon the stated choice of participants to accept or reject the vaccine. We find that a $1000 incentive increases vaccination uptake up to 86.9%. We identify two distinct segments among the vaccine hesitants—“Reluctants” and “Unwillings”. Reluctants can be persuaded to vaccinate for some level of monetary incentive, whereas Unwillings indicate that no amount of monetary incentive will persuade them to vaccinate. The Unwillings are more likely to (a) think that the disease is insufficiently severe, (b) have less faith in the public health system, (c) be older, compared to the Reluctants.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences
Traditional statistical learning theory relies on the assumption that data are identically and independently distributed (i.i.d.). However, this assumption often does not hold in many real-life applications. In this survey, we explore learning scenarios where examples are dependent and their dependence relationship is described by a dependency graph, a commonly utilized model in probability and combinatorics. We collect various graph-dependent concentration bounds, which are then used to derive Rademacher complexity and stability generalization bounds for learning from graph-dependent data. We illustrate this paradigm through practical learning tasks and provide some research directions for future work. To our knowledge, this survey is the first of this kind on this subject.
The article is devoted to the response to the Hungarian events of the autumn of 1956 in Romanian society and reveals the measures taken by the communist regime in Romania in order to neutralize the Hungarian influence on the situation in the country. As the author shows, anti-government demonstrations in Romania in the days of the Hungarian revolution, although of a local nature, posed a serious threat to the regime of the Romanian workers' party. The latent announcement of emergency state in the country, the involvement of the Interior Ministry and Ministry of Defense forces to protect law and order, a number of repressive measures, competent political work with the population, and also the adoption of important economic decisions helped the party leadership to keep the situation under control and prevent the recurrence of the Hungarian scenario in Romania. The article notes that the Hungarian revolution was one of the external factors that influenced the formation of a specific Romanian model of socialism with its more independent foreign policy and the desire to protect the country from destructive influences from the outside world.
Law, History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
The article analyzes the Caucasian direction of the foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the post-Soviet period; the study reveals the problems faced by the country's leadership in the course of its implementation. Tehran's high interest in strengthening Iranian influence in the South Caucasus after the collapse of the USSR and the weakening of Russia's positions in the region is revealed. The sharp rivalry between Iran and Turkey for the predominant influence in the South Caucasus and the strengthening of its political and economic positions in the region are shown. The author analyzes the actions of the Iranian leadership during the armed conlict in Nagorno-Karabakh and notes the concern over the possible expansion of the conflict and the involvement of the Azerbaijani ethnic minority living in the north-west of Iran. The role of the "Azerbaijani factor" in Iran's policy in the South Caucasus is revealed; the reasons for the complex relations of the Islamic Republic with Azerbaijan, on the one hand, and its high interest in establishing close ties with Armenia, on the other hand, are given. The impact of various factors on the ambivalent position of the Iranian leadership on the peaceful settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conlict is analyzed. The necessity of making qualitative changes in Iran's foreign policy in the South Caucasus direction, giving its policy in the region a more balanced character is proved. At the same time, it is emphasized that the balanced foreign policy of the Iranian leadership was in the interests of the national security of the country, focused on reducing the overall level of tension in the South Caucasus region.
Law, History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
Md. Mokhlesur Rahman, Kamal Chandra Paul, Md. Amjad Hossain
et al.
The ongoing COVID-19 global pandemic is affecting every facet of human lives (e.g., public health, education, economy, transportation, and the environment). This novel pandemic and citywide implemented lockdown measures are affecting virus transmission, people's travel patterns, and air quality. Many studies have been conducted to predict the COVID-19 diffusion, assess the impacts of the pandemic on human mobility and air quality, and assess the impacts of lockdown measures on viral spread with a range of Machine Learning (ML) techniques. This review study aims to analyze results from past research to understand the interactions among the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdown measures, human mobility, and air quality. The critical review of prior studies indicates that urban form, people's socioeconomic and physical conditions, social cohesion, and social distancing measures significantly affect human mobility and COVID-19 transmission. during the COVID-19 pandemic, many people are inclined to use private transportation for necessary travel purposes to mitigate coronavirus-related health problems. This review study also noticed that COVID-19 related lockdown measures significantly improve air quality by reducing the concentration of air pollutants, which in turn improves the COVID-19 situation by reducing respiratory-related sickness and deaths of people. It is argued that ML is a powerful, effective, and robust analytic paradigm to handle complex and wicked problems such as a global pandemic. This study also discusses policy implications, which will be helpful for policymakers to take prompt actions to moderate the severity of the pandemic and improve urban environments by adopting data-driven analytic methods.
David Brandfonbrener, William F. Whitney, Rajesh Ranganath
et al.
We introduce quantile filtered imitation learning (QFIL), a novel policy improvement operator designed for offline reinforcement learning. QFIL performs policy improvement by running imitation learning on a filtered version of the offline dataset. The filtering process removes $ s,a $ pairs whose estimated Q values fall below a given quantile of the pushforward distribution over values induced by sampling actions from the behavior policy. The definitions of both the pushforward Q distribution and resulting value function quantile are key contributions of our method. We prove that QFIL gives us a safe policy improvement step with function approximation and that the choice of quantile provides a natural hyperparameter to trade off bias and variance of the improvement step. Empirically, we perform a synthetic experiment illustrating how QFIL effectively makes a bias-variance tradeoff and we see that QFIL performs well on the D4RL benchmark.
This paper investigates the effectiveness of transfer learning based on Mallows' Cp. We propose a procedure that combines transfer learning with Mallows' Cp (TLCp) and prove that it outperforms the conventional Mallows' Cp criterion in terms of accuracy and stability. Our theoretical results indicate that, for any sample size in the target domain, the proposed TLCp estimator performs better than the Cp estimator by the mean squared error (MSE) metric in the case of orthogonal predictors, provided that i) the dissimilarity between the tasks from source domain and target domain is small, and ii) the procedure parameters (complexity penalties) are tuned according to certain explicit rules. Moreover, we show that our transfer learning framework can be extended to other feature selection criteria, such as the Bayesian information criterion. By analyzing the solution of the orthogonalized Cp, we identify an estimator that asymptotically approximates the solution of the Cp criterion in the case of non-orthogonal predictors. Similar results are obtained for the non-orthogonal TLCp. Finally, simulation studies and applications with real data demonstrate the usefulness of the TLCp scheme.
The mission of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is to coordinate and unify the petroleum policies of its Member Countries and ensure the stabilization of oil markets in order to secure an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consumers, a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital for those investing in the petroleum industry. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is a permanent, intergovernmental Organization, created at the Baghdad Conference on
September 10–14, 1960, by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. OPEC's objective is to co-ordinate and unify petroleum policies among Member Countries, in order to secure fair and stable prices for petroleum producers; an efficient, economic and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations; and a fair return on capital to those investing in the industry.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities
The rate of early marriage is 87% in northwest Nigeria, although it is 56% in Kaduna. One major issue is that early marriage is often rationalized as a religious norm. This study explores the role of faith leaders in advancing the cause of adolescent girls regarding the timing of marriage in Kaduna state. This qualitative study took place in three local government areas: Chikun (Mixed Christians and Muslims), Makarfi (majority Muslims), and Zangon-Kataf (majority Christians) were purposively selected to have a variety of mixed religious contexts. Using purposive sampling methods, the researcher conducted 24 focus group discussions with adolescent girls, 24 in-depth interviews with faith leaders, and 12 key informant interviews with other stakeholders. The study used a framework method for analyzing qualitative data. The study found that faith leaders play essential roles in rationalizing or discouraging early marriage through preaching and other activities. The study identifies three categories of faith leaders concerning early marriage. Some are proactive, discoursing about it. The second category is the passive faith leaders, somehow indifferent but has never preached against or in favor of early marriage. The last set consists of faith leaders promoting early marriage—who think early marriage is still beneficial. The study recommends that considering the social position of faith leaders and critical role in sanctioning marital unions, they could be considered as a vital link in efforts to curtail early marriage.
History of scholarship and learning. The humanities, Social Sciences