The impacts of fundraising periods and geographic distance on financing music production via crowdfunding in Brazil

We conduct an analysis of 1835 pledges to 10 music production projects hosted on the largest Brazilian crowdfunding platform, namely the Catarse Web site, and we assess the relation between the fundraising accumulation period, the donor–entrepreneur distance and the propensity of donors to back projects. Our results suggest a significantly negative association between distance and the value of capital pledged to projects, which is consistent with the notion that the entrepreneur’s network of close contacts might play a central role in funding. Furthermore, our results contradict the idea that crowdfunding reduces the inhibiting effect of donor–entrepreneur distance. In addition, the results show that a long project exposure is associated with higher values of pledges. These results suggest practical implications for the study of crowdfunding as a financing platform. This study contributes to the literature on the use of crowdfunding as an alternative funding source in a major emerging market.     

Early contribution of phonological awareness and later influence of phonological memory throughout reading acquisition

The acquisition of reading skills is known to rely on early phonological abilities, but only a few studies have investigated the independent contribution of the different steps involved in phonological processing. This 1‐year longitudinal study, spanning the initial year of reading instruction, aimed at specifying the development of phonological discrimination, awareness and various aspects of phonological memory and at assessing their respective contributions to early reading acquisition. Our results show an increase in performance at each phonological processing step, but also suggest a qualitative evolution in their relative importance. Hierarchical regression analyses indicate that reading skills are mainly predicted by phonological awareness measured at the kindergarten stage and, subsequently, by phonological memory abilities measured at the end of first grade. More precisely short‐term memory for serial‐order information seems to contribute to the development of decoding abilities, while phonological knowledge stored in long‐term memory seems to influence word recognition.     

Evaluating the reflexive practices in a learning experience

Reflexivity is a primary requirement for professional work. Our aim was to describe a methodology suitable for detecting the development of reflexive practice through the analysis of 59 Master’s degree students’ journals. We explore the use and changes of reflexive practice in relation to the settings and activities of the course using analysis of the mental language: We analyse how the reflexive practice is characterized, how it evolves through time and how it can be promoted. Data analysis shows that reflexivity is not monodimensional but multidimensional. Reflexive practice increases during the course: The different dimensions vary over time according to different organizational and educational conditions. This methodology allows us to formulate new hypotheses about which elements of the setting and process are effective in supporting participants’ reflexive practice.     

The experimenter's museum: GenBank, natural history, and the moral economies of biomedicine

Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences relies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such as DNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creation and their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition. At the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical tradition, based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay focuses on the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank, the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental knowledge in the world. The debates leading to its creation-about the collection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit and authorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge-illuminate the different moral economies at work in the life sciences in the late twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent rise of public access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly, this essay challenges the big picture according to which the rise of experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentieth century. It argues that both traditions have been articulated into a new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice in science at the beginning of the twenty-first century.     

Entrepreneurial effectiveness of European universities: An empirical assessment of antecedents and trade-offs

The phenomenon of entrepreneurial universities has received considerable attention over the last decades. An entrepreneurial orientation by academia might put regions and nations in an advantageous position in emerging knowledge-intensive fields of economic activity. At the same time, such entrepreneurial orientation requires reconciliation with the scientific missions of academia. Large-scale empirical research on antecedents of the entrepreneurial effectiveness of universities is scarce. This contribution examines the extent to which scientific productivity affect entrepreneurial effectiveness, taking into account the size of universities and the presence of disciplines, as well as the R&D intensity of the regional business environment (BERD). In addition, we assess the occurrence of trade-offs between different transfer mechanisms (contract research, patenting and spin off activity). The data used pertain to 105 European universities. Our findings reveal that scientific productivity is positively associated with entrepreneurial effectiveness. Trade-offs between transfer mechanisms do not reveal themselves; on the contrary, contract research and spin off activities tend to facilitate each other. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.     

Timescales for exploratory tactical behaviour in football small-sided games

The aim of this study was to identify the dynamics of tactical behaviour emerging on different timescales in football small-sided games and to quantify short- and long-term exploratory behaviour according to the number of opponents. Two teams of four professional male footballers played small-sided games against two different teams with a variable number of opponents (3, 5 and 7). Data were collected using a combination of systematic observation and a non-differential global positioning system (15 Hz). The temporal diversity and structural flexibility of the players were determined by calculating the dynamic overlap order parameter q, entropy and trapping strength. Analysis of the exploratory dynamics revealed two different timescales, forming a different metastable landscape of action for each constraint. Fast dynamics lasted on average a few seconds and consisted of changes in tactical patterns. The long timescale corresponded to the shared tasks of offence and defence lasting tens of seconds. The players’ tactical diversity decreased with an increasing number of opponents, especially in defence. Manipulating numerical imbalance is likely to promote changes in the diversity, unpredictability and flexibility of tactical solutions. The fact that the temporally nested structure of constraints shaped the emergence of tactical behaviour provides a new rationale for practice task design. The manipulation of numerical imbalance on the timescale of a few tens of seconds, on which the exploratory behaviour of players saturates, may help coaches to optimise the exploratory efficiency of the small-sided games.     

Qualitative differences in the exploration of upright and upside-down faces in four-month-old infants: an eye-movement study

Four-month-old infants were habituated with an upright or an upside-down face. Eye-movement recordings showed that the upright and upside-down faces were not explored the same way. Infants spent more time exploring internal features, mainly in the region of the nose and mouth, when the face was upright. They also alternated as frequently between the face's internal features (eyes vs. nose/mouth) as between external and internal features. When the face was upside down, the infants spent half of their time exploring external features, and preferentially alternated between external features and internal features. The main effect of inversion was a decrease of the looking time to the nose/mouth region and of the number of shifts between the eye region and the nose/mouth region.     

Initial Validity and Reliability of the Portuguese Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion 6-20 Scale

ABSTRACT

The aims of this study were to perform the cross-cultural adaptation of the Borg Rating of Perceived Exertion (RPE) 6–20 Scale to Brazilian Portuguese language and to start testing its validity and reliability. After performing the cross-cultural adaptation of the Scale, concurrent and discriminative validity, and reliability were determined on a treadmill in young (18–30 years) and older adult women (60–75 years). Considering young and older adult women, RPE presented high and moderate positive correlation with heart rate and high and low positive correlation with oxygen consumption, respectively. Older adult women presented RPE (11 ± 2) significantly higher than young ones (8 ± 1) exercising at the same absolute intensity. Intraclass coefficient correlation was excellent for RPE to young and older adult women. The Scale presented concurrent validity only to young adult women, whereas it presented discriminative validity between such groups of women. Moreover, the scale is reliable to young and older adult women.