Trait Affection Given and Received: A Test of Hofstede’s Theoretical Framework

This study sought to address Hofstede and McCrae’s (2004) call for systematic cross-cultural comparisons of trait-like attributes. Specifically, we examined the extent to which Danish, Icelandic, Polish, and American adults’ trait affection given and trait affection received are (a) dependent on national origin, and (b) associated with Hofstede’s dimensions of cultures (i.e. individualism-collectivism, masculinity-femininity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance). The participants (N = 606) completed a questionnaire in English that consisted of the trait affection given and trait affection received scales. Results of a multivariate analysis of variance and linear regression analyses revealed that people’s trait affection given and received are (a) dependent on national origin, and (b) associated with Hofstede’s dimensions of cultures.     

陆地卫星MSS影象目视解译在土地资源调查中局限性的讨论

简述陆地卫星多光谱扫描(MSS)影象的特点,着重介绍陆地卫星多光谱扫描影象适用于中、小比例尺的土地资源凋查     

Does regional disadvantage affect health-related sport and physical activity level? A multi-level analysis of individual behaviour

This study examines the role of regional government quality in health-related participation in sport and physical activity among adults (18–64 years) in 28 European countries. The importance of the analysis rests in the relative autonomy that regional and local governments have over policy decisions connected with sport and physical activity. While existing studies have focussed on economic and infrastructural investment and expenditure, this research investigates the quality of regional governments across 208 regions within 28 European countries. The individual-level data stem from the 2013 Eurobarometer 80.2 (n?=?18,675) and were combined with regional-level data from Eurostat. An individual's level of participation in sport and physical activity was measured by three variables reflecting whether an individual's activity level is below, meets, or exceeds the recommendations of the World Health Organization. The results of multi-level analyses reveal that regional government quality has a significant and positive association with individual participation in sport and physical activity at a level meeting or exceeding the guidelines. The impact is much larger than that of regional gross domestic product per capita, indicating that regional disadvantage in terms of political quality is more relevant than being disadvantaged in terms of economic wealth.     

Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2): evaluating the Swedish version by confirmatory factor analyses

The Competitive State Anxiety Inventory-2 (CSAI-2) is one of the most frequently used instruments when assessing competitive state anxiety in sport psychology research. However, doubts have been expressed about the factorial validity of both the English and the Greek versions of the scale. Hence, a revised version of the inventory (CSAI-2R) has recently been suggested to be more psychometrically sound (Cox et al., 2003). In the present study, the aim was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Swedish version of the CSAI-2 using confirmatory factor analyses. A total of 969 athletes (571 men and 398 women) competing in 26 different sports completed the Swedish version of the CSAI-2. Three different factor structures were evaluated: the original three-factor model (with cognitive anxiety, somatic anxiety and self-confidence), a two-factor model in which self-confidence was excluded, and a three-factor model containing 17 items (CSAI-2R). The results revealed that only the 17-item model displayed an acceptable fit to the data. Although some doubts remain about the amount of variance that can be attributed to error variance in the subscales, the results suggest that it is better to use the CSAI-2R rather than the original CSAI-2.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Exploring the effects of substituting basketball players in high-level teams

Substituting basketball players during competition is a key process to optimise collective performance. Available research on this topic is scarce, probably due to the difficulty in isolating these effects; thus, the aim of this study was to identify the temporal effects of substitutions in basketball (Spanish professional basketball league). The sample was composed of 1118 substitutions gathered from 21 basketball games. The analysed variables were coach-controlled (player and team’s personal fouls, player in and player out roles, player’s in and out minutes on-court and timeout situation); on-court (foul committed, free throws, 2- and 3-point field-goal effectiveness) and situational variables (scoreline, quality of opposition, game location and game quarter). The results showed positive scoring performances after the substitution for all the analyses. During the first quarter, there were significant effects for fouls committed, scoreline and game location after the substitution. The player’s out personal fouls, free-throw effectiveness, player in, minutes on-court player in, timeout situation and 3-point field-goal effectiveness were significant during the second quarter. The team’s personal fouls, game location, and scoreline were identified as important in the third quarter. The fourth quarter did not show significant effects on the independent variables. Current findings allow optimising coaches’ plans and team management of on-court and bench players throughout the game.     

Development and validation of the Perceived Game-Specific Soccer Competence Scale

ABSTRACT

The objective of this study was to create a valid, self-reported, game-specific soccer competence scale. A structural model of perceived competence, performance measures and motivation was tested as the basis for the scale. A total of 1321 soccer players (261 females, 1060 males) ranging from 12 to 15 years (13.4 ± 1.0 years) participated in the study. They completed the Perceived Game-Specific Soccer Competence Scale (PGSSCS), self-assessments of tactical skills and motivation, as well as technical and speed and agility tests. Results of factor analyses, tests of internal consistency and correlations between PGSSCS subscales, performance measures and motivation supported the reliability and validity of the PGSSCS. The scale can be considered a suitable instrument to assess perceived game-specific competence among young soccer players.     

Information-governing dynamics of attacker–defender interactions in youth rugby union

Abstract

Previous work on dynamics of interpersonal interactions in 1 vs. 1 sub-phases of basketball has identified changes in interpersonal distance between an attacker and defender as a potential control parameter for influencing organizational states of attacker–defender dyads. Other studies have reported the constraining effect of relative velocity between an attacker and defender in 1 vs. 1 dyads. To evaluate the relationship between these candidate control parameters, we compared the impact of both interpersonal distance and relative velocity on the pattern-forming dynamics of attacker–defender dyads in the sport of rugby union. Results revealed that when interpersonal distance achieved a critical value of less than 4 m, and relative velocity values increased or were maintained above 1 m · s^?1, a successful outcome (i.e. clean attempt) for an attacker was predicted. Alternatively, when values of relative velocity suddenly decreased below this threshold, at the same critical value of interpersonal distance, a successful outcome for the defender was predicted. Data demonstrated how the coupling of these two potential, nested control parameters moved the dyadic system to phase transitions, characterized as a try or a tackle. Observations suggested that relative velocity increased its influence on the organization of attacker–defender dyads in rugby union over time as spatial proximity to the try line increased.