Greed and Rapacity in Twilight and Vampire Academy: Kleinian Models of Maturation for Young Adult Readers

Children's Literature in Education - This paper considers the Twilight novels alongside the Vampire Academy books, as young adult readers regularly invoke these series as touchstones...     

Practical stability in terms of two measures for fractional order dynamic systems in Caputo's sense with initial time difference

The initial time difference practical stability in terms of two measures has been investigated for nonlinear fractional differential equations in Caputo's sense and these properties have been unified with Lyapunov-like functions to establish a comparison result.     

Automatic thematic classification of election manifestos

We digitized three years of Dutch election manifestos annotated by the Dutch political scientist Isaac Lipschits. We used these data to train a classifier that can automatically label new, unseen election manifestos with themes. Having the manifestos in a uniform XML format with all paragraphs annotated with their themes has advantages for both electronic publishing of the data and diachronic comparative data analysis. The data that we created will be disclosed to the public through a search interface. This means that it will be possible to query the data and filter them on themes and parties. We optimized the Lipschits classifier on the task of classifying election manifestos using models trained on earlier years. We built a classifier that is suited for classifying election manifestos from 2002 onwards using the data from the 1980s and 1990s. We evaluated the results by having a domain expert manually assess a sample of the classified data. We found that our automatic classifier obtains the same precision as a human classifier on unseen data. Its recall could be improved by extending the set of themes with newly emerged themes. Thus when using old political texts to classify new texts, work is needed to link and expand the set of themes to newer topics.     

Understanding the Internet banking adoption: A unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and perceived risk application

Understanding the main determinants of Internet banking adoption is important for banks and users; our understanding of the role of users’ perceived risk in Internet banking adoption is limited. In response, we develop a conceptual model that combines unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) with perceived risk to explain behaviour intention and usage behaviour of Internet banking. To test the conceptual model we collected data from Portugal (249 valid cases). Our results support some relationships of UTAUT, such as performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and social influence, and also the role of risk as a stronger predictor of intention. To explain usage behaviour of Internet banking the most important factor is behavioural intention to use Internet banking.     

A deep vein thrombosis caused by 20209C>T mutation in homozygosis of the prothrombin gene in a Caucasian patient

Introduction:

Additional nucleotide substitutions in the 3′-untranslated region of prothrombin gene could explain some thrombotic events and also adverse pregnancy outcomes. We describe the first case of a homozygous 20209C>T mutation as the cause of deep vein thrombosis in a Spanish patient.

Case and methods:

The 56-year-old male patient with a partial tear of the Achilles tendon developed calf (tibial) deep vein thrombosis after immobilization and was treated with an anticoagulant. To determine if the deep vein thrombosis was of genetic origin, a peripheral blood DNA sample was analysed for the presence of the three most frequent mutations associated with thrombotic events: factor V Leiden (1691G>A), prothrombin (20210G>A) and methylene tetrahydrofolate reductase (677C>T). The presence or absence of the normal allele of prothrombin could not be determined using the PTH-FV-MTHFR StripAssay (Vienna Lab).

Results:

Comprehensive analysis showed that the patient had a variant interfering with the polymerase chain reaction product, we sequenced the entire prothrombin gene and found that the patient had a homozygous C>T mutation at position 20209; this interfered with the polymerase chain reaction product, which needs a C at this position to be able to bind to the wild-type probe present in the test strip.

Conclusion:

The homozygous 20209C>T mutation and the presence of the mutation 677C>T in heterozygosity explained the patient’s deep vein thrombosis because the combination of mutations would increase the risk of thrombosis. Suitable genetic counselling should be provided to the patient and first-degree relatives as it important to detect prothrombin gene variants that could increase risk for thrombotic events.     

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     

The changing nature of autonomy: Transformations of the late Swedish teaching profession

This article discusses teacher autonomy in the case of the Swedish teaching profession since the 1980s. It is argued that deregulation, decentralization, and marketization reforms of the 1990s have indeed increased teacher autonomy, but in some respects also led to a increase of complexity in the Swedish school system. In order to handle this complexity, the state intensified a standardization of schooling, which restricts teacher autonomy today. Relevant the paper's understanding is that teacher autonomy is always about control, exerted internally by the profession itself and facilitated externally by state standards. The article argues that the restriction of teacher autonomy in recent times is also related to a simplified understanding of the phenomenon in the reforms of the 1990s.     

The interest of Bavarian primary school pupils in geographical topics and methods – selected results of an empirical survey

Interest is a central learning prerequisite for teaching. The article deals with a survey among 1600 primary school pupils in forms 2, 3 and 4 (ages 7–10) in the German federal state of Bavaria who were interviewed on their interest in geographical topics and working methods. They were given a questionnaire including 40 items to indicate their individual interest on a five-point Likert scale. The results show that the subscale ‘natural disaster' generates the highest interest, followed by ‘phenomena of geoscience' and ‘people and peoples'. The interest in all three subscales decreases with increasing age. Furthermore, several gender-specific differences occur. Among the working methods, experimenting, films and computers hold the first three places whilst again showing significant differences concerning age group as well as gender.     

Determining factors in the success of R&D cooperative agreements between firms and research organizations

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of a series of contextual and organizational factors on the success of 800 cooperative agreements between Spanish firms and research organizations, run between 1995 and 2000. Findings show that the most outstanding factors are, in the case of firms, commitment, previous links, definition of objectives and conflict, whereas for research organizations previous links, communication, commitment, trust and the partners’ reputation are more relevant. These study not only provides a comprehensive theoretical model to analyze the success of these agreements but is useful both for improving management of cooperation and for fostering collaboration both at a national an international level.