The Perception of Scientific Authorship Across Domains

Minerva - We extend previous research by systematically investigating whether perceptions of scientific authorship vary between domains. Employing regulations for authorship of scientific journals...     

Uncovering legislative pace in Germany: A methodical and computational application to answer temporal questions of law-making

How fast are law-making processes and how often are lawmakers exploiting institutional fast lanes to help speed up legislation? To this day, Political Science has not managed to provide a quantitative answer to these questions. By placing a scientific focus on this gap, the current examination will conceptualise a quantitative measure for legislative pace which is analogous to the tempo of music. This will permit the author to place the (subjective) temporal perception of law-making procedures into the overall context of legislature.A database, which contains machine-readable data extracted and transformed from semi-structured documents, will be highlighted for its ability to measure legislative pace in Germany. As a result, every procedural step within all the adopted federal laws in Germany (between autumn 1990 and autumn 2017), is able to be processed by computers.Finally, the paper employs the aforementioned database and the conceptualised quantification of pace (metronome) to shed light on legislative pace in Germany. Results are presented for the 16th legislative period (2005–2009) of the German Bundestag. Thus, the paper contributes to an ongoing dispute between “acceleration-optimist” and “deliberation-supporters” with respect to their views on the speed of legislation. The paper shows to what extend law-making can accelerate in times of parliamentary truce or in cases of broad consent between the majoritarian actors. However, this does not always imply a diminished (parliamentarian) interest inclusion and control. In general, institutional time-rules and parliamentary practices offer reliable so called “checks and balances” to monitor legislative acceleration. Nevertheless, what seems to be lacking, is a stronger set of rules that control the power of government and the parliamentarian factions' ability to delay law-making procedures.     

Continued access to syntactic information in reading

Reliable access to syntactic information beyond its use in first-pass reading was probed using a task labeled syntactic reading task. This task draws on an orthographic marker for syntactic structure, the capitalization of nouns in German. Subjects read written text strings containing a unit that could be taken as a noun or as a verb. The strings were disambiguated by the unit being capitalized or not. Thus subjects could interpret the text only when taking the capitalization marker into account. Data were collected from 231 German-speaking secondary school students. The results show that even subjects who were capable of reliably using capitalization markers in writing varied considerably in their use of these markers to identify syntactic structure in reading. High-achieving subjects profited more than others in situations where they could tie syntactic information to a prominent capitalization marker. This suggests that focus on syntactic form alone does not guarantee reliable access to syntactic information.     

Using DNA From Mothers and Children to Study Parental Investment in Children’s Educational Attainment

This study tested implications of new genetic discoveries for understanding the association between parental investment and children’s educational attainment. A novel design matched genetic data from 860 British mothers and their children with home-visit measures of parenting: the E-Risk Study. Three findings emerged. First, both mothers’ and children’s education-associated genetics, summarized in a genome-wide polygenic score, were associated with parenting—a gene–environment correlation. Second, accounting for genetic influences slightly reduced associations between parenting and children’s attainment—indicating some genetic confounding. Third, mothers’ genetics were associated with children’s attainment over and above children's own genetics, via cognitively stimulating parenting—an environmentally mediated effect. Findings imply that, when interpreting parents’ effects on children, environmentalists must consider genetic transmission, but geneticists must also consider environmental transmission.