Multi-scaling and mesoscopic structures

Multi-scaling and the systematic investigation of mesoscopic structures represent a field of fruitful cooperation in physics, chemistry, mineralogy and life sciences. The increasing miniaturization of devices as well as the emphasis of recent research on microstructures with length scales of a few nanometres lead to paradigm changes that may impact not only on our scientific understanding of fine-grained structures but also on the way we will develop device materials in the future. Here the role of interfaces becomes more important, and developments in areas such as ‘domain boundary engineering’ are evidence of this scientific evolution. In addition, nano-porous materials are particularly important in geology and in the development of artificial bones and ultra-light metals. Some of these developments are reviewed in this paper.

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Tongues of Fire

10.1093/oso/9780190884109.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Nancy Farriss

Keyword(s):

Cultural Difference ◽

Language Contact ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Culture Contact ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

Southern Mexico ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Indigenous Church ◽

Cultural Gaps

Language and translation governed the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines derived from cultural gaps that separated European experiences and concepts from those of the Indians. This study focuses on the Otomangue languages of Oaxaca in southern Mexico, especially Zapotec, and relates their role in the Dominican evangelizing program to the larger frame of culture contact in postconquest Mesoamerica. Fine-grained analysis of translated texts is used to reveal the rhetorical strategies of missionary discourse and combines with an examination of language contact in different social contexts. A major aim is to spotlight the role of the native elites in shaping what emerged as a new form of Christianity. As translators, chief catechists, and parish administrators they made evangelization in many respects an indigenous enterprise and the Mexican church it created an indigenous church.

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How Artefacts Do Leadership: A Ventriloquial Analysis

Management Communication Quarterly ◽

10.1177/0893318921998078 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 089331892199807

Author(s):

Jonathan Clifton ◽

Fernando Fachin ◽

François Cooren

Keyword(s):

Organizational Communication ◽

Recent Work ◽

Distributed Leadership ◽

Network Theory ◽

Actor Network Theory ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Naturally Occurring ◽

Human Actors

To date there has been little work that uses fine-grained interactional analyses of the in situ doing of leadership to make visible the role of non-human as well as human actants in this process. Using transcripts of naturally-occurring interaction as data, this study seeks to show how leadership is co-achieved by artefacts as an in-situ accomplishment. To do this we situate this study within recent work on distributed leadership and argue that it is not only distributed across human actors, but also across networks that include both human and non-human actors. Taking a discursive approach to leadership, we draw on Actor Network Theory and adopt a ventriloquial approach to sociomateriality as inspired by the Montreal School of organizational communication. Findings indicate that artefacts “do” leadership when a hybrid presence is made relevant to the interaction and when this presence provides authoritative grounds for influencing others to achieve the group’s goals.

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Delta band activity contributes to the identification of command following in disorder of consciousness

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-021-95818-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 11 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Gonzalo Rivera-Lillo ◽

Emmanuel A. Stamatakis ◽

Tristan A. Bekinschtein ◽

David K. Menon ◽

Srivas Chennu

Keyword(s):

Functional Neuroimaging ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Disorder Of Consciousness ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Electrical Brain Activity ◽

Delta Band ◽

Delta Modulation ◽

Command Following ◽

Band Activity

AbstractThe overt or covert ability to follow commands in patients with disorders of consciousness is considered a sign of awareness and has recently been defined as cortically mediated behaviour. Despite its clinical relevance, the brain signatures of the perceptual processing supporting command following have been elusive. This multimodal study investigates the temporal spectral pattern of electrical brain activity to identify features that differentiated healthy controls from patients both able and unable to follow commands. We combined evidence from behavioural assessment, functional neuroimaging during mental imagery and high-density electroencephalography collected during auditory prediction, from 21 patients and 10 controls. We used a penalised regression model to identify command following using features from electroencephalography. We identified seven well-defined spatiotemporal signatures in the delta, theta and alpha bands that together contribute to identify DoC subjects with and without the ability to follow command, and further distinguished these groups of patients from controls. A fine-grained analysis of these seven signatures enabled us to determine that increased delta modulation at the frontal sensors was the main feature in command following patients. In contrast, higher frequency theta and alpha modulations differentiated controls from both groups of patients. Our findings highlight a key role of spatiotemporally specific delta modulation in supporting cortically mediated behaviour including the ability to follow command. However, patients able to follow commands nevertheless have marked differences in brain activity in comparison with healthy volunteers.

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Job Resources and Strengths Use in Relation to Employee Performance: A Contextualized View

Psychological Reports ◽

10.1177/0033294121997783 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 003329412199778

Author(s):

Luca Tisu ◽

Andrei Rusu ◽

Coralia Sulea ◽

Delia Vîrgă

Keyword(s):

Employee Performance ◽

Job Demands ◽

Job Resources ◽

Conservation Of Resources ◽

Role Clarity ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Strengths Use ◽

Individual Strategies ◽

Moderator Role

Job resources play a prominent role in employee performance literature, yet a fine-grained understanding of how resources are relevant for several performance types is still needed. Relying on the Job Demands-Resources and Conservation of Resources theories, the present study addresses this call in two ways. First, it examines the predictive effect of four job resources (i.e., role clarity, feedback, autonomy, and opportunities for development) on nine types of performance (i.e., proficiency, adaptivity, and proactivity as an individual, team, and organization member). Second, it tests the moderator role of strengths use in these relationships. Data was gathered from a sample of Romanian employees (N = 332) and analyzed via hierarchical multiple linear regression. The results indicate that the selected job resources are, indeed, predictors of different types of employee performance and not in a unitary manner. Role clarity and feedback appear to be the most relevant predictors for various performance types, while autonomy seems to be the least important. Also, strengths use moderates these relationships, but in a reinforcing manner only regarding opportunities for development. The interaction of strengths use with role clarity and feedback renders the latter two obsolete, indicating that individual strategies may act as substitutes for job resources. These findings add to the Job Demands-Resources theory's versatile nature and provide more clarity to practitioners who plan interventions to enhance specific performance types, taking individual strategies into account.

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Adopting the Situation in School Questionnaire to Examine Physical Education Teachers’ Motivating and Demotivating Styles Using a Circumplex Approach

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health ◽

10.3390/ijerph18147342 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 18 (14) ◽

pp. 7342

Author(s):

Géraldine Escriva-Boulley ◽

Emma Guillet-Descas ◽

Nathalie Aelterman ◽

Maarten Vansteenkiste ◽

Nele Van Doren ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Physical Education ◽

Autonomy Support ◽

Future Research ◽

Physical Education Teachers ◽

Structure Control ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Circular Structure ◽

Need Support ◽

Academic Courses

Grounded in SDT, several studies have highlighted the role of teachers’ motivating and demotivating styles for students’ motivation, learning, and physical activity in physical education (PE). However, most of these studies focused on a restricted number of motivating strategies (e.g., offering choice) or dimensions (e.g., autonomy support). Recently, researchers have developed the Situations-in-School (i.e., SIS-Education) questionnaire, which allows one to gain a more integrative and fine-grained insight into teachers’ engagement in autonomy-support, structure, control, and chaos through a circular structure (i.e., a circumplex). Although teaching in PE resembles teaching in academic courses in many ways, some of the items of the original situation-based questionnaire (e.g., regarding homework) are irrelevant to the PE context. In the present study, we therefore sought to develop a modified, PE-friendly version of this earlier validated SIS-questionnaire—the SIS-PE. Findings in a sample of Belgian (N = 136) and French (N = 259) PE teachers, examined together and as independent samples, showed that the variation in PE teachers’ motivating styles in this adapted version is also best captured by a circumplex structure, with four overarching styles and eight subareas differing in their level of need support and directiveness. The SIS-PE possesses excellent convergent and concurrent validity. With the adaptations being successful, great opportunities for future research on PE teachers (de-)motivating styles are created.

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Have Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy Patients an Increased Cancer Risk?

Journal of Neuromuscular Diseases ◽

10.3233/jnd-210676 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-5

Author(s):

Gian Luca Vita ◽

Luisa Politano ◽

Angela Berardinelli ◽

Giuseppe Vita

Keyword(s):

Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy ◽

Muscular Dystrophy ◽

Systematic Investigation ◽

Mdx Mice ◽

True Incidence ◽

Patients With Cancer ◽

Dmd Gene ◽

Age Range ◽

Prevalence Of Cancer

Background: Increasing evidence suggests that Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) gene is involved in the occurrence of different types of cancer. Moreover, development of sarcomas was reported in mdx mice, the murine model of DMD, in older age. So far, nine isolated DMD patients were reported with concomitant cancer, four of whom with rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), but no systematic investigation was performed about the true incidence of cancer in DMD. Methods: All members of the Italian Association of Myology were asked about the occurrence of cancer in their DMD patients in the last 30 years. Results: Four DMD patients with cancer were reported after checking 2455 medical records. One developed brain tumour at the age of 35 years. Two patients had alveolar RMS at 14 and 17 years of age. The fourth patient had a benign enchondroma when 11-year-old. Conclusion: Prevalence of cancer in general in the Italian DMD patients does not seem to be different from that in the general population with the same age range. Although the small numbers herein presented do not allow definitive conclusion, the frequent occurrence of RMS in DMD patients raises an alert for basic researchers and clinicians. The role of DMD gene in cancer merits further investigations.

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Porphyrin and phthalocyanine-based Metal Organic Frameworks beyond metal-carboxylates

Dalton Transactions ◽

10.1039/d0dt03903a ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Siddhartha De ◽

Thomas Devic ◽

Alexandra Fateeva

Keyword(s):

Porous Materials ◽

Metal Organic Frameworks ◽

Metal Carboxylates ◽

Natural Systems ◽

Metal Organic

Given the ubiquitous role of porphyrins in natural systems, these molecules and related derivatives such as phthalocyanines are fascinating building units to achieve functional porous materials. Porphyrin-based MOFs have been...

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The Role of Frost Processes in the Retreat of River Banks

Water ◽

10.3390/w13131812 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (13) ◽

pp. 1812

Author(s):

Karol Augustowski ◽

Józef Kukulak

Keyword(s):

Relative Role ◽

Freezing And Thawing ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Fluvial Processes ◽

Precise Calculation ◽

Erosion Pins ◽

Summer Half ◽

Lateral Erosion ◽

Summer Flood

The rate of bank retreat was measured using erosion pins on the alluvial banks of the rivers in the Podhale region (the boundary zone between Central and Outer Carpathians) during the hydrological year 2013/2014. During the winter half-year (November–April), the bank retreat was mainly caused by processes related to the freezing and thawing of the ground (swelling, creep, downfall). During the summer half-year (May–October), fluvial processes and mass movements such as lateral erosion, washing out, and sliding predominated. The share of fluvial processes in the total annual amount of bank retreat (71 cm on average) was 4 times greater than that of the frost phenomena. Erosion on bank surfaces by frost phenomena during the cold half-year was greatest (up to 38 cm) on the upper parts of banks composed of fine-grained alluvium, while fluvial erosion during the summer half-year (exceeding 80 cm) mostly affected the lower parts of the banks, composed of gravel. The precise calculation of the relative role of frost phenomena in the annual balance of bank erosion was precluded at some stations by the loss of erosion pins in the summer flood.

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