Initiation of non-heterosexual relationships

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslava Varella Valentova ◽  
Marco Antonio Correa Varella

Human sexual orientation is an intriguing phenomenon which is still poorly understood and has important evolutionary implications. Evolutionary based studies mostly focus on heterosexual individuals and relationships, probably because non-heterosexuality concerns a minority of the population and decreases individual direct reproductive success. To better understand human nature, it is important to analyse whether the mating psychology of minorities exhibit specific evolved sexual/reproductive strategies. Here we review studies on partner preferences, mate choice, and flirting in non-heterosexual populations, to identify which patterns are similar to or different from heterosexuals. The general pattern supports the notion that sex differences are larger than within sex variation among people of different sexual orientations. However, although some mating strategies among non-heterosexuals resemble heterosexuals of the same sex, others resemble heterosexuals of the opposite sex, and yet in others, the pattern is different than among either heterosexual men or women. We point to limitations of the current state of this research, and we suggest possible future directions in the study of non-heterosexual relationship initiation.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaroslava Varella Valentova ◽  
Marco Antonio Correa Varella

Human sexual orientation is an intriguing phenomenon which is still poorly understood and has important evolutionary implications. Evolutionary based studies mostly focus on heterosexual individuals and relationships, probably because non-heterosexuality concerns a minority of the population and decreases individual direct reproductive success. To better understand human nature, it is important to analyse whether the mating psychology of minorities exhibit specific evolved sexual/reproductive strategies. Here we review studies on partner preferences, mate choice, and flirting in non-heterosexual populations, to identify which patterns are similar to or different from heterosexuals. The general pattern supports the notion that sex differences are larger than within sex variation among people of different sexual orientations. However, although some mating strategies among non-heterosexuals resemble heterosexuals of the same sex, others resemble heterosexuals of the opposite sex, and yet in others, the pattern is different than among either heterosexual men or women. We point to limitations of the current state of this research, and we suggest possible future directions in the study of non-heterosexual relationship initiation.


Sexualities ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 136346072096129
Author(s):  
Eyo O Mensah

In many cultural traditions in Africa and beyond, it is taboo for women to initiate sexual offers to men. However, with the new wave of gender fluidity, exposure to media, and affiliation with modernity, some young women in Nigeria initiate heterosexual relationships with their choice of partners. This article explores the nuanced narratives, motivations and experiences of young women in such relationships from a qualitative ethnographic approach using participant observations, focus group and semi-structured interviews. The study is rooted in gender performativity, a postmodern feminist approach to gender and sexuality which allows an individual to express his or her sexual identity and roles based on preference, freedom and responsibility. The results, based on linguistic evidence, show that through initiating sexual relationships, young women find a source of empowerment and agency that challenges their stereotyped passive roles, breaks down gender barriers in normative heterosexual relationships, and thus expand the boundary of their femininity.


2018 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Péter Bucsky

Abstract The freight transport sector is a low profit and high competition business and therefore has less ability to invest in research and development in the field of autonomous vehicles (AV) than the private car industry. There are already different levels of automation technologies in the transport industry, but most of these are serving niche demands and answers have yet to be found about whether it would be worthwhile to industrialise these technologies. New innovations from different fields are constantly changing the freight traffic industry but these are less disruptive than on other markets. The aim of this article is to show the current state of development of freight traffic with regards to AVs and analyse which future directions of development might be viable. The level of automation is very different in the case of different transport modes and most probably the technology will favour road transport over other, less environmentally harmful traffic modes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1880533
Author(s):  
Tiliksew Addis ◽  
Abera Kachi ◽  
Jun Wang

i-Perception ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 204166952110203
Author(s):  
Jonas K. Olofsson ◽  
Ingrid Ekström ◽  
Maria Larsson ◽  
Steven Nordin

Olfaction, the sense of smell, is characterized by a notable age-dependency such that aging individuals are more likely to have poor olfactory abilities. These impairments are considered to be mostly irreversible and as having potentially profound effects on quality of life and food behavior, as well as constituting warning signs of mortality, cognitive dysfunction, and dementia. Here, we review the current state of research on aging and olfaction, focusing on five topics which we regard to be of particular relevance for the field: nutrition and health, cognition and dementia, mortality, environment and genetics, and training-based enhancement. Under each of these headlines, we provide a state-of-the-art overview and discuss gaps in our knowledge which might be filled by further research. Understanding how olfactory abilities are diminished in aging, and how they may be alleviated or recovered, involves a set of challenging tasks for researchers in the years to come.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8430
Author(s):  
Lambros Mitropoulos ◽  
Annie Kortsari ◽  
Alexandros Koliatos ◽  
Georgia Ayfantopoulou

The hyperloop is an innovative land transport mode for passengers and freight that travels at ultra-high speeds. Lately, different stakeholders have been engaged in the research and development of hyperloop components. The novelty of the hyperloop necessitates certain directions to be followed toward the development and testing of its technological components as well the formation of regulations and planning processes. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of hyperloop publications to record the current state of progress of hyperloop components, including the pod, the infrastructure, and the communication system, and identify involved EU stakeholders. Blending this information results in future directions. An online search of English-based publications was performed to finally consider 107 studies on the hyperloop and identify 81 stakeholders in the EU. The analysis shows that the hyperloop-related activities are almost equally distributed between Europe (39%) and Asia (38%), and the majority of EU stakeholders are located in Spain (26%) and Germany (20%), work on the traction of the pod (37%) and the tube (28%), and study impacts including safety (35%), energy (33%), and cost (30%). Existing tube systems and testing facilities for the hyperloop lack full-scale tracks, which creates a hurdle for the testing and development of the hyperloop system. The presented analysis and findings provide a holistic assessment of the hyperloop system and its stakeholders and suggest future directions to develop a successful transport system.


2021 ◽  
pp. 204589402110407
Author(s):  
Andrew J Sweatt ◽  
Raju Reddy ◽  
Farbod Rahaghi ◽  
Nadine Al-Naamani

In this conference paper, we review the 2020 American Thoracic Society (ATS) International Conference session titled, “What’s New in Pulmonary Hypertension Clinical Research: Lessons from the Best Abstracts”. This virtual mini-symposium took place on October 21, 2020, in lieu of the annual in-person ATS International Conference which was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Seven clinical research abstracts were selected for presentation in the session, which encompassed five major themes: (1) standardizing diagnosis and management of pulmonary hypertension, (2) improving risk assessment in pulmonary arterial hypertension, (3) evaluating biomarkers of disease activity, (4) understanding metabolic dysregulation across the spectrum of pulmonary hypertension, and (5) advancing knowledge in chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension. Focusing on these five thematic contexts we review the current state of knowledge, summarize presented research abstracts, appraise their significance and limitations, and then discuss relevant future directions in pulmonary hypertension clinical research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Sameen Maruf ◽  
Fahimeh Saleh ◽  
Gholamreza Haffari

Machine translation (MT) is an important task in natural language processing (NLP), as it automates the translation process and reduces the reliance on human translators. With the resurgence of neural networks, the translation quality surpasses that of the translations obtained using statistical techniques for most language-pairs. Up until a few years ago, almost all of the neural translation models translated sentences independently , without incorporating the wider document-context and inter-dependencies among the sentences. The aim of this survey article is to highlight the major works that have been undertaken in the space of document-level machine translation after the neural revolution, so researchers can recognize the current state and future directions of this field. We provide an organization of the literature based on novelties in modelling and architectures as well as training and decoding strategies. In addition, we cover evaluation strategies that have been introduced to account for the improvements in document MT, including automatic metrics and discourse-targeted test sets. We conclude by presenting possible avenues for future exploration in this research field.


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