Different Colour Predictions of Facial Preference by Caucasian and Chinese Observers

Facial colour characteristics convey vital personal information and influence social interactions and mate choices as contributing factors to perceived beauty, health, and age. How various colour characteristics would affect facial preference and whether there is a cultural difference are not fully understood. Here, we provide a useful and repeatable methodology for skin colour research based on a realistic skin model to investigate the effect of various facial colour characteristics on facial preference and compare the role of colour predictors in Caucasian (CA) and Chinese (CN) populations. Our results show that, although the averaged skin colour of facial areas plays a limited role, together with colour variation and contrast, there are stronger links between colour and facial preference than previously revealed. We also find large cultural differences in facial colour perceptions. Interestingly, Chinese observers tend to rely more heavily on colour cues to judge facial preference than Caucasian observers.

Tree pruning in the structural approach to vowel reduction and lenition

The article scrutinises several vowel reduction and lenition phenomena by employing a model of syntax-like structural representations, i.e. Government Phonology 2.0. In contrast to the standard GP model, whereby lenition and vowel reduction can be viewed as shortening, element suppression or status switching, the structural approach employs the procedure of tree pruning with a heavily limited role of melodic annotation. This paper will take a closer look at node removal with special attention to its trajectory. In particular, two basic directionalities are considered: top-down and bottom-up. The former has been proposed to account for vowel reduction whereby the highest positions are deleted retaining the head and potentially its sister. The acquisition of plosives and fricatives points to the latter trajectory, which disposes of nodes closer to the head. However, the choice of positions that are targeted in weak contexts might be also related to the inherently encoded hierarchy of terminal nodes within the constituents in question.

Before Bagan: Using Archaeological Data Sets to Assess the Traditional Historical Narrative | ပုဂံမတိုင်မီကာလ၏အစဉ်အလာသမိုင်းအဆိုအမိန့်များကို ရှေးရောင်းသုရတသ နပညာှပ်ဆိုင်ှာအချက်အလက်များအသုံးပပု၍ဆန်းစစ်ပခင်း

What we know about Bagan derives almost exclusively from historical sources – namely retrospective chronicles, inscriptions, and changing architectural styles. To date, archaeological excavations have played a limited role in augmenting or challenging this traditional narrative. This is unfortunate, because small scale excavations within Bagan’s peri-urban settlement zone, and within the walled and moated “royal city,” have demonstrated considerable knowledge about the city’s past. This is especially true for the Pre-Bagan phase (600-1044 CE). This presentation documents what we think we know about the time “before Bagan,” using the established sources, and assesses this narrative using information from contemporaneous excavation levels. ပုဂံခေတ်ယဉ်ချေးမှုအခြျာင်းျို သမိုင်းအေေျ်လျ်မေားဖြစ်သည့် အစဉ်အလာရာဇဝင်မှတ်တမ်းမေား၊ ချောျ်စာမေား၊ နှင့် ခဖပာင်းလဲလာေဲ့သည့်ဗိသုျာပုံ စံမေားမှသာလေင် သိြျရသည်။ နှစ်သျ်တမ်း သတ်မှတ်ရန်အတွျ် ခရှးခောင်းသုခတ သနဆိုင်ရာတူးခြာ်ခလ့လာမှုမေားသည်အစဉ်အလာအဆိုအမိန့် မေားျို ခဝြန်စစ်ခဆးရန် (သို့) ဖပင်ဆင်ြျရန် လုံခလာျ်မှုမရှိြျခသးခေေ။ ပုဂံမမို့ရိုး၊ ျေုံးဧရိယာနှင့် မမို့အစွန်အြေ ားခနရာမေားတွင်ခလ့လာေဲ့သည့် အနည်းငယ်မျှခသာ စမ်းသပ်တူးခြာ်ခလ့လာမှုမေားျ ပုဂံမမို့၏အတိတ်ျာလျို သိရှိနိုင်ခစရန် ရုပ်လုံးခြာ်ြပခနြျသည်။ ပုဂံမမို့ဖပမတိုင်မီျာလ (၆၀၀-၁၀၄၄ စီအီး)နှစ်သျ်တမ်းတွျ်ေေျ်မှုအခဖြမေားရရှိေဲ့သည်။ ယေုတင်ဖပမည့် စာတမ်းမှာ ပုဂံခေတ် မတိုင်မီျာလအခြျာင်းအရာမေားျို ခရှးခောင်းသုခတသနပ ညာရပ်ဆိုင်ရာတူးခြာ်မှုရလဒ်မေားနှင့် အစဉ်အလာအဆိုအမိန့်အေေျ်အလျ်မေားျို စစ်ခဆးအသုံးဖပုလေျ် မည်ျဲ့သို့ခတွးခတာသိရှိလာနိုင် ခြျာင်းျို တင်ဖပမည်ဖြစ်ပါသည်။

Diagnostic and prognostic role of nitroglycerin-induced dilation in patients with suspected vasospastic angina, combined with ergonovine provocation test

The diagnostic and prognostic role of nitroglycerin-induced dilation (NID) combined with ergonovine provocation test in patients with suspected VSA patients is not clear. A total of 438 consecutive patients who underwent the ergonovine provocation test for the diagnosis of vasospastic angina (VSA) were enrolled. Patients with VSA (n = 52) had a significantly greater coronary response to ergonovine (− 84.3 ± 10.5% vs. − 38.4 ± 17.9%, p < 0.001) and NID (26.3 ± 31.0% vs. 12.5 ± 19.0%, p < 0.001) than non-VSA patients. However, positive NID (more than 13.8% dilation, n = 170) showed a poor accuracy (AUC 0.64 [95% CI: 0.56–0.73], p = 0.001, sensitivity 60.4%, specificity 61.3%) for the diagnosis of VSA by ergonovine provocation test. Major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) occurred more frequently in the VSA group than in the non-VSA group (9.6% vs. 2.2%, p = 0.006). In addition, the positive NID group showed a lower rate of MACE than the negative NID group (1.2% vs. 4.3%, p = 0.021). Interestingly, the group of VSA with negative NID had poor prognosis than any other combinations (Log-rank, p < 0.0001). Although NID had a limited role in the detection of VSA defined by ergonovine provocation test, NID combined with the ergonovine provocation test has an additive prognostic role in the clinical outcomes in patients with suspected VSA.

Das mittel- bis spätawarenzeitliche Gräberfeld von Edelstal/Nemesvölgy – Ein regionales Machtzentrum im nordwestlichen Karpatenbecken?

Although well known to the community of Avar Age archaeologists, the old excavated cemetery of Edelstal (Hung. Nemesvölgy) played a quiet limited role in the discussion about social structures and societies, even for the northwestern part of the Carparthian Basin. This circumstance was also linked to the lack of publication of all graves. Based on this and the complete analyses of this cemetery the author wants to illustrate how important the burial community might have been in the social system of the Late Avar Khaganate. A special focus lies hereby on prominent items like gilded boar belts, buckles with the emperor's image or golden earrings and hair clips indicating wealth, communication, relations and links to the top social elites and presuming a high elaborated prestige chain network.

The role of non-senatorial actors in conversations and meetings

Chapter 7 posits an important hypothesis for this book: senators could not reach everybody for many reasons, so they were surrounded by a wide spectrum of people, non-senatorial actors who intervened in conversations with several degrees of agency and thus played an important role in the transmission of information and, therefore, in politics. The chapter focuses mainly on two groups: freedmen and elite women; finally, it questions the role of courtesans within this system. Elite women did not intervene in politics exclusively in their own realm; instead, their role in conversations attests to their inclusion within the broader network of conversations and the circulation of information that sustained Roman politics. Trusted liberti also played a relevant role. Even those actors with a lower degree of agency were not mere mouthpieces who parroted words that they had been taught. These actors played a limited role in institutional politics. However, they were a sine quibus non within the sphere of extra-institutional politics.

Archaeological Sites as Peripheral Destinations. Exploring Big Data on Fieldtrips for an Upcoming Response to the Tourism Crisis after the Pandemic

Archaeological heritage sites constitute the most recent addition to the tourism supply of Madrid, one of the most visited regions of Spain. In 2003, the Plan de Yacimientos Visitables (Plan of Archaeological Visitable Sites) was implemented, museumising 21 sites. However, the peripheral nature of these sites and the lack of personnel prevent strict control being carried out of who visits them, the practices of these visitors and how they rate the sites. This study proposes a systematic procedure to analyse the data gathered from Twitter and Flickr, in order to determine the most shared archaeological spaces in the years immediately preceding the pandemic, and to assess the perception that the visitors had of them. The information provided is useful for learning about the real weight that these sites have in leisure experiences (school trips, guided tours, recreation, etc.). Now that travel has been restricted due to the pandemic, we should ask whether Spain’s minor heritage is able to structure new proximity tourism routes. This is based on the hypothesis that, until now, these types of heritage have had a very limited role in recreational practices, but offer potential as “outdoor museums” in the present climate.

Scientific Realism and the Romantic Reaction Against Reason

A so-called Romantic counterpoint to the proclamation of the hegemony of reason by Enlightenment thinkers blossomed in the nineteenth century in the form of philosophies that explicitly challenged the rationalist domination of Western philosophy and the truth claims of modern science. Thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson formulated philosophies in which reason played only a limited role either in understanding human affairs or in apprehending reality. For Kierkegaard, reality transcended reason, while for Schopenhauer, human will was the ultimate reality. For Nietzsche, will was the dominant feature of humanity, which guaranteed that reason could not achieve a synoptic understanding of experience, let alone apprehend reality: reasoning could at best achieve partial perspectives on human experience. Bergson offered the most developed alternative to reason, especially modern science-based reasoning, to penetrate experience to reality.