Supply Chain Governance of Agricultural Products under Big Data Platform Based on Blockchain Technology

The present work serves to improve the stable cooperation relationship among subjects of supply chain such as enterprises, farmers, intermediary organizations, and retailers and enhance the governance and optimization of agricultural product supply chain, thus strengthening the competitiveness of China’s agricultural industry. The supply chain governance of agricultural products is taken as the research object. Initially, the stabilities of two supply chain organization modes, “company and farmer” and “company, intermediary organization and farmer,” are analyzed by static game analysis. Then, based on the above analysis and the characteristics of blockchain institutional technology, a detailed analyzation is made on the mechanism of supply chain of agricultural products governance based on blockchain technology. Finally, the functional framework of agricultural supply chain governance is designed based on the basic framework of blockchain technology, and analyzation is made on the trust mechanism and contract mechanism of agricultural supply chain governance based on blockchain technology. The research results show that problems such as information and cognitive constraints in agricultural supply chain governance cannot be completely solved only through the evolution of blockchain organizational structure and the supply of governance mechanism, and speculative behavior will still appear. Optimizing the governance of supply chain of agricultural products based on blockchain technology can realize the transformation of its governance scenario. Meanwhile, the blockchain technologies such as deintermediation, demistrust, and intelligent contract play an important role in the process of agricultural supply chain governance, which can make it change in many aspects such as organization mode, application operation, and governance mechanism. The rapid development of new generation information technologies such as blockchain, the Internet of Things, and computer technology makes it possible to comprehensively digitize economic activities such as production and transaction in the supply chain of agricultural products. The present work combines the technical logic of blockchain digital governance with the institutional logic of agricultural product supply chain governance and tries to solve the instability problems caused by imperfect organization, lack of trust, and incomplete contract in agricultural product supply chain governance with the characteristics of blockchain such as deintermediation, demistrust, and intelligent contract.

Improvised music follows human language quantitative properties to optimize music processing

Music is a cognitively demanding task. New tones override the previous tones in quick succession, with only a short window to process them. Language presents similar constraints on the brain. The cognitive constraints associated with language processing have been argued to promote the Chunk-and-Pass processing hypothesis and may influence the statistical regularities associated with word and phenome presentation that have been identified in language and are thought to allow optimal communication. If this hypothesis were true, then similar statistical properties should be identified in music as in language. By searching for real-life musical corpora, rather than relying on the artificial generation of musical stimuli, a novel approach to melodic fragmentation was developed specifically for a corpus comprised of improvisation transcriptions that represent a popular performance practice tradition from the 16th century. These improvisations were created by following a very detailed technique, which was disseminated through music tutorials and treatises across Europe during the 16th century. These music tutorials present a very precise methodology for improvisation, using a pre-defined vocabulary of melodic fragments (similar to modern jazz licks). I have found that these corpora follow two paramount, quantitative linguistics characteristics: (1) Zipf’s rank-frequency law and (2) Zipf’s abbreviation law. According to the working hypothesis, adherence to these laws ensures the optimal coding of the examined music corpora, which facilitates the improved cognitive processing for both the listener and the improviser. Although these statistical characteristics are not consciously implemented by the improviser, they might play a critical role in music processing for both the listener and the improviser.

Improvised music follows human language quantitative properties to optimize music processing

Music is a cognitively demanding task. New tones override the previous tones in quick succession, with only a short window to process them. Language presents similar constraints on the brain. The cognitive constraints associated with language processing have been argued to promote the Chunk-and-Pass processing hypothesis and may influence the statistical regularities associated with word and phenome presentation that have been identified in language and are thought to allow optimal communication. If this hypothesis were true, then similar statistical properties should be identified in music as in language. By searching for real-life musical corpora, rather than relying on the artificial generation of musical stimuli, a novel approach to melodic fragmentation was developed specifically for a corpus comprised of improvisation transcriptions that represent a popular performance practice tradition from the 16th century. These improvisations were created by following a very detailed technique, which was disseminated through music tutorials and treatises across Europe during the 16th century. These music tutorials present a very precise methodology for improvisation, using a pre-defined vocabulary of melodic fragments (similar to modern jazz licks). I have found that these corpora follow two paramount, quantitative linguistics characteristics: (1) Zipf’s rank-frequency law and (2) Zipf’s abbreviation law. According to the working hypothesis, adherence to these laws ensures the optimal coding of the examined music corpora, which facilitates the improved cognitive processing for both the listener and the improviser. Although these statistical characteristics are not consciously implemented by the improviser, they might play a critical role in music processing for both the listener and the improviser.

Promoting Climate Actions: A Cognitive-Constraints Approach

Many Americans do not view climate change as a threat requiring urgent action. Moreover, among U.S. conservatives, higher science literacy is paradoxically associated with higher anthropogenic climate-change skepticism. The present study harnessed the power of two cognitive constraints essential to belief formation and revision to design educational materials that can mitigate these problems. The key role of the coherence and causal-invariance constraints, which map onto two narrative proclivities that anthropologists have identified as universal, predicts that climate-change information embedded in scientific explanations of (indisputable) everyday observations within a coherent personal moral narrative, juxtaposed with reasoners’ typically less coherent explanations, will be more persuasive than climate-change information by itself. An experiment conducted in U.S. states with the highest level of climate skepticism demonstrates that across the political spectrum, conveying science information using materials that leverage these constraints raises both appreciation of science and willingness to take pro-climate actions.

Descriptions of improvisational thinking by expert musicians trained in different cultural traditions

Research about improvisation often focuses on one musical tradition. The current study investigated descriptions of thinking behind improvisation in different cultural traditions through interviews with advanced improvisers residing in a metropolitan area in the United States. The participants were rigorously trained in their tradition and have performance experience within it. However, as immigrants they are experienced in communicating with Western audiences and conversant in Western ways of thinking about music. Immediately after completing the improvisation, each participant listened to a recording and looked at its visual representation, while describing the underlying thinking. The visual representation showed pitch contour and note length without reference to any notational system. A thematic analysis revealed eight main themes: Licks and Conventions describe how prelearned material and convention guided creation; Reaction, Forward Looking, and Repetition & Variety outline various processes that shape creation in the moment; and Aesthetics, Communication, and Emotion provide clues to the improvisers’ motivation behind choices. Interestingly, the use of prelearned patterns appear to facilitate improvisations in all the traditions represented. This and other identified strategies appearing cross-culturally may be shaped by shared cognitive constraints. These shared strategies may also facilitate understanding as educators broaden their curricula to multiple musical traditions.

If not party mandates, then what? The determinants of legislative agendas

What determines changes in the focus of laws over time? Before turning to the impact of democratic mandates, this chapter examines alternative explanations focusing on globalization, the rise of regulatory politics and its effects on redistribution; social change and the emergence of post-materialism; friction and cognitive constraints resulting in punctuated equilibrium patterns of attention; and the hypothesis of a broadening of policy agendas leading governments to deal with a growing number of issues. Panel negative binomial regressions of data collected by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) on legislative priorities in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, confirm that further explanations are needed. Among the different explanations that we explore, only globalization seems to have some impact on legislative agendas in terms of the relative weight of regulatory and redistributive policies. These first tests set the landscape and provide guidance as to potential covariates to take into account when analysing the role of parties and party competition in the subsequent chapters.

Cognitive constraints on advance planning of sentence intonation

Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.

A Bibliometric Analysis of Behavioral Finance and Behavioral Accounting

This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of relevant publications in the field of behavioral finance and behavioral accounting. The analysis shows that the emerging themes of research in recent years in behavioral finance is on investors’ sentiment, social media, investors’ attention, and financial literacy. In the field of behavioral accounting, biases such as  overconfidence, framing effects or cognitive constraints on information processing, have been explored in greater detail. Other than cognitive biases, this field includes studies such as behavioral tax, organizational ecology, and performance evaluative style of organization, among others. Interestingly, our analysis suggests that research in behavioral accounting is comparatively underdeveloped than research in behavioral finance. This bibliometric analysis has been extended by network analysis using, “Visualization of similarities, (VOS) viewer” software. Using the themes generated here the direction for future scope of research work has been discussed.

Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species

Voice modulatory cues such as variations in fundamental frequency, duration and pauses are key factors for structuring vocal signals in human speech and vocal communication in other tetrapods. Voice modulation physiology is highly similar in humans and other tetrapods due to shared ancestry and shared functional pressures for efficient communication. This has led to similarly structured vocalizations across humans and other tetrapods. Nonetheless, in their details, structural characteristics may vary across species and languages. Because data concerning voice modulation in non-human tetrapod vocal production and especially perception are relatively scarce compared to human vocal production and perception, this review focuses on voice modulatory cues used for speech segmentation across human languages, highlighting comparative data where available. Cues that are used similarly across many languages may help indicate which cues may result from physiological or basic cognitive constraints, and which cues may be employed more flexibly and are shaped by cultural evolution. This suggests promising candidates for future investigation of cues to structure in non-human tetrapod vocalizations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Voice modulation: from origin and mechanism to social impact (Part I)’.

The Role of Human Fallibility in Psychological Research: A Survey of Mistakes in Data Management

Errors are an inevitable consequence of human fallibility, and researchers are no exception. Most researchers can recall major frustrations or serious time delays due to human errors while collecting, analyzing, or reporting data. The present study is an exploration of mistakes made during the data-management process in psychological research. We surveyed 488 researchers regarding the type, frequency, seriousness, and outcome of mistakes that have occurred in their research team during the last 5 years. The majority of respondents suggested that mistakes occurred with very low or low frequency. Most respondents reported that the most frequent mistakes led to insignificant or minor consequences, such as time loss or frustration. The most serious mistakes caused insignificant or minor consequences for about a third of respondents, moderate consequences for almost half of respondents, and major or extreme consequences for about one fifth of respondents. The most frequently reported types of mistakes were ambiguous naming/defining of data, version control error, and wrong data processing/analysis. Most mistakes were reportedly due to poor project preparation or management and/or personal difficulties (physical or cognitive constraints). With these initial exploratory findings, we do not aim to provide a description representative for psychological scientists but, rather, to lay the groundwork for a systematic investigation of human fallibility in research data management and the development of solutions to reduce errors and mitigate their impact.