Can Substitutes Reduce Future Demand for Wildlife Products: A Case Study of China’s Millennial Generation

China is one of the world’s leading consumer markets for wildlife products, yet there is little understanding of how demand will change in the future. In this study, we investigate the consumptive habits and attitudes of the millennial ‘Juilinghou’ demographic – a subset of society in China with the potential to substantially influence future demand for wildlife products. We surveyed 350 Chinese university students across Harbin and Beijing, China, and found that the intended future consumption of wildlife products was relatively low in this population but with a strong orientation towards wildlife products with medicinal properties. Seventy percent of those respondents who had used and/or intended to use wildlife products were willing to try substitutes, but this was heavily dependent on their price (cheaper) and quality. The insights gained through this survey are intended to meaningfully inform future initiatives to introduce sustainable substitutability into wildlife markets to alert future wildlife product consumers to alternative choices.

The signs and symbolic markers of sacral orientation in Mosque architecture

Mosques as a religious building for the Moslem Community have two orientations and they include the Qibla as the main and direction of the sky as the secondary. Praying is the main element of worship for Moslems and is recommended to be led towards the Qibla or upward direction. The mosque has been discovered not to have a sacred space but Qibla, mihrab, and Qibla marker walls are considered sacred. These sacred orientation signs and markers have been used and developed since the beginning but their existence and understanding have been eroded due to the influence of locals as well as development. Currently, the majority of the mosques in Indonesia have a centralized and strong orientation towards the upper direction when they are expected to have the main orientation in the form of Qibla direction. This study was, therefore, conducted to examine the anatomy of these mosques using semiotic theory by comparing the two mosques with several signs and markers of sacred orientation in the country. The results showed there are new signs and markers but the old ones are still significant in the mosques in the present time.

A Search Advantage for Horizontal Targets in Dynamic Displays

Several lines of evidence point to the existence of a visual processing advantage for horizontal over vertical orientations. We investigated whether such a horizontal advantage exists in the context of top-down visual search. Inspired by change detection studies, we created displays where a dynamic target -- a horizontal or a vertical group of five dots that changed contrast synchronously -- was embedded within a randomly flickering grid of dots. The display size (total dots) varied across trials, and the orientation of the target was constant within interleaved blocks. As expected, search was slow and inefficient. Importantly, participants were almost a second faster finding horizontal compared to vertical targets. They were also more efficient and more accurate during horizontal search. Such findings establish that the attentional templates thought to guide search for known targets can exhibit strong orientation anisotropies. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and how these might be explored in future studies.

Influence of Long-Period-Stacking Ordered Structure on the Damping Capacities and Mechanical Properties of Mg-Zn-Y-Mn As-Cast Alloys

Magnesium alloys are concerned for its mechanical properties and high damping performance. The influence of Mn toward the internal organization morphology of long-period stacking ordered (LPSO) second phase and the consistent damping performance in Mg-4.9Zn-8.9Y-xMn have been studies in this work. It has shown that the addition of Mn tends to diffuse to the LPSO interface and causes the LPSO phase to expand in the arc direction. The circular structure of LPSO can optimize the damping property of the alloy better than the structure with strong orientation, especially at the strain of 10−3 and 250 °C. With more additions of Mn, damping would have a reduction due to the dispersed fine LPSO phases and α-Mn particles. When the Mn content is higher than 1.02%, the grain is refined, and mechanical properties have been significantly improved. Mg-4.9%Zn-8.9%Y-1.33%Mn shows the best mechanical property.

Clustering Koreans’ Environmental Awareness and Attitudes into Seven Groups: Environmentalists, Dissatisfieds, Inactivators, Bystanders, Honeybees, Optimists, and Moderates

We attempted to characterize different groups of environmental awareness and attitudes and to interpret the public’s diverse interests in the environment. Responses of a five-year public survey in South Korea were clustered by k-means algorithms into the following seven groups: environmentalists, dissatisfieds, inactivators, bystanders, honeybees, optimists, and moderates. The environmentalists, who were dissatisfied with the status of the environment, had a strong orientation toward pro-environmental attitudes and practices. The inactivators revealed a discrepancy between high orientation in pro-environmental perception and attitude and weak participation in pro-environmental practices. The optimists and dissatisfieds stood distinct against each other, while the former were satisfied with the status of the environment and the environmental protection efforts of government and enterprises, the latter were not. The honeybees, who were older than others, had little knowledge of the environment but engaged in more environmental protection practices; the younger bystanders were less interested in environmental issues and practices. The moderates gave average answers to the overall questions. Cluster analysis could help in understanding the complex landscape of the public’s environmental awareness and attitudes beyond a straightforward scale from anti- to pro-environment and support the establishment of environmental policy customized to the different groups.

A search advantage for horizontal targets in dynamic displays

Several lines of evidence point to the existence of a visual processing advantage for horizontal over vertical orientations. We investigated whether such a horizontal advantage exists in the context of top-down visual search. Inspired by change detection studies, we created displays where a dynamic target – a horizontal or a vertical group of 5 dots that changed contrast synchronously – was embedded within a randomly flickering grid of dots. The display size (total dots) varied across trials and the orientation of the target was constant within interleaved blocks. As expected, search was slow and inefficient. Importantly, participants were almost a second faster finding horizontal compared to vertical targets. They were also more efficient and more accurate during horizontal search. Such findings establish that the attentional templates thought to guide search for known targets can exhibit strong orientation anisotropies. We discuss possible underlying mechanisms and how these might be explored in future studies.

New Institutional Approaches to the Study of Political Executives

The New Institutionalism—NI—has had a pervasive influence on the study of political executives over the past three decades. It draws attention to the interactions between institutions, organizations, actors, interests, preferences, ideas, resources, and decisions. As such, it captures executives as both institutions and organizations and as political governments and administrations. NI’s strong orientation towards understanding the horizontal and vertical interconnectedness of institutions and organizations makes is very well-suited to analysing Europe’s multi-level executive system. Key NI insights to the study of political executives include the interdependency between formal and informal institutional-organizational settings; the importance of resources; the porosity of institutional-organizational boundaries; the diversity of actors’ motivations; and the relevance of legacies for explaining executive developmental trajectories and executive effects. However, ‘unruly actors’ and political and policy ‘turbulence’ pose analytical challenges to core theoretical assumptions of the NI.

Social epistemology as a new paradigm for journalism and media studies

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.

The value of academics’ research-related online writing

Research productivity indicators tend to ignore online and social media writing of academics, nevertheless, many academics for instance tweet and blog. It thus seems that there is additional value for writing in these genres. This study sets out to explore what roles writing in these hybrid online genres plays in relation to academics’ research activities. Drawing on in-depth research interviews with 29 academics with various L1s from three different disciplines, the study focuses on the participants’ perceptions of tweeting and blogging, and how they value writing in these genres in relation to core research-writing genres in their fields. Besides some differences in the evaluations between the disciplines, in general the academics expressed a strong orientation towards evaluative regimes related to writing in their core genres, particularly institutional merit systems and peer review systems. At the same time, the hybrid genres seemed to gain value beyond these systems in providing opportunities for self-actualisation and communicating on one’s own terms. The findings provide important insights into the ecology of genres academics make use of in the process of knowledge production.

Nzinga Mbandi: From Story to Myth

The figure of Queen Nzinga Mbandi continues to be appreciated in fictional and/or historical narratives as a myth of postcolonial Angolan identity, allowing a continuous approach as to what concerns the modes of cultural representation. In this article, the works of Manuel Pedro Pacavira, Nzinga Mbandi (1975), Pepetela, A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) and José Eduardo Agualusa, A Rainha Ginga e de como os africanos inventaram o mundo (2014) will be analyzed, as these authors, in different moments of the recent Angolan history, look at this emblematic figure, drawing on historical information produced by Cavazzi, Cadornega or Jean Louis Castilhon, among others. The works now in analysis reiterate the mythical figure of resistance to the European invaders, which was Nzinga Mbandi, or a strong orientation towards the nationalist exaltation supported by it, an evident strategy which, by the rescue of figures and cultural practices, is defined as a means to affirm negritude.