La gènesi dels somatismes: accions humanes fossilitzades

Somatic idioms – those including a part of the body – have been traditionally studied from a synchronic perspective, yielding different explanations for their semantic value. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the diachronic origin of idiomatic meaning, by illustrating the process of phraseologization from a historical, usage-based perspective. As the first step, we will reflect on the general nature of phraseological meaning, and then on the semantic particularities of somatic idioms. Secondly, we will carryout a corpus-based diachronic analysis of the Catalan idiom tapar-se el nas (to hold one’s nose) within the framework of the Invited Inference Theory of Semantic Change. The different stages of the process will be exemplified and discussed. As a result, a new notion of somatic idioms as frozen human actions will be presented.

Stimulus-Response Conflict Tasks and Their Use in Clinical Psychology

This article reviews the historical usage of the concept of ‘conflict’ in psychology and delineates the design and development of three basic conflict tasks (Stroop, Flanker, Stop Signal). Afterwards, important theoretical concepts to account for conflict processing are introduced. In the second part, the usage of these tasks in clinical psychology is considered. The article closes with some reflections regarding factors that may have been hitherto largely neglected in this respect.

Loanwords and Expressions Denoting Hues in Old Hungarian

The study presents loanwords and expressions referring to hues in the old Hungarian language. It relays mostly on data collected from the Historical Dictionary of Hungarian Language from Transylvania (SzT.), and it also uses data from the Hungarian Etymological Dictionary (TESz.). A number of studies have been written about the Hungarian colour terms presenting usage and distribution, yet only few of them dealt with their etymology and their historical usage. The present paper focuses on the etymology of terms denoting hues, and aims to present reasons for naming and using these loan colour terms. The study investigates whether these terms appearing in old Transylvanian texts were loanwords, loan expressions or they were simply used as a result of linguistic interference.

English similarity predicates construe particular dimensions of similarity

This paper investigates the ways English speakers employ the predicates like, similar, and resemble to express similarity in natural speech. A corpus of 450 instances was created and manually coded, and an acceptability rating experiment was conducted. Converging evidence from the corpus analysis and the experiment shows that the three predicates occur with the same range of uses, but differ in their propensities to occur with particular dimensions of similarity. Specifically, like is associated with metaphorical comparisons, and resemble is associated with visual comparisons. A synchronic account of these findings is developed, based on a distinction between conventionally encoded meaning and prototypical usage. A diachronic account is also proposed, highlighting the commonality in the predicates’ conceptual origins and the differences in their historical usage. This work has theoretical and methodological implications for the study of similarity. In particular, it raises the possibility that previous findings may be distorted due to a reliance on certain similarity predicates in the phrasing of experimental instructions and stimuli. It also ties into debates on synonymy, suggesting a shift in attention from a distinction between denotational and associative meaning, to the aforementioned distinction between conventional and prototypical meaning.

Convalescent Plasma Therapy for COVID-19: State of the Art

SUMMARY Convalescent plasma (CP) therapy has been used since the early 1900s to treat emerging infectious diseases; its efficacy was later associated with the evidence that polyclonal neutralizing antibodies can reduce the duration of viremia. Recent large outbreaks of viral diseases for which effective antivirals or vaccines are still lacking has renewed the interest in CP as a life-saving treatment. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has led to the scaling up of CP therapy to unprecedented levels. Compared with historical usage, pathogen reduction technologies have now added an extra layer of safety to the use of CP, and new manufacturing approaches are being explored. This review summarizes historical settings of application, with a focus on betacoronaviruses, and surveys current approaches for donor selection and CP collection, pooling technologies, pathogen inactivation systems, and banking of CP. We additionally list the ongoing registered clinical trials for CP throughout the world and discuss the trial results published thus far.

How to appreciate, use, and choose Scientific Colour Maps

<p>The visual representation of data is at the heart of science. One of the choices faced by the scientist in representing data is the decision regarding colours. However, due to historical usage and default colour palettes on visualisation software, colour maps that distort data through uneven colour gradients are still commonly used today. In fact, the most-used colour map in presentations at the EGU General Assembly in 2018 - including Geodynamics sessions - was the one colour map that is most widely known to distort the data and misguide readers (see https://betterfigures.org/2018/04/16/how-many-rainbows-at-egu-2018/).</p><p>Here, we present the work that has been accomplished, the readily available solution, and present a how-to guide to ‚Scientific Colour Maps’ (Crameri 2018, Zenodo; Crameri et al. (In Review)), a methodology that prevents data distortion, offers intuitive colouring, and is accessible for people with colour-vision deficiencies.</p><p>Crameri, F. (2018). Scientific colour-maps. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1243862<br>Crameri, F., Shephard, G.E. Heron, P.J. Advantage, availability, and application of Scientific Colour Maps. (In Review with Nature Communications)</p>

E-Memory Choice Architecture

Twitter archiving systems have been developed to preserve users' tweets. The available methods of organizing tweets for curation include the hashtag, user ID, and keywords. These can be viewed as memory encoding symbols supporting future retrieval of users' social media memories. As Twitter has become a global social media platform, online Twitter archiving systems have transformed from an open platform for archiving tweets to an integrated service managing multiple accounts across platforms. With the changing business models of Twitter archiving systems, usage data has become unavailable publicly. This study collected historical usage data from the API of an online Twitter archiving system, TwapperKeeper, before its acquisition by Hootsuite in September 2011. The valuable system usage data allowed this study to examine the tweet archiving preferences of early Twitter adopters. By mapping adoption-diffusion and use-diffusion models into the web information architecture of the online archiving system, this study analyzed user choice architecture through the system function use.

Story, Storyteller, and Storytelling

Nothing has had so much impact on our daily lives in the past two decades as the revolution in technologies of communication. Across the resulting debate in industry and academia the notion of ‘storytelling’ has come into prominence. It is a term in need of conceptual placement and theoretical framing. Publishers may feel that they have first call on storytelling as primary producers of the written text. When oral traditions documented by scribes gave way to authorship of the written text, the dissemination of knowledge became by way of print. But since the invention and adoption of other media—film, radio, internet, web, book apps, interactive mobile media—storytelling has been the exclusive domain of none. This paper provides a definition of ‘story’, ‘storytelling’, and ‘storyteller’ based on contemporary examples and historical usage, and traces how the affordances of new technologies have opened up pathways in storytelling by looking at examples from the origins of media convergence in the early 20th century to today.

Carbon copy

Purpose By juxtaposing fatal colliery explosions in early twentieth-century Britain and in 2010 at Pike River, New Zealand, this paper aims to investigate the generalizability of the mock bureaucracy concept to underground coal mining disasters. Design/methodology/approach The main source is published official accident inquiries; a methodological reflection justifies the use of these materials. Findings Mock bureaucracies existed in the British underground coal mining milieu from the time when safety rules were first formulated in that industry context. As for Pike River, it is an exemplary case. The development in 1970s Britain of a new approach to safety management (the Robens system), and its subsequent export to New Zealand, means that a contemporary coal mine under financial duress, such as Pike River, is a prime site for mock bureaucracy to flourish. Originality/value Although the concept of mock bureaucracy has been applied to an explosion in an underground coal mine before, this is the first paper to explore the concept’s historical usage and generalizability in explaining the environing context of such explosions.