Motivation, Perception, and Engagement

Mobile news as the focal concept of study is explicated as a multidimensional construct. This chapter elaborates on the attributes of mobile media and implications of these attributes for mobile news consumption. The chapter then presents the analytical framework with five dependent variables of mobile news consumption and predictors of the consumption at individual and societal levels. Finally, to achieve a systematic study of mobile news consumption in Asia, a comparative model is proposed; it highlights the similarities of the four Asian cities with different social political systems for cross-societal comparisons.

Special feature: measuring components of ecological resilience in long-term ecological datasets

Ecological resilience has become a focal concept in ecosystem management. Palaeoecological records (i.e. the sub-fossil remains preserved in sediments) are useful archives to address ecological resilience since they can be used to reconstruct long-term temporal variations in ecosystem properties. The special feature presented here includes nine new papers from members and associates of the PAGES EcoRe3 community. The papers build on previous work in palaeoecology to investigate, identify and compare components of ecosystem resilience on centennial to millennial timescales. There are four key messages that can be summarized from the findings of papers within the special feature: (i) multi-proxy studies reveal insights into the presence and mechanisms of alternative states; (ii) transitions between alternative states may not necessarily be abrupt; (iii) components of ecological resilience can be identified in long-term ecological data and (iv) the palaeoecological record can also provide insights into factors influencing the resilience of ecosystem functioning. Overall, these papers demonstrate the importance of using long-term ecological records for addressing questions related to the theoretical framework provided by ecological resilience.

Explicating Ecoculture

Ecoculture is an emerging focal concept reflecting the inextricability of nature and culture. It is applicable to and employed in many disciplines, yet it is rarely defined, cited, or interrogated, causing potential inconsistencies in scholarly operationalization. In the present analysis, I use Steven H. Chaffee’s method of explication to develop an analytical review of ecoculture. I explore the primitive terms—ecology and culture—before assessing the scholarly use of the derived, compound term. I trace ecoculture across multiple disciplines, synthesizing operationalizations into one transdisciplinary theoretical framework. I find that ecoculture connotes interconnectedness and place relations, and has been critically operationalized in ways that problematize dominant human-centered ideologies, making it a productive scholarly frame that emphasizes the relationships between humans, their cultures, and their ecologies.

Concept Mover’s Distance: Measuring Concept Engagement in Texts via Word Embeddings

We propose a method for measuring a text's engagement with a focal concept using distributional representations of the meaning of words. More specically, this measure relies on Word Mover's Distance, which uses word embeddings to determine similarities between two documents. In our approach, which we call Concept Mover's Distance, a document is measured by the minimum distance the words in the document need to travel to arrive at the position of a "pseudo document" consisting of only words denoting a focal concept. This approach captures the prototypical structure of concepts, is fairly robust to pruning sparse terms as well as variation in text lengths within a corpus, and when used with pre-trained embeddings, can be used even when terms denoting concepts are absent from corpora and can be applied to bag-of-words datasets. We close by outlining some limitations of the proposed method as well as opportunities for future research.

Myths, projections, and overextensions: The conceptual landscape of Thomas Szasz

This chapter distinguishes among myths, projections, and overextensions as they occur within the practice of psychiatry—adding to the conceptual complexity of Szasz’s own analyses and reflecting on how his focal concept of autonomy may itself fall prey to myth, projection, or overextension. Szasz offers detailed explications of his use of the term “myth,” yet many questions remain regarding his application of that term and its relevance to psychiatry. How is a metaphor “literalized,” and when is this problematic? What terms, in addition to the term “mental illness,” serve to support the myths of psychiatry? How do myths relate to the projections and overextensions that can also be found in the language and practice of psychiatry? With these distinctions in mind, it is appropriate to ask whether Szasz’s own reliance on the notion of autonomous agency might itself qualify as a myth, a projection, or an overextension.

An Inquiry-Based Field & Laboratory Investigation of Leaf Decay: A Critical Aquatic Ecosystem Function

Effective investigations incorporate all four features of constructivist teaching. This high school or college-level field investigation guides teachers (and students) through the stages of inquiry. The focal concept is ecosystem function, specifically leaf decay rates in aquatic environments. Teachers elicit their students' prior knowledge and use it to generate discussion on variables that influence decay rates. Students engage in designing and conducting experiments. The learning cycle is continued when students apply their new knowledge and receive feedback, and completed when students return to their initial conceptions of leaf decay and reflect on the knowledge they gained through scientific experimentation.

Simple Feature Frequency versus Feature Validity Models of Formation of Prototypes

The typicality of a concept instance is related to the frequency with which its constituent features occur among all instances of the focal concept and possibly of other contrasting concepts. According to a simple frequency model, the prototype consists of the features that have occurred most often among instances of the focal concept. But according to a validity model, the prototype has the features that have occurred frequently among focal instances and, at the same time, infrequently among instances of contrast categories. By this account, the extent to which features overlap among focal and contrast instances is important in prototype formation. Here the feature frequencies among focal instances and the degree to which these features overlapped with contrast instances were manipulated. Twenty undergraduate college students first studied instances of the contrast category and then instances of the focal category. Next, they provided typicality ratings, frequency estimates of whole stimuli, and frequency estimates of features. All three measures supported the prediction of a simple frequency model of prototype formation.