Search results for "ELECTION"

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered with Trust: Non-Resident Citizens’ Experiences of Newly Adopted Postal Voting

2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that the traditional “booth, ballot, and pen” model of voting, based on a specific location and physical presence, may not be feasible during a health crisis. This situation has highlighted the need to assess whether existing national electoral legislation includes enough instruments to ensure citizens’ safety during voting procedures, even under the conditions of a global pandemic. Such instruments, often grouped under the umbrella of voter facilitation or convenience voting, range from voting in advance and various forms of absentee voting (postal, online, and proxy voting) to assisted voting and voting at home and in hospitals and other healthcare …

Evidence for Positive Selection in the Capsid Protein-Coding Region of the Foot-and-Mouth Disease Virus (FMDV) Subjected to Experimental Passage Regi…

2001

We present sequence data from two genomic regions of foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) subjected to several experimental passage regimens. Maximum-likelihood estimates of the nonsynonymous-to-synonymous rate ratio parameter (dN/dS) suggested the action of positive selection on some antigenic sites of the FMDV capsid during some experimental passages. These antigenic sites showed an accumulation of convergent amino acid replacements during massive serial cytolytic passages and also in persistent infections of FMDV in cell culture. This accumulation was most significant at the antigenic site A (the G-H loop of capsid VP1), which includes an Arg-Gly-Asp (RGD) cellular recognition motif. Our …

Crafting the Commons: The Art of Selecting Conservative and Labour Parliamentary Candidates for the 2015 General Election

2015

International audience; Crafting the Commons: The Art of Selecting Conservative and Labour Parliamentary Candidates for the 2015 General ElectionThe selection of parliamentary candidates for the general election is one of the most crucial tasks carried out by local parties who have long enjoyed relative autonomy from party headquarters in this respect. But because the aggregate choices of individual local parties determine the composition of the parliamentary parties, the party leaderships in both parties have devised new strategies and rules allowing them to influence that choice. This is in order both to ensure both that future MPs are more in tune with the leadership line and that the so…

Brand Alliances: a Network Perspective with application to the fashion industry

2021

THE ROLE OF CAPITAL STRUCTURE IN FIRM’S ALLIANCE STRATEGY

2014

A NETWORK PERSPECTIVE ON CO-BRANDING CAMPAIGNS: EVIDENCE FROM THE FASHION INDUSTRY

Co-branding strategies have attracted increasing attention in the academic community over the last decades. Previous research privileged the analysis of co-branding campaigns by studying dyadic relationships between brands. Here, we take a network view to highlight the influence of the single companies' co-branding portfolio on partnership formation. From a theoretical perspective, the studies on co-branding analyze the process through which partner brands send a "signal" to consumers. Here, instead, we propose to look at partner selection as a process in which a signal, namely, the portfolio of previous co-branding campaigns, is sent from one brand to the others. In particular, we focus on…

Diverse partner selection with brood recombination in genetic programming

2018

The ultimate goal of learning algorithms is to find the best solution from a search space without testing each and every solution available in the search space. During the evolution process new solutions (children) are produced from existing solutions (parents), where new solutions are expected to be better than existing solutions. This paper presents a new parent selection method for the crossover operation in genetic programming. The idea is to promote crossover between two behaviourally (phenotype) diverse parents such that the probability of children being better than their parents increases. The relative phenotype strengths and weaknesses of pairs of parents are exploited to find out i…

Peer selection and influence : Students’ interest-driven socio-digital participation and friendship networks

2020

Digital technologies have been increasingly embedded in students’ everyday lives. Interest-driven socio-digital participation (ISDP) involves students’ pursuit of interests mediated by computers, social media, the internet, and mobile devices’ integrated systems.ISDPis likely to intertwine closely with young people’s social networks that has been scarcely studied quantitatively. To close this gap, the present paper investigated students’ peer selection and influence effects of the intensity of their ISDP and friendship networks. We collected two-wave data by administering a peer nomination to trace students’ friendship networks with peers and a self-reported questionnaire to examine student…

Pārliecināšana kā stratēģija politiskās runās

2020

Pārliecināšana ir viena no mijiedarbes procesos bieži lietotajām komunikācijas metodēm. Vēlēšanu kampaņu laikā kandidāti nereti savās runās izmanto retorikas rīkus, lai manipulētu ar savu mērķauditoriju un iegūtu potenciālo vēlētāju atbalstu. Šī darba mērķis ir izpētīt un pamatot, kā retorika un pārliecināšana izpaužas valodas lietojumā. Pētījuma metode ir diskursa analīze. Pētījums veikts divos līmeņos (micro un meta), pamatojoties uz amerikāņu sociologa Ārona Sikurela (Aaron Cicourel) izstrādāto satura un nozīmes analīzes struktūru. Tika analizētas un pētītas piecas prezidenta Trampa runas. Pētījumu rezultāti norādīja uz deklaratīvo un komisīvo runas aktu izmantojumu, lai radītu pragmatis…

Ecological and social impacts of photovoltaic solar power plants and optimization of their locations in northern Chile

2017

Large scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power plants are gaining popularity in Chile. Solar energy potential in northern Chile is one of the best worldwide and true deserts are considered ideal environments for solar power plant projects. Atacama Desert is one of the driest places on earth. Nevertheless, northern Chile is home for many endemic species with 40 different vegetation types. The thesis presents studies of ecological effects (I-II) and location optimization of PV solar power plants in northern Chile (III). For ecological impacts two types of PV solar power plant technologies were studied: fixed mount solar plant and solar- tracking mounts. Study units were placed below the mounts or …