Search results for "ELECTION"

Fluctuating asymmetry and sexual performance in the drumming wolf spider Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata

2003

Recently, there has been much interest in estimating fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of morphological traits as a short-cut measure of individual quality. FA deals with small differences around the symmetry value of zero. Thus, measurement error is often relatively large. However, repeated measurements. and large sample sizes allow reliable estimates of FA that can be corrected for errors. The purpose of this study was two-fold: at the biological level, we examined with a large sample size (N = 804) whether pedipalp FA could be used as a short-cut measure, of individual quality in the wolf spider Hygrolycosa rubrofasciata. This was done by estimating how strongly FA correlates with male sexual p…

Looking at social motivation to assess meat producing poultry adaptation to rearing conditions

2013

International audience

Friends, academic achievement, and school engagement during adolescence : A social network approach to peer influence and selection effects

2018

Abstract Peers become increasingly important socializing agents for academic behaviors and attitudes during adolescence. This study investigated peer influence and selection effects on adolescents' emotional (i.e., flow in schoolwork, school burnout, school value), cognitive (i.e., school effort), and behavioral (i.e., truancy) engagement in school. A social network approach was used to examine students of post-comprehensive education in Finland (N = 1419; mean age = 16). Students were asked to nominate peers to generate peer networks and to describe their own school engagement at two time points (one year apart). Network analyses revealed that the degree to which peer influence and selecti…

Intra- and inter-specific social selection of vigilance and defense phenotypes in breeding colonies of lesser kestrels and jackdaws

2012

The Institutions of Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Malaysia: A Critical Review of the Development Agendas Under the Regimes of Mahathir, Abdullah, an…

2018

After toppling the 61-year dominant Barisan Nasional through a historic election victory in May 2018, expectations are high for the new ruling government led by Mahathir Mohamad and the Pakatan Harapan to fulfil their promises for socio-economic reforms and regime change in Malaysia. But what have been the institutions of the prevailing regime that need to be reformed and changed? This article offers a critical review of the evolving development agendas since the 1990s of the successive governments of Mahathir Mohamad, Abdullah Badawi, and Najib Razak, each couched in different catchphrases: Wawasan 2020, Islam Hadhari, and 1Malaysia. A close reading of these programs suggests that their su…

Biological adaptation in light of the Lewontin–Williams (a)symmetry

2022

Neo-Darwinism characterises biological adaptation as a one-sided process, in which organisms adapt to their environment but not vice versa. This asymmetric relationship – here called Williams’ asymmetry – is called into question by Niche Construction Theory, which emphasises that organisms and their environments often mutually affect each other. Here we clarify that Williams’ asymmetry is specifically concerned with (quasi-) directed modifications towards phenotypes that increase individual fitness. This directedness – which drives the adaptive fit between organism and environment – entails far more than the mere presence of cause-effect relationships. We argue that difficulties with invoki…

Signal processing techniques for robust sound event recognition

2019

The computational analysis of acoustic scenes is today a topic of major interest, with a growing community focused on designing machines capable of identifying and understanding the sounds produced in our environment, similar to how humans perform this task. Although these domains have not reached the industrial popularity of other related audio domains, such as speech recognition or music analysis, applications designed to identify the occurrence of sounds in a given scenario are rapidly increasing. These applications are usually limited to a set of sound classes, which must be defined beforehand. In order to train sound classification models, representative sets of sound events are record…

Intelligent solutions for real-life data-driven applications

2017

The subject of this thesis belongs to the topic of machine learning or, specifically, to the development of advanced methods for regression analysis, clustering, and anomaly detection. Industry is constantly seeking improved production practices and minimized production time and costs. In connection to this, several industrial case studies are presented in which mathematical models for predicting paper quality were proposed. The most important variables for the prediction models are selected based on information-theoretic measures and regression trees approach. The rest of the original papers are devoted to unsupervised machine learning. The main focus is developing advanced spectral cluster…

Conception de documents numériques : Parcours méthodologique

2009

There is a strong social demand for studies of digital document. Yet our models of society and education are struggling to integrate issues related to these types of documents. However, the subject is less than half a century old, and so it is hardly surprising that the writing and training practices are just being developed. Like the book, the digital document involves many different skills and techniques in its development. The list of jobs tends to grow steadily: ergonomists, referencing specialists, information architects, programmers, designers, integrators ... It is therefore difficult to have a global view on all this know-how and the related methodologies. This special edition seeks…

Multiple mini-interviews as a selection tool for initial teacher education admissions

2022

This study investigates the reliability of multiple mini interviews (MMIs) to select students for classroom and special education teacher programs (n = 418) using intraclass correlations and cross-classified multilevel modeling. The results indicated mostly small effects of clustering of applicants to different interviewers and five-station circuits. The largest variance components in the MMI total score were for applicants (63.3%) and measurement error (20.6%), while the variance component for the interviewer was relatively small (11.6–14.4%). The applicants' and interviewers' perceptions were positive. This study provides evidence for the use of MMIs as a reliable tool for initial teacher…