Search results for "change"
showing 10 items of 6163 documents
Best Friends Forever? Modeling the Mechanisms of Friendship Network Formation
2020
The formation of friendships and alliances is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and likely a crucial component of the cooperative hunting and child-rearing practices that helped our early hominin ancestors survive. Research on contemporary human beings typically finds that strong-tie social networks are fairly small, and reveals a high degree of physical (e.g., age) and social-structural (e.g., educational attainment) homophily. Yet, existing work all too often underestimates, or even ignores, the importance of abstract, symbolic homophily (such as shared identities or worldviews) as a driver of friendship formation. Here we employ agent-based modeling to identify the optimal variable wei…
Internal resources as tools to increase the global competition: the Italian wine industry case
2017
Purpose The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, it identifies distinct organizational models in a sample of small and medium enterprises operating in the Sicilian wine industry; and second, it identifies the key factors enabling a superior export success. Design/methodology/approach Internal resources were analyzed theoretically in order to achieve the aims of the study. Subsequently the empirical investigation was carried out administering a questionnaire to a sample of 102 wineries in Sicily, Italy. A cluster analysis was performed in order to group these firms into homogeneous categories. Findings The findings show that success in the international market is more common among winer…
A crisis of definition: culture versus industry in odda, norway
2013
AbstractThis article addresses the influence of dominant and traditional ways of grasping the reality in social and economic processes of change. Our point of departure is how the perception of cri...
Global diversity and geography of soil fungi
2014
Fungi play integral roles in soil nutrient cycling, but the determinants of fungal diversity and biogeographic patterns of key functional groups remain poorly understood. By using pyrosequencing data from hundreds of globally distributed soil samples, we demonstrated fungal diversity that expands upon the taxonomic and molecular diversity recorded so far. Except for ectomycorrhizal symbionts, fungal functional group richness was unrelated to plant diversity and plant-to-fungus richness ratio declined exponentially towards the poles. Climatic factors, followed by edaphic and spatial variables, constituted the best predictors of fungal richness and community composition at the global scale. F…
Rethinking exchange and prices
2017
Our monetary economies of production are not based upon relative exchanges described by the standard theory. Money is neither a commodity nor a positive asset; it cannot be exchanged against physical goods and services. It follows that payments do not consist of mutual transfers of commodities. In fact, each producer working for the needs for the community produces wealth for himself. Further, transactions on any markets are absolute exchanges. One of the consequences of this is that market prices do not measure wealth; rather, they are coefficients of redistribution of products.
Plagiarism and predatory journals: A threat to scientific integrity
2018
This article presents an analysis of the concept of plagiarism in order to show the wide spectrum of manifestations that can be considered as such when committing a transgression of intellectual property, carried out with the intention of deceiving the authors’ true contribution and the originality and novelty of the information. It describes the different circumstances in which intentional plagiarism has occurred, and the damage that this misconduct causes in the credibility of the scientific system, in which authorship credit is the foundation of the academic career, of the prestige of the author in the scientific community, and the basis for financing research. Some circumstances are fav…
Critiquing and Joining Intersections of Disaster, Conflict, and Peace Research
2020
AbstractDisaster research, conflict research, and peace research have rich and deep histories, yet they do not always fully intersect or learn from each other, even when they investigate if and how disasters lead to conflict or peace. Scholarship has tended to focus on investigating causal linkages between disaster (including those associated with climate change) and conflict, and disaster diplomacy emerged as a thread of explanatory research that investigates how and why disaster-related activities do and do not influence peace and conflict. However, definitive conclusions on the disaster-conflict-peace nexus have evaded scientific consensus, in part due to conceptual, methodological, and …
Does Car Sharing Contribute to Urban Sustainability from User-Motivation Perspectives?
2021
Mobility, its current state and development perspectives in the future creates challenges with respect to sustainability, the first of which is the uncontrolled increase in greenhouse gas emissions in the last few decades, while road transport is one of the “sinners” creating long-term negative impact. The second is the dominance of car travel and car usage in the passenger transportation segment before the latest COVID-19 pandemic accelerated environmental problems. Although recent trends show new, greener patterns in consumption, there is still a relatively low share of consumers acknowledging the importance of sustainable and green preferences. This research study aims to investigate car…
Science teachers’ perceptions of the current situation of planetary emergency
2003
During the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio in 1992 educators of every subject were asked to contribute to public awareness and understanding of the problems and challenges related to our planet’s future, in order to make possible citizens’ participation in well grounded decision-making. The purpose of our contribution is to analyse what science teachers’ perceptions are, because without correct teacher perception of the planetary crisis and its possible solutions, we can’t expect their effective implication in this dimension of education.
How populist crisis rhetoric affects voters in Switzerland
2019
Right-wing populism has a long tradition in Switzerland. Nevertheless, only little is known about how populist messages in the media contribute to the success of the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and to the acceptance of the party’s anti-immigration policies. In this study, we combine data from a large media content analysis (including newspapers and TV news shows) with data from a panel-survey in order to address this research gap. Thereby we differentiate between effects driven by the content and the form of right-wing populist communication. While right-wing populist content depicts immigrants and the political elite as a threat to the Swiss people, populist style evokes the sense of a cris…