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The spatial distribution of maize plants influences the number of kernels set per plant by modifying the radiation environment during the critical period for kernel number determination. A two-year field experiment was conducted in Sardinia to explore whether, in a Mediterranean environment, a reduction in row distance can have a positive effect on grain yield of full-season maize hybrids and, if it does, whether this effect is also affected by plant density. Treatments were a factorial combination of three plant densities (6, 8 and 10 plants/m2) and two row spacings (35 and 70 cm). Grain yield and grain number benefited from a reduction in row distance from the canonical 70 cm to 35 cm irrespective of plant density and yield level (14.7 t/ha on average in 2021, 9.9 t/ha in 2022 vs 13.7 and 8.8 t/ha with canonical row distance). Row distance did not affect either the coefficient of extinction of radiation or the intercepted photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) during the critical period for grain number determination. The higher grain number per unit area at the smaller row distance translated into a greater grain yield, which cannot solely be attributed to radiation interception and plant growth rate during the period of kernel number determination. Halving the common row distance is a valuable management option for full-season hybrids grown in Mediterranean environments without nitrogen and water limitations as it seems capable of increasing grain yield via an increase in kernel number per unit area, regardless of plant density and yield level.
One species-general life history (LH) principle posits that challenging childhood environments are coupled with a fast or faster LH strategy and associated behaviors, while secure and stable childhood environments foster behaviors conducive to a slow or slower LH strategy. This coupling between environments and LH strategies is based on the assumption that individuals’ internal traits and states are independent of their external surroundings. In reality, individuals respond to external environmental conditions in alignment with their intrinsic vitality, encompassing both physical and mental states. The present study investigated attachment as an internal mental state, examining its role in mediating and moderating the association between external environmental adversity and fast LH strategies. A sample of 1169 adolescents (51% girls) from 9 countries was tracked over 10 years, starting from age 8. The results confirm both mediation and moderation and, for moderation, secure attachment nullified and insecure attachment maintained the environment-LH coupling. These findings suggest that attachment could act as an internal regulator, disrupting the contingent coupling between environmental adversity and a faster pace of life, consequently decelerating human LH.
This paper addresses the underexplored domain of hydraulic energy harvesters (HEH). Through a literature review, existing designs are identified, aiding in the categorisation of energy conversion technologies and fluid-mechanical interfaces. Recognizing a lack of standardized approaches to testing HEH, the paper proposes a re-configurable test platform. The platform, accommodating diverse configurations, operates at high pressures, aligns with existing hydraulic setups, and functions in static or dynamic modes. This tool aims to assist researchers further explore the implementation of HEHs.
It is unclear how much adolescents’ lives were disrupted throughout the COVID-19 pandemic or what risk factors predicted such disruption. To answer these questions, 1,080 adolescents in 9 nations were surveyed 5 times from March 2020 to July 2022. Rates of adolescent COVID-19 life disruption were stable and high. Adolescents who, compared to their peers, lived in nations with higher national COVID-19 death rates, lived in nations with less stringent COVID-19 mitigation strategies, had less confidence in their government’s response to COVID-19, complied at higher rates with COVID-19 control measures, experienced the death of someone they knew due to COVID-19, or experienced more internalizing, externalizing, and smoking problems reported more life disruption due to COVID-19 during part or all of the pandemic. Additionally, when, compared to their typical levels of functioning, adolescents experienced spikes in national death rates, experienced less stringent COVID-19 mitigation measures, experienced less confidence in government response to the COVID-19 pandemic, complied at higher rates with COVID-19 control measures, experienced more internalizing problems, or smoked more at various periods during the pandemic, they also experienced more COVID-19 life disruption. Collectively, these findings provide new insights that policymakers can use to prevent the disruption of adolescents’ lives in future pandemics.
Additive manufacturing (AM) has transformed job shop production and catalysed the growth of Makerspaces, FabLabs, Hackspaces, and Repair Cafés. AM has enabled the handling and manufacturing of a wide variety of components, and its accessibility has enabled more individuals to make. While smaller than their production-scale counterparts, the objectives of minimizing technician overhead, capital expenditure, and job response time remain the same. The typical First-Come First-Serve (FCFS) operating model, while functional, is not necessarily the most efficient and makes responding to a-typical or urgent demand profiles difficult. This article reports a study that investigated how AM machines configured with Minimally Intelligent agents can support production in these environments. An agent-based model that simulated 5, 10, 15, and 20 AM machines operating a 9 am−5 pm pattern and experiencing a diverse non-repeating demand profile was developed. Machines were configured with minimal intelligence – FCFS, First-Response First-Serve (FRFS), Longest Print Time (LPT), Shortest Print Time (SPT), and Random Selection logics – that governed the selection of jobs from the job pool. A full factorial simulation totaling 15,629 configurations was run until convergence to a ranked list of production performance – min Job Time-in-System. Performance changed as much as 200%. Performant configurations featured a variety of logics, while the least performant were dominated by FCFS and LPT. All FCFS (a proxy for today’s operations) was one of the least performant configurations. The results provide an optimal set of logics and performance bands that can be used to justify capital expenditure and AM operations in Makerspaces.
A recent article announced the undertaking of a project aimed at gathering the corpus of the monumental inscriptions commissioned by the Islamic dynasties of Central Asian Turkic origin, over the fourth/tenth to seventh/thirteenth centuries. During this period, on both monuments and artefacts, commissioners and artisans are known to have focused increasing attention on the inscriptions, as testified by the evident and significant changes in the structures of texts, explications of hierarchies of power, protocols of authorities, and in the choices of language and styles of writing. Over the years, many of these inscriptions have received significant scholarly attention. Others, however, especially those found in archaeological contexts and in incomplete or fragmentary state, still require indepth analysis, aimed at detecting clues that can serve in dating and contextualisation. While engaged in studying those inscriptions of the rich Ghaznavid epigraphic corpus dating from the fifth/eleventh century, the author viewed it as necessary to organise systematically the contemporary Seljuq production, in the conviction that comparative analysis of these two corpora and their distinctive features would reveal useful aspects, gradually improving knowledge and opening to still further exploration. This short contribution presents the oldest group of royal inscriptions of the Great Seljuqs, and the most substantial as currently known: those bearing the names of the brothers Malikshāh (r. 465–85/1073–92) and Tutush (r. 471–88/1078–95). These amount to about twenty inscriptions, many of them intact and in good condition, made in just over ten years (475/1082–3 to 488/1095) and coming from different parts of the territories they once controlled. Our first aim has been to review the published data and organise them in chronological order of the inscriptions – regardless of the territorial origin – focusing mainly on the protocols of the two rulers and the most important palaeographical aspects.
Four inscriptions from the Umayyad Great Mosque in Damascus, dating to 475/1082–3, are the earliest recognised for the Seljuq rulers. Carried out ten years after Malikshāh's rise to power, these constitute an epigraphic programme aimed at celebrating a project of restoration and reconstruction of the building. They are executed on four rectangular marble slabs (nos. 1–4), originally placed on the pillars supporting the dome at the centre of the prayer hall transept.
This paper provides an overview and appraisal of the International Design Engineering Annual (IDEA) challenge - a virtually hosted design hackathon run with the aim of generating a design research dataset that can provide insights into design activities at virtually hosted hackathons. The resulting dataset consists of 200+ prototypes with over 1300 connections providing insights into the products, processes and people involved in the design process. The paper also provides recommendations for future deployments of virtual hackathons for design research.
Prototyping is a well-established and valued design process activity. However, capturing prototypes and the tacit knowledge that led to and was gained from their creation is a challenge. Beyond that, questions remain on how best to utilise that captured data. This paper looks at how one can exploit and generate insights from data that has been captured, specifically looking at graph databases, the network analysis techniques they permit and the differing fidelities of visualisation and interactivity that they enable.
The act of prototyping is a key element of the design process. However, capturing information on how prototypes evolve and influence one another is a complex problem. This paper presents an iterative evolution to a prototyping capture platform, termed Pro2Booth, designed to address the shortcomings encountered in previous systems. The Pro2Booth hardware and online software described in this paper provide a new baseline for future innovation and exploration of the prototype capture process.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents (N = 1,330; Mages = 15 and 16; 50% female), mothers, and fathers from nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, United States) reported on adolescents’ internalizing and externalizing problems, adolescents completed a lab-based task to assess tendency for risk-taking, and adolescents reported on their well-being. During the pandemic, participants (Mage = 20) reported on changes in their internalizing, externalizing, and substance use compared to before the pandemic. Across countries, adolescents’ internalizing problems pre-pandemic predicted increased internalizing during the pandemic, and poorer well-being pre-pandemic predicted increased externalizing and substance use during the pandemic. Other relations varied across countries, and some were moderated by confidence in the government’s handling of the pandemic, gender, and parents’ education.
We consider a system of reaction–diffusion equations including chemotaxis terms and coming out of the modelling of multiple sclerosis. The global existence of strong solutions to this system in any dimension is proved, and it is also shown that the solution is bounded uniformly in time. Finally, a nonlinear stability result is obtained when the chemotaxis term is not too big. We also perform numerical simulations to show the appearance of Turing patterns when the chemotaxis term is large.
This chapter uses evidence from the Parenting across Cultures (PAC) project to illustrate ways in which longitudinal data can help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/). The chapter begins by providing an overview of the research questions that have guided PAC as well as a description of the participants, procedures and measures. Next, empirical findings from PAC are summarized to illustrate implications for six specific SDGs. Then the chapter describes how longitudinal data offer advantages over cross-sectional data in operationalizing SDG targets and implementing the SDGs. Finally, limitations, future research directions and conclusions are provided.
PAC was developed in response to concerns that understanding of parenting and child development was biased by the predominant focus in the literature on studying families in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies and that findings in such countries may not generalize well to more diverse populations around the world (Henrich et al, 2010). In an analysis of the sample characteristics in the most influential journals in six subdisciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007, 96% of research participants were from Western industrialized countries, and 68% were from the United States alone (Arnett, 2008), which means that 96% of research participants in these psychological studies were from countries with only 12% of the world's population (Henrich et al, 2010). When basic science research is limited to WEIRD countries, knowledge of human development becomes defined by a set of experiences that may not be widely shared in different cultural contexts, so studying parenting and child development in a wide range of diverse cultural contexts is important to understand development more fully.
PAC has been conceptualized and funded as a consecutive series of three five-year grants, each covering a different developmental period and guided by different research questions. In the first project period, participants were aged 8 to 12. The main research questions focused on cultural differences in links between discipline and child adjustment, warmth as a moderator of links between harsh discipline and child outcomes, and cognitive and emotional mediators of effects of harsh discipline on children's aggression and anxiety. In the second period, target participants were 13 to 17 years old.
Spatial Augmented Reality (SAR) differs from other forms of AR by allowing the projection of digital images onto a model. This allows the AR to be more tangible and for interaction to be more realistic. The scale of the model plays a role in the realism but may be constrained by technical factors. This study attempts to understand the influence scale has on a design session by analysing the concept generation process, the ease of designing and the design behaviour. Understanding how these factors are influenced by the model scale betters the understanding of how SAR can influence design.
This study used data from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States; N = 1,315) to investigate bidirectional associations between parental warmth and control, and child externalizing and internalizing behaviors. In addition, the extent to which these associations held across mothers and fathers and across cultures with differing normative levels of parent warmth and control were examined. Mothers, fathers, and children completed measures when children were ages 8 to 13. Multiple-group autoregressive cross-lagged structural equation models revealed that evocative child-driven effects of externalizing and internalizing behavior on warmth and control are ubiquitous across development, cultures, mothers, and fathers. Results also reveal that parenting effects on child externalizing and internalizing behaviors, though rarer than child effects, extend into adolescence when examined separately in mothers and fathers. Father-based parent effects were more frequent than mother effects. Most parent- and child-driven effects appear to emerge consistently across cultures. The rare culture-specific parenting effects suggested that occasionally the effects of parenting behaviors that run counter to cultural norms may be delayed in rendering their protective effect against deleterious child outcomes.
SAR provides an unobtrusive implementation of AR and enables multiple stakeholders to observe and interact with an augmented physical model. This is synonymous with co-design activities and hence, there is a potential for SAR to have a significant impact in the way design teams may set-up and run their co-design activities in the future. Whilst there are a growing number of studies which apply SAR to design activities, few studies exist that examine a particular element of a design activity in a controlled manner. This paper will begin to fill this gap through the controlled study of SAR and its effects on the communication between participants of a co-design activity. To do so the paper compares a controlled design session, using more traditional methods of design representations (3D models on a screen), to sessions run using SAR. The sessions are then analysed to gather information on the gestures used by the participants as well as the overall efficiency of the participants at completing the set design task. The paper concludes that the data gathered tentatively supports a link between the use of SAR and improved communication between design session participants.
Using multilevel models, we examined mother-, father-, and child-reported (N = 1,336 families) externalizing behavior problem trajectories from age 7 to 14 in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States). The intercept and slope of children's externalizing behavior trajectories varied both across individuals within culture and across cultures, and the variance was larger at the individual level than at the culture level. Mothers’ and children's endorsement of aggression as well as mothers’ authoritarian attitudes predicted higher age 8 intercepts of child externalizing behaviors. Furthermore, prediction from individual-level endorsement of aggression and authoritarian attitudes to more child externalizing behaviors was augmented by prediction from cultural-level endorsement of aggression and authoritarian attitudes, respectively. Cultures in which father-reported endorsement of aggression was higher and both mother- and father-reported authoritarian attitudes were higher also reported more child externalizing behavior problems at age 8. Among fathers, greater attributions regarding uncontrollable success in caregiving situations were associated with steeper declines in externalizing over time. Understanding cultural-level as well as individual-level correlates of children's externalizing behavior offers potential insights into prevention and intervention efforts that can be more effectively targeted at individual children and parents as well as targeted at changing cultural norms that increase the risk of children's and adolescents’ externalizing behavior.
Using data from 1,177 families in eight countries (Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States), we tested a conceptual model of direct effects of childhood family adversity on subsequent externalizing behaviors as well as indirect effects through psychological mediators. When children were 9 years old, mothers and fathers reported on financial difficulties and their use of corporal punishment, and children reported perceptions of their parents’ rejection. When children were 10 years old, they completed a computerized battery of tasks assessing reward sensitivity and impulse control and responded to questions about hypothetical social provocations to assess their hostile attributions and proclivity for aggressive responding. When children were 12 years old, they reported on their externalizing behavior. Multigroup structural equation models revealed that across all eight countries, childhood family adversity had direct effects on externalizing behaviors 3 years later, and childhood family adversity had indirect effects on externalizing behavior through psychological mediators. The findings suggest ways in which family-level adversity poses risk for children's subsequent development of problems at psychological and behavioral levels, situated within diverse cultural contexts.
These 12 essays reanimate the dialogue between interdisciplinary scholars and practicing artists that originally gave birth to visual culture as a field of study. A new translation of Nancy’s essay, 'The Image: Mimesis and Methexis', reveals how Nancy’s work informs, challenges and inspires our encounters with visual culture.
In many applications, the Gaussian convolution is approximately computed by means of recursive filters, with a significant improvement of computational efficiency. We are interested in theoretical and numerical issues related to such an use of recursive filters in a three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3Dvar) scheme as it appears in the software OceanVar. In that context, the main numerical problem consists in solving large linear systems with high efficiency, so that an iterative solver, namely the conjugate gradient method, is equipped with a recursive filter in order to compute matrix-vector multiplications that in fact are Gaussian convolutions. Here we present an error analysis that gives effective bounds for the perturbation on the solution of such linear systems, when is computed by means of recursive filters. We first prove that such a solution can be seen as the exact solution of a perturbed linear system. Then we study the related perturbation on the solution and we demonstrate that it can be bounded in terms of the difference between the two linear operators associated to the Gaussian convolution and the recursive filter, respectively. Moreover, we show through numerical experiments that the error on the solution, which exhibits a kind of edge effect, i.e. most of the error is localized in the first and last few entries of the computed solution, is due to the structure of the difference of the two linear operators.
Research on the impact of natural disasters on the mental health of older adults finds both vulnerabilities and resilience. We report on the rates of clinically significant depression among older adults (aged ≥60 years) living in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and the factors associated with mental health need.
Methods
The Sandy Mobilization, Assessment, Referral and Treatment for Mental Health (SMART-MH) program integrates community outreach and needs assessments to identify older adults with mental health and aging service needs. Older adults with significant anxiety or depressive symptoms were offered short-term psychotherapy. Social service referrals were made directly to community agencies. All SMART-MH activities were offered in Spanish, Russian, Mandarin/Cantonese, and English.
Results
Across the full sample, 14% of participants screened positive for depression. Hurricane Sandy stressors predicted increased odds of depression, including storm injury, post-storm crime, and the total count of stressors. Outcomes varied significantly by age group, such that all Sandy-related variables remained significant for younger-old adults (aged 60–74 years), whereas only the loss of access to medical care was significant for older-old adults (aged ≥75 years).
Conclusions
Storm-affected communities show higher rates of depressive symptoms than seen in the general population, with storm stressors affecting mental health needs differentially by age group. (Disaster Med Public Health Preparedness. 2017;11:97–109)