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Systematic Pattern (systematic + pattern)
Selected AbstractsA longitudinal study of gender-related cognition and behaviourDEVELOPMENTAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2004Anne Campbell Gender schema theory proposes that children's acquisition of gender labels and gender stereotypes informs gender-congruent behaviour. Most previous studies have been cross-sectional and do not address the temporal relationship between knowledge and behaviour. We report the results of a longitudinal study of gender knowledge and sex-typed behaviour across three domains in children tested at 24 and 36 months (N = 56). Although both knowledge and sex-typed behaviour increased significantly between 2 and 3 years, there was no systematic pattern of cross-lagged correlations between the two, although some concurrent relationships were present at 24 months. Future longitudinal work might profitably focus on younger children using reliable pre-verbal measures of gender knowledge and employing a shorter lag between measurement times. [source] Cost inefficiency and hospital health outcomesHEALTH ECONOMICS, Issue 7 2008Niccie L. McKay Abstract This study explores the association between cost inefficiency and health outcomes in a national sample of acute-care hospitals in the US over the period 1999,2001, with health outcomes being measured by both mortality and complications rates. The empirical analysis examines health outcomes as a function of cost inefficiency and other determinants of outcomes, using stochastic frontier analysis to obtain hospital cost inefficiency scores. The results showed no systematic pattern of association between cost inefficiency and hospital health outcomes; the basic results were unchanged regardless of whether cost inefficiency was measured with or without using instrumental variables. The analysis also indicated, however, that the association between cost inefficiency and health outcomes may vary substantially across geographical regions. The study highlights the importance of distinguishing between ,good' costs that reflect the efficient use of resources and ,bad' costs that stem from waste and other forms of inefficiency. In particular, the study's results suggest that hospital programs focused on reducing cost inefficiency are unlikely to be associated with worsened hospital-level mortality or complications rates, while, on the other hand, across-the-board reductions in cost could well have adverse consequences on health outcomes by reducing efficient as well as inefficient costs. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Sententiousness and Nationalist Discourse: The Case of Alfredo RoccoNATIONS AND NATIONALISM, Issue 1 2000John Dickie This article considers the normative and hypostatising functions of nationalist discourse, and the necessity of rhetoric to nations and nationalism. It does so on the basis of a case study of sententiousness in the thought of Alfredo Rocco. Rocco was one of the most important Nationalist and Fascist intellectuals and the legislative architect of the Fascist state. His political thought is analysed by taking as a starting point a quirk of the historiography on Rocco, which insistently attributes a dangerous ,rigour' to his texts, and in particular to the punchy, sententious quality of his style. A close reading of Rocco's nationalism, using Flaubert to understand the rhetoric of sententiousness, reveals a systematic pattern of contradictions between normative and hypostatised definitions of the nation. Aspects of these findings, it is argued, can potentially be extended to embrace all forms of nationalism. [source] IgA nephropathy and mesangial cell proliferation: shared global gene expression profilesNEPHROLOGY, Issue 2002Hideto SAKAI SUMMARY: It is well established that mesangial cell proliferation plays a major role in glomerular injury and progressive renal injury. the expression of a number of different genes has been reported in proliferative mesangial cells in culture. However, the relevance of these genes to renal injury in general and IgA nephropathy (IgAN) remains to be established. Assessment of gene activity on a global genome-wide scale is a fundamental and newly developed molecular strategy to expand the scope of clinical investigation from a single gene to studying all genes at once in a systematic pattern. Capitalizing on the recently developed methodology of high cDNA array hybridization, the simultaneous expression of thousands of genes in primary human proliferating mesangial cells was monitored and compared with renal tissue of IgAN. Complex [,- 33P]-labelled cDNA targets were prepared from cultured mesangial cells, remnant tissue from five IgAN renal biopsies and four nephrectomies (controls). Each target was hybridized to a high-density array of 18 326 paired target genes. the radioactive hybridization signals were analysed by phosphorimager. Approximately 8212±530 different gene transcripts were detected per target. Close to 5% (386±90 genes) were full-length mRNA human transcripts (HT) and the remainder were expressed sequence tags (EST). Using a relational database, electronic subtraction was performed and matching was carried out to allow identification of 203 HT with shared expression in proliferative mesangial cells and IgAN renal biopsies. In addition hierarchical clustering analysis was performed on the HT of IgAN and controls to establish differential expression profiles of mesangial HT in IgAN and controls. Collectively the presented data constitutes a preliminary renal bioinformatics database of the transcriptional profiles in IgAN. More importantly, the information may help to speed up the discovery of genes underlying human IgAN. [source] Individualism and the "Western Mind" reconsidered: American and dutch parents' ethnotheories of the childNEW DIRECTIONS FOR CHILD & ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT, Issue 87 2000Sara Harkness Research on Dutch and American parentS' descriptions and interpretations of their children's personality and behavior reveals a systematic pattern of difference that defies the idea of a uniform "Western mind" characterized by individualism. [source] Attitudes Towards Personnel Selection Methods: A Partial Replication and Extension in a German SampleAPPLIED PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2003Bernd Marcus Cette recherche qui fait appel à un échantillon de 213 étudiants allemands porte sur les attitudes envers un ensemble de méthodes utilisées dans la sélection professionnelle. Son but premier était d'apporter un nouvel éclairage sur les différences culturelles qui marquent les réactions des candidats devant les techniques de sélection en reconstituant partiellement une étude de Steiner & Gilliland (1996) qui recueillirent des évaluations de l'acceptation du processus pour dix procédures différentes auprès d'étudiants français et américains. Des divergences significatives sont apparues au niveau des moyennes, mais aucune structure sous-jacente ne put rendre compte de ces différences. En général, les sujets des trois nations ont note les plus favorablement les méthodes répandues (l'entretien et le C.V.), ainsi que les procédures en rapport évident avec le travail (les tests d'échantillon de travail), puis les tests papier-crayon, tandis que les contacts personnels et la graphologie étaient négativement appréciés. Autre objectif important: éprouver la validité des courtes descriptions des instruments de sélection généralement utilisées dans les études comparatives portant sur ce thème. On a évalué deux fois les attitudes envers quatre types de tests imprimés, une premiére fois après la présentation de la description et une seconde fois à l'issue de la passation du test. La convergence prétest-posttest, de basse à moyenne, met en évidence de sérieux problémes en ce qui concerne ces descriptions des tests papier-crayon. On aborde aussi les leçons à en tirer quant aux jugements sur les pratiques de sélection du point de vue des candidats et pour les recherches à venir. This research examined attitudes towards a variety of personnel selection methods in a German student sample (N= 213). Its first objective was to shed further light on cultural differences in applicant reactions to selection techniques by partially replicating a study by Steiner and Gilliland (1996), who obtained ratings of process favorability for ten different procedures from two groups of French and American students. Results indicated a number of significant mean discrepancies but no systematic pattern appeared to underlie these differences. In general, subjects in all three nations rated widespread methods (e.g. interview, résumés) or obviously job-related procedures (work sample tests) most favorably, followed by paper-and-pencil tests, whereas personal contacts and graphology appeared in the negative range. A second major objective was to examine the validity of the brief descriptions of selection instruments often used in comparative studies on this topic. Attitudes towards four different types of written tests were assessed twice for this purpose, once after presenting descriptive information, and a second time after actual test administration. Low to moderate pretest,posttest convergence pointed to serious problems with these descriptions for paper-and-pencil tests. Implications for current evaluations of selection practices from the applicants' perspective and for future research are discussed. [source] Modifying the metaphor in order to improve understanding of control languages,the little-person becomes a cast of actorsBRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY, Issue 4 2007Peter Whalley The instructional metaphor is an important bridge to understanding, particularly when students are undertaking tasks that are conceptually difficult and outside their previous experience. It is suggested that the limitations of the implicit metaphor of the procedural control languages are the main cause of the problems experienced with delivering the control topic within the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) curriculum. These continue to dominate classroom practice despite Papert warning more than 25 years ago of the conceptual restrictions that they place on children's thinking. It is also claimed that the procedural control languages do not provide an adequate representation of the underlying input,process,output model of control, and that this contributes to a systematic pattern of misunderstanding. Classroom trials of a graphic object-orientated language are related to a prior study made with the procedural control language Control Logo. The relatively more sophisticated mental models developed by students working with actor-lab are discussed in terms of the different underlying metaphors and the problem representation provided. [source] Information technology innovation diffusion: an information requirements paradigmINFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNAL, Issue 3 2008Nigel Melville Abstract., Information technology (IT) innovation research examines the organizational and technological factors that determine IT adoption and diffusion, including firm size and scope, technological competency and expected benefits. We extend the literature by focusing on information requirements as a driver of IT innovation adoption and diffusion. Our framework of IT innovation diffusion incorporates three industry-level sources of information requirements: process complexity, clock speed and supply chain complexity. We apply the framework to US manufacturing industries using aggregate data of internet-based innovations and qualitative analysis of two industries: wood products and beverage manufacturing. Results show systematic patterns supporting the basic thesis of the information processing paradigm: higher IT innovation diffusion in industries with higher information processing requirements; the salience of downstream industry structure in the adoption of interorganizational systems; and the role of the location of information intensity in the supply chain in determining IT adoption and diffusion. Our study provides a new explanation for why certain industries were early and deep adopters of internet-based innovations while others were not: variation in information processing requirements. [source] How you count counts: the importance of methods research in applied ecologyJOURNAL OF APPLIED ECOLOGY, Issue 5 2008Chris S. Elphick Summary 1Methods papers play a crucial role in advancing applied ecology. Counting organisms, in particular, has a rich history of methods development with many key advances both in field sampling and the treatment of resulting data. 2Most counts, however, have associated errors due to portions of the population of interest being unavailable for detection (e.g. target population not fully sampled; individuals present but not detectable), detection mistakes (e.g. detectable individuals missed; non-existent individuals recorded), or erroneous counts (e.g. large groups miscounted; individuals misidentified). 3Developments in field methods focus on reducing biases in the actual counts. Simultaneously, statisticians have developed many methods for improving inference by quantifying and correcting for biases retrospectively. Prominent examples of methods used to account for detection errors include distance sampling and multiple-observer methods. 4Simulations, in which population characteristics are set by the investigator, provide an efficient means of testing methods. With good estimates of sampling biases, computer simulations can be used to evaluate how much a given counting problem affects estimates of parameters such as population size and decline, thereby allowing applied ecologists to test the efficacy of sampling designs. Combined with cost estimates for each field method, such models would allow the cost-effectiveness of alternative protocols to be assessed. 5Synthesis and applications. Major advances are likely to come from research that looks for systematic patterns, across studies, in the effects of different types of bias and assumption violation on the ecological conclusions drawn. Specifically, determining how often, and under what circumstances, errors contribute to poor management and policy would greatly enhance future application of ecological knowledge. [source] Dimensions of style: Context, politics and motivation in gay Israeli speech1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 1 2009Erez Levon Sociolinguistic research has traditionally examined stylistic variation as a way of understanding how speakers may use language indexically. Quantitatively, research has sought to correlate observed patterns of variation across such external parameters as context or topic with the ways in which speakers linguistically orient themselves to their immediate surroundings or to some other socially-salient reference group. Recently, this approach has been criticized for being too mechanistic. In this paper, I present a new method for examining stylistic variation that addresses this critique, and demonstrate how an attention to speakers' motivations and interactional goals can be reconciled with a quantitative analysis of variation. I illustrate the proposed method with a quantitative examination of systematic patterns of prosodic variation in the speech of a group of Israeli men who are all members of various lesbian and gay political-activist groups. [source] Exit polling in a cold climate: the BBC,ITV experience in Britain in 2005JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES A (STATISTICS IN SOCIETY), Issue 3 2008John Curtice Summary., Conducting an exit poll to forecast the outcome of a national election in terms of both votes and seats is particularly difficult in Britain. No official information is available on how individual polling stations voted in the past, use of single-member plurality means that there is no consistent relationship between votes and seats, electors can choose to vote by post and most of those who vote in person do so late in the day. In addition, around one in every six intended exit poll respondents refuses to participate. Methods that were developed to overcome these problems, and their use in the successful 2005 British Broadcasting Corporation,Independent Television exit poll, are described and evaluated. The methodology included a panel design to allow the estimation of electoral change at local level, coherent multiple-regression modelling of multiparty electoral change to capture systematic patterns of variation, probabilistic prediction of constituency winners to account for uncertainty in projected constituency level shares, collection of information about the voting intentions of postal voters before polling day and access to interviewer guesses on the voting behaviour of refusals. The coverage and accuracy of the exit poll data are critically examined, the effect of key aspects of the statistical modelling of the data is assessed and some general lessons are drawn for the design and analysis of electoral exit polls. [source] Analysing the isotopic life history of the alpine ungulates Capra ibex and Rupicapra rupicapra rupicapra through their hornsRAPID COMMUNICATIONS IN MASS SPECTROMETRY, Issue 15 2009Inês C. R. Barbosa The horn of ungulate grazers offers a valuable isotopic record of their diet and environment. However, there have been no reports of the spatio-temporal variation of the isotopic composition of horns. We investigated patterns of carbon (,13C) and nitrogen (,15N) isotopic composition along and perpendicular to the horn axis in Capraibex and Rupicaprarupicaprarupicapra to assess the effects of animal age, within-year (seasonal) and inter-annual variation, natural contamination and sampling position on horn isotope composition. Horns of male C. ibex (n,=,23) and R. r. rupicapra (n,=,1) were sampled longitudinally on the front (only R. r. rupicapra) and back side and on the surface and sub-surface. The sides of the R. r. rupicapra horn did not differ in ,13C. In both species, the horn surface had a 0.15, lower ,13C and a higher carbon-to-nitrogen (C/N) ratio than the sub-surface. Washing the horn with water and organic solvents removed material that caused these differences. With age, the ,15N of C. ibex horns increased (+0.1, year,1), C/N ratio increased, and 13C discrimination relative to atmospheric CO2 (13,) increased slightly (+0.03, year,1). Geostatistical analysis of one C. ibex horn revealed systematic patterns of inter-annual and seasonal 13C changes, but 15N changed only seasonally. The work demonstrates that isotopic signals in horns are influenced by natural contamination (,13C), age effects (13, and ,15N), and seasonal (,13C and ,15N) and inter-annual variation (,13C). The methods presented allow us to distinguish between these effects and thus allow the use of horns as isotopic archives of the ecology of these species and their habitat. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] | ||||||||||||||||