Renaissance of a rural artifact in a city with a million people: biodiversity responses to an agro-forestry restoration in a large urban traditional fruit orchard

The rural landscapes surrounding large cities are rapidly becoming incorporated into the urban environment. The most conspicuous changes involve green spaces, such as former agro-forestry systems like fruit orchards. In this paper, we assess the influence on biodiversity of restoring a large urban traditional fruit orchard as reflected by six selected taxa: plants, lichens, butterflies, beetles, orthopteroids and birds. The study was performed in Prague, which is the capital city of the Czech Republic and has more than a million inhabitants. We studied the effect of orchard renewal in 45 patches (15 for birds and 30 for other taxa). The majority of taxa responded positively to the restoration. The restoration had a significant positive effect on the species richness of lichens, butterflies and beetles. All taxa showed significantly altered species compositions, and the number of red-listed species increased. Orchards have a high potential for multi-functional use. Orchards are productive agro-forestry systems and host numerous possible human activities. Therefore, orchard restoration also has a social aspect. Moreover, our research in this artificial ecosystem revealed that its restoration increased the biodiversity and conservation potential of the associated areas.

     

The Twitter games: media education,popular culture and multiscreen viewing in virtual concourses

Interactive media and virtual environments give rise to transmedia and multiscreen viewing in a new popular and participatory culture. This in turn requires a new type of critical, reflective media education. This article reviews expert opinions on the educational potential of The Hunger Games (THG) and the use of Twitter during the viewing of films by young audiences. The study has the twofold goal of analysing whether the tweets include the topics of ideology and values mentioned in the selected articles and whether the conversations help build knowledge of the subjects that, according to the experts, are discussed in the literary trilogy. The method, based on discourse analysis, is twofold as well, comprising, on one hand, the discussion of 61 selected academic papers on THG and, on the other, 6000 tweets posted by youngsters while watching the films in the trilogy shown on TV. The tweets were analysed using the ‘coding and counting’ technique in computer-mediated discourse analysis. The results show a great chasm between academic or educational perspectives and what youngsters see in the films. Twitter interactions show that the virtual environments where these interactions take place are mere virtual concourses rather than affinity or learning spaces. This draws attention to the need for a new type of media education which not only includes the popular culture in formal education environments, but also uses the virtual concourses where youngsters gather around media products to transform mere coexistence into convergence of interests based on the meaning of these products.     

The turning arcs: a computationally efficient algorithm to simulate isotropic vector-valued Gaussian random fields on the d-sphere

Statistics and Computing - Random fields on the sphere play a fundamental role in the natural sciences. This paper presents a simulation algorithm parenthetical to the spectral turning bands method...     

The Relative Contribution of Health Status and Quality of Life Domains in Subjective Health in Old Age

To analyze the influence of different health status dimensions and quality of life (QoL) domains on older adults’ subjective health, and to assess the role that residential satisfaction plays in these relationships. A QoL survey was conducted on a representative sample of the community-dwelling older adult population in Madrid province (Spain). Logistic regression models were applied to studying: the health status dimensions associated with satisfaction with health; the relationship between satisfaction with health and other QoL domains; and, the influence of these domains on satisfaction with life. Sociodemographic and residential characteristics were included in all the models. The determinants of satisfaction with health in the first model were: mobility, usual activities, morbidity, and satisfaction with neighborhood. QoL domains associated with health were: leisure activities, neighborhood, and finances. Satisfaction with life was explained by these three domains, along with age, family and health. In sum, leisure, neighborhood, and finances showed a positive effect on satisfaction with health and with life.     

Analytical results for IGFR and DRPFR distributions,with actuarial applications

An increasing generalized failure rate of a lifetime X defines an ageing concept, denoted by IGFR. Another notion, denoted by DRPFR, is defined by the decreasingness of the reversed proportional failure rate. In this article, we provide characterizations for both IGFR and DRPFR absolutely continuous lifetimes, based on monotonicity of quotients of probabilistic functionals and a result by Nanda and Shaked (2001 Nanda, A.K., Shaked, M. (2001). The hazard rate and the reversed hazard rate orders, with applications to order statistics. Ann. Inst. Stat. Math. 53:853–864.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). We derive the necessary conditions for the IGFR notion, based on stochastic orderings of truncated distributions, and we prove that the product of DRPFR lifetimes is also DRPFR; that the IGFR property is preserved by composition with certain risk aversion utility functions; and that the order statistics and the records (and the subsequent order statistic (record)) are IGFR under suitable assumptions, with similar results for DRPFR lifetimes. Also, we provide sufficient conditions for the hazard rate ordering of products and random products of IGFR lifetimes, and similar results for the reversed hazard rate order and DRPFR lifetimes, with a complementary result for the mean residual life order of random products of two families of IGFR lifetimes, we derive the upper and lower bounds for the cumulative distribution function of the product of IGFR lifetimes, and we provide the lower bounds for the risk function of an IGFR lifetime based on the distribution moments, and these bounds are extended for the product of IGFR lifetimes. We discuss extensively the applications of the results in insurance portfolios.     

A Bayesian approach for misclassified ordinal response data

ABSTRACT

Motivated by a longitudinal oral health study, the Signal-Tandmobiel^® study, a Bayesian approach has been developed to model misclassified ordinal response data. Two regression models have been considered to incorporate misclassification in the categorical response. Specifically, probit and logit models have been developed. The computational difficulties have been avoided by using data augmentation. This idea is exploited to derive efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Although the method is proposed for ordered categories, it can also be implemented for unordered ones in a simple way. The model performance is shown through a simulation-based example and the analysis of the motivating study.     

How does the combination of R&D and types of knowledge matter for patent propensity?

This paper examines whether the combined effects of R&D efforts and the types of knowledge obtained from the invention process determine patent propensity. With this aim, we investigate a unique, manually collected sample of firms and the Spanish and European Patent Offices to analyze how the combination of R&D and knowledge codifiability, observability and simplicity influence the patent decision. Our results contribute to the literature and assist R&D managers by showing that codified knowledge has a positive impact on patent propensity. Furthermore, we find that knowledge observability and simplicity only influence patent propensity when they are combined with internal R&D expenditures.     

Functional regression concurrent model with spatially correlated errors: application to rainfall ground validation

In this paper, we give an extension of the functional regression concurrent model to the case of spatially correlated errors. We propose estimating the spatial correlation structure by using functional geostatistics. The estimation of the regression parameters is carried out by feasible generalized least squares. This modeling approach is motivated by the problem of validating rainfall data retrieved from satellite sensors. In this sense, we use the methodology to study the relationship between satellite and ground rainfall time series recorded in 82 weather stations from Department of Valle del Cauca, Colombia. The model obtained allows predicting pentadal rainfall curves in many sites of the region of interest by using as input the satellite information. A residual analysis shows a good performance of the methodology proposed.     

University environment and entrepreneurial intention: the mediating role of the components of the theory of planned behaviour / El entorno universitario y la intención emprendedora: el papel mediador de los componentes de la teoría de la acción planificada

Entrepreneurship contributes to job creation and economic development. Thus, it is important to promote entrepreneurial initiatives; universities play a key role in this regard. The psychosocial perspective can contribute a great deal to studying the antecedents that lead a person to become an entrepreneur, with the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) being the theoretical framework used the most to predict entrepreneurial intention. Based on the data collected in Spain as part of the international GUESSS project (Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey) with a sample of 9,753 students, the influence of the university environment, the entrepreneurial environment and the perceived risk of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention are analysed, both directly and as mediated by the three components of the TPB (attitudes towards entrepreneurship, subjective norms and entrepreneurial self-efficacy). The results show that the university environment is the antecedent with the greatest effect on entrepreneurial intention; therefore, it is recommended that entrepreneurship be promoted through initiatives and educational programmes in the university environment.     

Centerline-SMED integration for machine changeovers improvement in food industry

This paper demonstrates how it is possible to combine SMED with Centerlining in complex production environments with numerous changes of format, product, raw materials and tools. This research proposes a methodology involving an initial application of Centerlining and, once the machinery and the process are stable, the subsequent implementation of SMED. Furthermore, it aims to show that it is possible to achieve improved output and reduced machinery changeover time while ensuring that the effect achieved by SMED is more stable. This increases the organizational advantages with respect to the implementation of SMED without prior application of Centerlining. The most important overall conclusion is that a successful application of SMED must always be accompanied by another type of tool or technique to maximize the results of its application. And, as presented in this work, one technique that enables significant improvements to SMED is the application of Centerlining.