Landscape status of the Ousteri Wetland, Puducherry, India

Ousteri Lake is popularly called Ousteri which is a word formed out of the fusion of Tamil words Oussudu (a proper noun) and eri (meaning a lake). Ousteri is an inter-state lake about 50 percent of its waterspread lies in Puducherry and the rest in Tamil Nadu of India. The landscape survey of the entire Ousteri Lake has been collected and reported in the article. Additionally provides feedback from all category of stakeholders to identify whether the Ousteri lake is worth to be recognised under Ramsar Convention or not.

Intervenção mediacional e hábitos alimentares: um estudo de crianças com síndrome de Down

The inadequacy about eating habits have been established as a serious problem nowadays. It is a multifactorial and difficult to handle, given their different nuances and causes. A population particularly exposed to the bad eating habits arising harm are individuals with Down syndrome, both with regard to the aspects inherent to the individual's own condition, regarding eating misfits, making it the weight control a necessary measure for a proper development. Thus, this study aimed to develop and evaluate a proposal based nutrition education from the assumptions of mediated learning, with children three to four years with Down syndrome. The participants were five children, four girls and a boy. Also included his parents and / or guardians. The data collection procedure involved the use of eight playful workshops with children and nutritional evaluation of those five meetings with parents and three home visits with each participating family. We tried to build with these children and their families a nutritional education to contribute to their daily choices of eating. Using listening, observation and questionnaire, besides playful interventions, it was observed that the first meaning of the act of eating is built in the family and reinforced by their social life. Overall, our sample characteristics seem to agree with the literature. During the intervention, the children showed attention, but little understanding of the content. With mothers, the results were different, with reflections on the inadequate power both the type of food offered, and quantity and so this offer is performed, conducted along the interventions changes in your lifestyle, such as perception of influence they had on their children in the formation of their eating habits, as well as less frequent intake of soft drinks and sweets. Nutritional interventions and mediations conducted with the mothers is that they seem to be effective strategies to combat obesity. Face of what was discussed, we see the importance of implementing intervention measures in combating and preventing overweight or obese since childhood, particularly with children with Down syndrome. One should prevent childhood obesity with educational and informative measures from birth, with family and with each child, through the primary health care and schools.

Make research training have meaning

Peer reviewed

The Importance of Proper Measurement for a Cloud Security Assurance Model

Winner of a best paper award.

RE-MEANING THE SACRED: COLONIAL DAMAGE AND INDIGENOUS COSMOLOGIES

Indigenous ways of knowing are dependent on an inheriting process both amongst humans and between human and non-human being. These multi-relationships cross material and immaterial borders as sites of knowledge production. This manuscript will interrogate how three particular Indigenous cosmological relationships have been purposefully re-meaninged by colonial institutions: 1) How Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee origin stories have been abstracted into a distinctive epistemological versus ontological site; 2) How Anishnaabe spirit worlds are impacted by colonial relations, and how state institutions benefit from the re-meaning of these worlds; and 3) How Indigenous sovereignty in Canada is imagined from a statist perspective, and how these polices have re-meaninged the sacred relationships within a cosmological understanding of Haudenosaunee governance. The re-meaning of sacredly-held Indigenous relationships is both accelerated by, and contributes to, a practice of reducing upon Indigenous and non-human societies. Throughout expressions of colonialism on Indigenous territories (the academy, the state, Indian policy), Indigenous knowledge is consistently either dismissed or appropriated. This reduction of Indigenous knowledge continues to bolster functions of the state as related to the elimination of the “Indian Problem” via reducing the “Indian” to an adaptive subject.

Understandings of transnational families in debates on Migration and development

International migration sets in motion a range of significant transnational processes that connect countries and people. How migration interacts with development and how policies might promote and enhance such interactions have, since the turn of the millennium, gained attention on the international agenda. The recognition that transnational practices connect migrants and their families across sending and receiving societies forms part of this debate. The ways in which policy debate employs and understands transnational family ties nevertheless remain underexplored. This article sets out to discern the understandings of the family in two (often intermingled) debates concerned with transnational interactions: The largely state and policydriven discourse on the potential benefits of migration on economic development, and the largely academic transnational family literature focusing on issues of care and the micro-politics of gender and generation. Emphasizing the relation between diverse migration-development dynamics and specific family positions, we ask whether an analytical point of departure in respective transnational motherhood, fatherhood or childhood is linked to emphasizing certain outcomes. We conclude by sketching important strands of inclusions and exclusions of family matters in policy discourse and suggest ways to better integrate a transnational family perspective in global migration-development policy.

Household "ethnoscapes" and rite of passage: meaning and chronicity of the diagnosis in schizophrenia

Based on the results of an ethnographic study with people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their relatives in Barcelona and Tarragona along one year, I problematize the transformation of roles and relationships inside the household from the first burst and the assignation of a diagnosis as rite of passage. I appeal to a cultural interpretation of family, understanding the family group as a specific ethnoscape. I analyze the chronicity meaning, and its consequences in the conformation of the “role of sick person” in the context of parental relationships. I also discuss the paradoxes in terms of autonomy for the affected persons because of the projection of cultural connotation of chronicity.

Expresiones no verbales como enunciados realizativos: construcciones preposicionales y apelaciones enfáticas

El presente estudio revisa la caracterización de los enunciados realizativos, deteniéndose en aquellos que no presentan estructura oracional. Así, analizaremos las expresiones no verbales que presentan las características propiamente performativas: construcciones preposicionales encabezadas por núcleos ´locativos`, ´sumativos` y ´sustractivos` y apelaciones enfáticas. En este sentido, podremos determinar el valor de las preposiciones que introducen sintagmas equivalentes a predicados con sentido realizativo. Por otro lado, distinguiremos dos modos de enunciar en relación con la descortesía y la adulación: insultos y halagos. Dichas expresiones se describirán desde una perspectiva gramatical y prosódica, de modo que se atenderá a su capacidad para reproducir enunciados realizativos convencionales y de orientar el acento y la inflexión melódica a la transformación cognitiva y emocional de la realidad del individuo receptor.

On a first-name basis: Englishization and naming in Flanders

Following and contributing to the ongoing shift from more structuralist, system-oriented to more pragmatic, socio-cultural oriented anglicism research, this paper verifies to what extent the global spread of English affects naming patterns in Flanders. To this end, a diachronic database of first names is constructed, containing the top 75 most popular boy and girl names from 2005 until 2014. In a first step, the etymological background of these names is documented and the evolution in popularity of the English names in the database is tracked. Results reveal no notable surge in the preference for English names. This paper complements these database-driven results with an experimental study, aiming to show how associations through referents are in this case more telling than associations through phonological form (here based on etymology). Focusing on the socio-cultural background of first names in general and of Anglo-American pop culture in particular, the second part of the study specifically reports on results from a survey where participants are asked to name the first three celebrities that leap to mind when hearing a certain first name (e.g. Lana, triggering the response Del Rey). Very clear associations are found between certain first names and specific celebrities from Anglo-American pop culture. Linking back to marketing research and the social turn in onomastics, we will discuss how these celebrities might function as referees, and how social stereotypes surrounding these referees are metonymically attached to their first names. Similar to the country-of-origin-effect in marketing, these metonymical links could very well be the reason why parents select specific “celebrity names”. Although further attitudinal research is needed, this paper supports the importance of including socio-cultural parameters when conducting onomastic research.

Comparison of module detection algorithms in protein networks and investigation of the biological meaning of predicted modules

Background
It is generally acknowledged that a functional understanding of a biological system can only be obtained by an understanding of the collective of molecular interactions in form of biological networks. Protein networks are one particular network type of special importance, because proteins form the functional base units of every biological cell. On a mesoscopic level of protein networks, modules are of significant importance because these building blocks may be the next elementary functional level above individual proteins allowing to gain insight into fundamental organizational principles of biological cells.
Results
In this paper, we provide a comparative analysis of five popular and four novel module detection algorithms. We study these module prediction methods for simulated benchmark networks as well as 10 biological protein interaction networks (PINs). A particular focus of our analysis is placed on the biological meaning of the predicted modules by utilizing the Gene Ontology (GO) database as gold standard for the definition of biological processes. Furthermore, we investigate the robustness of the results by perturbing the PINs simulating in this way our incomplete knowledge of protein networks.
Conclusions
Overall, our study reveals that there is a large heterogeneity among the different module prediction algorithms if one zooms-in the biological level of biological processes in the form of GO terms and all methods are severely affected by a slight perturbation of the networks. However, we also find pathways that are enriched in multiple modules, which could provide important information about the hierarchical organization of the system

Feasibility, normative heuristics and the proper place of historical responsibility – a reply to Ohndorf et al.

In this comment, we pick up three points raised by Ohndorf et al. (2015) in their reply to our ethical assessment of the German Advisory Council’s Budget Approach (WBGUBA). First, we discuss and clarify the relationship between ethics and political feasibility, highlighting that the way Ohndorf et el. use feasibility creates an unwarranted status quo bias. Second, we explain the proper place historical responsibility should have within the WBGUBA, stressing the fact that the reasons why we choose one policy proposal over another matter. Third, we analyze the limited extent to which a normative heuristic should motivate an ethically ambitious policy proposal like the WBGUBA.

Audiovisual Storytelling and Ideological Horizons : Audiences, Cultural Contexts and Extra-textual Meaning Making

Abstract: Audiovisual Storytelling and Ideological Horizons: Audiences, Cultural Contexts and Extra-textual Meaning Making In a society characterized by mediatization people are to an increasing degree dependent on mediated narratives as a primary means by which we make sense of our experience through time and our place in society (Hoover 2006, Lynch 2007, Hjarvard 2008, Hjarvard & Lövheim 2012). American media scholar Stewart Hoover points to symbols and scripts available in the media environment, what he call the “symbolic inventory” out of which individuals make religious or spiritual meaning (Hoover 2006: 55). Vernacular meaning-making embedded in everyday life among viewers’ dealing with fiction narratives in films and tv-series highlight a need for a more nuanced understanding of complex audiovisual storytelling. Moving images provide individuals with stories by which reality is maintained and by which humans construct ordered micro-universes for themselves using film as a resource for moral assessment and ideological judgments about life (Plantinga 2009, Johnston 2010, Axelson 2015). Important in this theoretical context are perspectives on viewers’ moral frameworks (Zillman 2005, Andersson & Andersson 2005, Frampton 2006, Avila 2007).This paper presentation will focus on ideological contested meaning making where audiences of different cultural background engage emotionally with filmic narratives, possibly eliciting ideological and spiritual meaning-making related to viewers’ personal world views. Through the example of the Homeland tv-series I want to discuss how spectators’ cultural, religious, political and ideological identities could be understood playing a role in the interpretative process of decoding content. Is it possible to trace patterns of different receptions of the multilayered and ambiguous story depicted in Homeland by religiously engaged Christians and Moslems as well as non-believers, in America, Europe and Middle East? How is the fiction narrative dealt with by spectators in the audience in different cultural contexts and how is it interpreted through the process of extra-text evaluation and real world2understanding in a global era preoccupied with war on terror? The presentation will also discuss methodological considerations about how to reach out to audiences anchored in different cultural context.

Movies and the Enchanted Mind : Emotional Comprehension and Spiritual Meaning Making Among Young Adults in Contemporary Sweden

The outcome of an empirical audience study in Sweden including questionnaires, focus groups and ten in-depth individual interviews discussing favorite films supports claims about viewers as active and playful (cf. Frampton 2006, Hoover 2006, Plantinga 2009). The soft side of mediatization processes is illustrated showing young adults experiencing enchantment through films (Jerslev 2006, Partridge 2008, Klinger 2008, Oliver & Hartmann 2010). The outcome is in line with a growing number of empirical case studies which support conclusions that both thinking and behavior are affected by film watching (Marsh 2007, Suckfüll 2010, Oliver & Hartmann 2010, Axelson 2014). The results of the interviews exploring specific scenes of idiosyncratic relevance support theories about fiction films as important sources for moral and spiritual reflection (Partridge 2004, Zillman 2005, Lynch 2007, Plantinga 2009).  The concept thick viewing is proposed for capturing these moments of film experience when profound and enchanted emotional interpretations take place.