Proximate or Primary Source? How Multiple Layers of News Sources on Social Media Predict News Influence

News shared on social media presents multiple layers of sources, from reputable news organizations to individual users who share news on social media. A web-based experiment investigated (a) whether the influence of a primary news source (news organization) on viewers decreases as it becomes less proximate with the presence of a more immediate source (individual user who shared news), and (b) if so, how the evaluations of both sources, along with a varying degree of issue relevance, affect viewers’ agreement with news position. Participants read one news article either shared on Facebook by a well-known celebrity or directly posted onto a news website. The perceived credibility of news organizations predicted viewers’ agreement with the news position, but only when the news was presented on a news web page so that the news organization was shown as the proximate source. When multiple sources were displayed, the influence of news organization credibility disappeared when the given news lacked personal relevance.

Influence of Stone Crusher Units’ Dust Pollution on Agriculture in Virudhunagar District of Tamil Nadu

In this process, many industries are polluting the air and environment. One among them is the stone crushing industry. Air polluting industries are a proximate source of major damage to farming systems in adjacent areas, thus disrupting the main source of livelihoods of many small and marginal farmers. Scientific study shows that polluted air from industrial and urban areas usually consists of a mixture of pollutants, which can adversely affect agriculture in many complex ways. Air pollutants that are most damaging to agriculture are sulphur dioxide and the oxides of nitrogen, which are categorized as acid pollutants. Agriculture yields depend upon many factors like weather, soil fertility, irrigation, pesticides, and the like. Other things remaining the same, air pollution, particularly dust pollution, causes a significant fall in crop yields, and in turn, agriculture income reduces. Hence a modest attempt has been made here to study the influence of dust pollution by stone crushing units in the surrounding areas of Virudhunagar District. The results of the Factor Analysis show that the spread of dust from stone crushing units has affected the fertility of the soil, led to a reduction in the area of cultivation, and has a negative impact on cattle breathing and ultimatelyaffected the income levels of the farming community.

Recurrent arterial ischemic strokes in a patient with patent foramen ovale and ductus arteriosus: Presentation of our management and review of the literature

Ischemic stroke in children is a relatively rare entity, relative to the adult population. The most common potential risk factors include cardiac embolism, prothrombotic states and vasculopathies. The diagnosis is concerning for the need to identify the underlying cause. Treatment of the proximate source of ischemia can often protect against future events.We present the case of a 7-year-old patient who initially presented with an ischemic brain insult which was repeated, despite the initiation of anticoagulation therapy. The investigation revealed patent foramen ovale and patent ductus arteriosus and because of the recurrent ischemic ictuses, transcatheter closure of both defects was decided. A brief description of the literature is also presented.

Origins and spread of fluted-point technology in the Canadian Ice-Free Corridor and eastern Beringia

Fluted projectile points have long been recognized as the archaeological signature of early humans dispersing throughout the Western Hemisphere; however, we still lack a clear understanding of their appearance in the interior “Ice-Free Corridor” of western Canada and eastern Beringia. To solve this problem, we conducted a geometric morphometric shape analysis and a phylogenetic analysis of technological traits on fluted points from the archaeological records of northern Alaska and Yukon, in combination with artifacts from further south in Canada, the Great Plains, and eastern United States to investigate the plausibility of historical relatedness and evolutionary patterns in the spread of fluted-point technology in the latest Pleistocene and earliest Holocene. Results link morphologies and technologies of Clovis, certain western Canadian, and northern fluted points, suggesting that fluting technology arrived in the Arctic from a proximate source in the interior Ice-Free Corridor and ultimately from the earliest populations in temperate North America, complementing new genomic models explaining the peopling of the Americas.

Catholic Personalism up to John Paul II

This chapter charts the history of the Catholic Church’s personalism and its major representatives up to John Paul II. It examines the deep origins of personalism and discusses the theological controversies of the early Church as the ultimate source and the revolutionary philosophy of Immanuel Kant as the proximate source of personalism. It examines movements in European philosophy that prepared the ground for the rise of personalism, including ‘dialogical’ thought and phenomenology, along with the various European schools of personalism. Finally, it outlines the central ideas of personalist philosophy, especially its attempt to think through the various realities of human being, and indeed of reality in general, in light of the radically unique character of personal existence, as well as those aspects of human being linked to personhood ranging from relationality and community to the significance of gender, sexuality, and the mystery of love.

Revisiting Caffeine Biosynthesis – Speculations about the Proximate Source of its Purine Ring

The prevailing hypothesis of caffeine biosynthesis starting from xanthosine was combined with Kremers’ speculation on NAD as a biochemical precursor of caffeine and trigonelline in coffee. This bold sketch together with a few free-spirited ideas may channel future caffeine biosynthesis studies into novel directions.

Source Cues in Online News: Is the Proximate Source More Powerful than Distal Sources?

With the rise of intermediaries such as portals, social-bookmarking sites, and microblogs, online news is often carried through multiple sources. However, the perceived credibility of different source cues attached to a single news story can be quite different. So, how do readers evaluate the story? Do users factor in all distal sources, or do they simply refer to the proximate source delivering the news? Using a 2 (involvement) × 2 (proximal source credibility) × 2 (distal source credibility) full-factorial between-subjects experiment (N = 231), we found that while highly involved readers considered both types of sources, low-involvement readers were primarily influenced by the proximate source.

Constraint and adaptation in the evolution of carnivoran skull shape

The evolutionary history of the Order Carnivora is marked by episodes of iterative evolution. Although this pattern is widely reported in different carnivoran families, the mechanisms driving the evolution of carnivoran skull morphology remain largely unexplored. In this study we use coordinate-point extended eigenshape analysis (CP-EES) to summarize aspects of skull shape in large fissiped carnivores. Results of these comparisons enable the evaluation of the role of different factors constraining the evolution of carnivoran skull design. Empirical morphospaces derived from mandible anatomy show that all hypercarnivores (i.e., those species with a diet that consists almost entirely of vertebrate flesh) share a set of traits involved in a functional compromise between bite force and gape angle, which is reflected in a strong pattern of morphological convergence. Although the paths followed by different taxa to reach this “hypercarnivore shape-space” differ because of phylogenetic constraints, the morphological signature of hypercarnivory in the mandible is remarkably narrow and well constrained. In contrast, CP-EES of cranial morphology does not reveal a similar pattern of shape convergence among hypercarnivores. This suggests a lesser degree of morphological plasticity in the cranium compared to the mandible, which probably results from a compromise between different functional demands in the cranium (e.g., feeding, vision, olfactory sense, and brain processing) whereas the mandible is only involved in food acquisition and processing. Combined analysis of theoretical and empirical morphospaces for these skull data also show the lower anatomical disparity of felids and hyaenids compared to canids and ursids. This indicates that increasing specialization within the hypercarnivorous niche may constrain subsequent morphological and ecological flexibility. During the Cenozoic, similar skull traits appeared in different carnivoran lineages, generated by similar selection pressures (e.g., toward hypercarnivory) and shared developmental pathways. These pathways were likely the proximate source of constraints on the degree of variation associated with carnivoran skull evolution and on its direction.

Planetary Trojans – the main source of short period comets?

One of the key considerations when assessing the potential habitability of telluric worlds will be that of the impact regime experienced by the planet. In this work, we present a short review of our understanding of the impact regime experienced by the terrestrial planets within our own Solar system, describing the three populations of potentially hazardous objects which move on orbits that take them through the inner Solar system. Of these populations, the origins of two (the Near-Earth Asteroids and the Long-Period Comets) are well understood, with members originating in the Asteroid belt and Oort cloud, respectively. By contrast, the source of the third population, the Short-Period Comets, is still under debate. The proximate source of these objects is the Centaurs, a population of dynamically unstable objects that pass perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. However, a variety of different origins have been suggested for the Centaur population. Here, we present evidence that at least a significant fraction of the Centaur population can be sourced from the planetary Trojan clouds, stable reservoirs of objects moving in 1:1 mean-motion resonance with the giant planets (primarily Jupiter and Neptune). Focussing on simulations of the Neptunian Trojan population, we show that an ongoing flux of objects should be leaving that region to move on orbits within the Centaur population. With conservative estimates of the flux from the Neptunian Trojan clouds, we show that their contribution to that population could be of order ~3%, while more realistic estimates suggest that the Neptune Trojans could even be the main source of fresh Centaurs. We suggest that further observational work is needed to constrain the contribution made by the Neptune Trojans to the ongoing flux of material to the inner Solar system, and believe that future studies of the habitability of exoplanetary systems should take care not to neglect the contribution of resonant objects (such as planetary Trojans) to the impact flux that could be experienced by potentially habitable worlds.