Cross-Cultural Consumer Acceptability for Ethnic Fermented Sauce Products: Comparisons among Korean, UAE, and US Consumers

The present study investigated the drivers of liking ethnic sauces in a cross-cultural context. Experiments were conducted to understand the acceptance of salad dressings and dipping sauces developed from Korean fermented seasonings among consumers with different ethnic backgrounds, including: South Korean, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and American. The samples of interest included four types of salad dressings made from fermented soybean paste (doenjang) and four types of spicy dipping sauces made from fermented chili pepper paste (gochujang). The salad dressings were preferred by Korean and US consumers. Koreans liked the nutty-flavored salad dressings, whereas UAE and American consumers commonly liked the spicy type. There was a stronger cross-cultural agreement in liking dipping sauces rather than salad dressings. Both Korean and American consumers liked spicy dipping sauces that elicited a sweet taste. UAE consumers tended to prefer the less spicy dipping sauce samples. Consumers in all three countries generally liked spicy dipping sauces more than salad dressings. Cultural differences were observed between the responses depending on the presence and level of spiciness in the two different food types. For product development with ethnic fermented flavors or chili spices, the contextual appropriateness and consumer familiarity with the corresponding flavor should be taken into account.

Identity (self-)deconstruction in Chinese police’s civil conflict mediation

While recent pragmatic research on identity in discourse mainly focuses on ubiquitous construction of one’s own or others’ identity, inadequate attention has been directed to the frequently occurring deconstruction of self-constructed and other-assigned identities. Drawing on transcripts of recordings of 19 Chinese police officer-mediated interactions, this study examines what, how and why self-constructed and other-assigned identities of police officers are deconstructed. Qualitative analysis of the data shows that Chinese police officers’ self-constructed non-institutional identities were often deconstructed by disputants via negating their contextual appropriateness or their social or institutional rightness, whereas police officers also often deconstructed the institutional identities assigned to them by the disputants via negating the validity of the assigned institutional identity or the institutional relationship. It is argued that the cause of this identity deconstruction phenomenon is rooted in police officers’ identity dilemma arising from social changes regarding police work in China.

Conceptual, sociological and materialistic view of innovation-translation dynamics in medicine: The need and directions for a novel multi-pronged initiative

The recent decades have witnessed overwhelming advancements in medical technologies and the quality of healthcare. A vast majority of the advancements which are capable of revolutionising healthcare still remain dormant within laboratories which is certainly due to the tardive translation and assimilation of these innovations. Innovation-translation is explained by an over-simplified linear model which provides the users with just two option- either to adopt or not. The translation of medical innovation is a cyclical and dynamic process which includes the conception of novel ideas, generation of proof of concept, adoption, post-adoption analysis and emergence of new innovations. Conceptual factors like principle, validity, contextual appropriateness and performance; sociological factors like political climate, professional involvement, interdisciplinary interaction and investment policies; and materialistic factors like resource availability, affordability and apt human resource management are the chief determinants of innovation translation. Loose knit configuration of national policies favour innovation translation than close knit configuration. India suffers from lack of drive for local innovation, lack of succinct aptitude, inadequate local investment and lack of efficient regulation. Innovation studies expose the determinants of successful and failed innovations. Ensuring a favourable political and financial environment that provides systematic innovation assessment, evaluation and regulation, valid operational guidelines, encourage local innovation, and promote intellectual aptitude can drive further innovation. Competitively promoting sustaining and disruptive innovation will enable remarkable advancements. Post-adoption analysis and feedback and Precision medicine are significant tools. Efforts should be made to introduce and ensure meticulous innovation surveillance. Keywords: Innovation-translation dynamics; Cyclic dynamic model; Innovation surveillance; Regulation.

Interfaces between linguistic systems: Evidence from Child Language

Interfaces between grammatical domains have been considered from various perspectives in child language research and in general linguistics. The study aims to provide evidence for interfaces in acquisition of early clause-structure, based on longitudinal data from three Hebrew-acquiring toddlers. Two facets of their early speech output were examined: Usage productivity in verb-inflection, identified by a criterion of contextual appropriateness; and structural transparency/opacity of children’s speech output, with transparent forms being unambiguous in relation to their grammatical targets. These factors yielded two distinct developmental periods for the three children: I – from the onset of verb usage to productive verb inflection, and II – from productive verb inflection to disappearance of structural opacity. Period II displays a puzzling mixture of both transparent and opaque usages, not only in verb inflection, but also in use of prepositions marking objects and adverbs. These puzzles are resolved by the significant correlations that emerged between apparently unrelated linguistic systems: (1) opaque verb-forms occur mainly together with object/adverbs, and (2) transparent prepositions occur mainly in combination with transparent verbs. These unexpected convergences between different linguistic systems are discussed as underlining the role of structural transparency/opacity and as shedding new light on between-domain interfaces in language acquisition.

Towards Computational Fronesis

This paper presents research in Contextual Affect Analysis (CAA) for the need of future application in intelligent agents, such as conversational agents or artificial tutors. The authors propose a new term, Computational Fronesis (CF), to embrace the tasks included in CAA applied to development of conversational agents such as artificial tutors. In tutor-student discourse it is crucial that the artificial tutor was able not only to detect user/student emotions, but also to verify toward whom they were directed and whether they were appropriate for the context of the conversation. Therefore, as the first task in CF the authors focus on verification of contextual appropriateness of emotions. They performed some of the first experiments in this task for the Japanese language and discuss future directions in development and implications of Computational Fronesis.