State marketing programs for food and agricultural products are largely driven by consumers’ desires to purchase in-state products. Evaluations of state marketing programs have largely ignored consumer location and proximity to surrounding states, measures of ethnocentrism, and the presence of other geographic marketing labels. This study examines willingness to pay for own and out-of-state labels for a generic commodity, milk, within an eight-state region. The results show that an aggregate model conceals consumer heterogeneity in marginal willingness to pay values for state brands as compared to a disaggregate model, even when using random parameter logit models.

This study examines the role of distance in the decision among grammatical variants. The empirical test case is the English mandative subjunctive construction, which co-occurs with an embedded modal auxiliary, a subjunctive or an indicative verb form. The fact that the subjunctive is triggered by specific lexical items allows one to measure the distance between the triggering unit and the target verb. This distance is found to play a significant role in the grammatical decision process. With increasing distance between trigger and target, the probability of selecting a modal auxiliary increases and the probability of selecting the subjunctive decreases. The theoretical account hinges on the range and strength of linguistic units. Syntactic units (i.e. modals) are claimed to have a wider range than morphological units (i.e. indicative and subjunctive). Furthermore, the indicative is claimed to have a wider range than the subjunctive. Varying ranges are interpreted as varying decay rates. The lower decay rate of syntactic as compared to morphological units results from the syntactic level being superordinated to the morphological level in language production. The inclusion of the semantic and the phonological levels confirms that the position of a level in the structural hierarchy determines its range.

In this paper, we study how the topology of the International Trade Network (ITN) changes in geographical space, and along time. We employ geographical distance between countries in the world to filter the links in the ITN, building a sequence of subnetworks, each one featuring trade links occurring at similar distance. We then test if the assortativity and clustering of ITN subnetworks changes as distance increases, and we find that this is indeed the case: distance strongly impacts, in a non-linear way, the topology of the ITN. We show that the ITN is disassortative at long distances, while it is assortative at short ones. Similarly, the main determinant of the overall high-ITN clustering level are triangular trade triples between geographically close countries. This means that trade partnership choices and trade patterns are highly differentiated over different distance ranges, even after controlling for the economic size and income per capita of trading partners, and it is persistent over time. This evidence has relevant implications for the non-linear evolution of globalization.

Abstract. A subset $W$ of the vertex set of a graph $G$ is called a resolving set of $G$ if for every pair of distinct vertices $u,\,v$ , of $G$ , there is $w\,\in \,W$ such that the distance of $w$ and $u$ is different from the distance of $w$ and $v$ . The cardinality of a smallest resolving set is called the metric dimension of $G$ , denoted by $\dim\left( G \right)$ . The circulant graph ${{C}_{n}}\left( 1,\,2,\,.\,.\,.\,,\,t \right)$ consists of the vertices ${{v}_{0}},\,{{v}_{1\,}},\,.\,.\,.\,,{{v}_{n\,-\,1}}$ and the edges ${{v}_{i}}{{v}_{i\,+\,j}}$ , where $0\,\le \,i\,\le \,n\,-\,1,1\,\le \,j\,\le \,t\,\left( 2\,\le \,t\,\le \,\left\lfloor \frac{n}{2} \right\rfloor \right)$ , the indices are taken modulo $n$ . Grigorious, Manuel, Miller, Rajan, and Stephen proved that $\dim\left( {{C}_{n}}\left( 1,\,2,\,.\,.\,.\,,\,t \right) \right)\,\ge \,t\,+\,1$ for $t\,<\,\left\lfloor \frac{n}{2} \right\rfloor ,\,n\,\ge \,3$ , and they presented a conjecture saying that $\dim\left( {{C}_{n}}\left( 1,\,2,\,.\,.\,.\,,\,t \right) \right)\,=\,t\,+\,p\,-\,1$ for $n\,=\,2tk\,+\,t\,+\,p$ , where $3\,\le \,p\,\le \,t\,+\,1$ . We disprove both statements. We show that if $t\,\ge \,4$ is even, there exists an infinite set of values of $n$ such that $\dim\left( {{C}_{n}}\left( 1,\,2,\,.\,.\,.\,,t \right) \right)\,=\,t$ . We also prove that $\dim\left( {{C}_{n}}\left( 1,\,2,\,.\,.\,.\,,\,t \right) \right)\,\le \,t\,+\,\frac{p}{2}$ for $n\,=\,2tk\,+\,t\,+\,p$ , where $t$ and $p$ are even, $t\,\ge \,4,\,2\,\le \,p\,\le \,t$ , and $k\,\ge \,1$ .

We investigated whether straight-line distance from residential compounds to healthcare facilities influenced mortality, the incidence of pneumonia and vaccine efficacy against pneumonia in rural Gambia. Clinical surveillance for pneumonia was conducted on 6938 children living in the catchment areas of the two largest healthcare facilities. Deaths were monitored by three-monthly home visits. Children living >5 km from the two largest healthcare facilities had a 2·78 [95% confidence interval (CI) 1·74–4·43] times higher risk of all-cause mortality compared to children living within 2 km of these facilities. The observed rate of clinical and radiological pneumonia was lower in children living >5 km from these facilities compared to those living within 2 km [rate ratios 0·65 (95% CI 0·57–0·73) and 0·74 (95% CI 0·55–0·98), respectively]. There was no association between distance and estimated pneumococcal vaccine efficacy. Geographical access to healthcare services is an important determinant of survival and pneumonia in children in rural Gambia.

While much has been written about Bakhtin's later writings, most notably Rabelais and his World, little attention has been paid to his early manuscripts written in the mid-1920s. In this article Dick McCaw compares Bakhtin's early philosophical ideas about authorship and Stanislavsky's theory about how an actor creates a character. Bakhtin argues that actors can only be authors when they remain outside the character. He agrees that there is a need for empathy, but that this moment of co-experiencing with the character is followed by a return to oneself. Although this would seem to fly in the face of Stanislavsky's demand for the actor's empathetic identification with their role, McCaw concludes that both writers agreed that there was a necessary doubleness in the consciousness of the actor. This article develops ideas first considered in McCaw's PhD, ‘Bakhtin's Other Theatre’ (Royal Holloway, University of London, 2004) and now being reworked as a book on Bakhtin and the theatre of his time. Dick McCaw is a Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, and has written With an Eye for Movement (2006) and edited the Laban Sourcebook (2011).

This paper provides a general framework based on statistical design and Simulated Annealing (SA) optimization techniques for the development, analysis, and performance evaluation of forthcoming snake robot designs. A planar wheeled snake robot is considered, and the effect of its key design parameters on its performance while moving in serpentine locomotion is investigated. The goal is to minimize energy consumption and maximize distance traveled. Key kinematic and dynamic parameters as well as their corresponding range of values are identified. Derived dynamic and kinematic equations of n-link snake robot are used to perform simulation. Experimental design methodology is used for design characterization. Data are collected as per full factorial design. For both energy consumption and distance traveled, logarithmic, linear, and curvilinear regression models are generated and the best models are selected. Using analysis of variance, ANOVA, effects of parameters on performance of robots are determined. Next, using SA, optimum parameter levels of robots with different number of links to minimize energy consumption and maximize distance traveled are determined. Both single and multi-criteria objectives are considered. Webots and Matlab SimMechanics software are used to validate theoretical results. For the mathematical model and the selected range of values considered, results indicate that the proposed approach is quite effective and efficient in optimization of robot performance. This research extends the present knowledge in this field by identifying additional parameters having significant effect on snake robot performance.

When they process sentences, language comprehenders activate perceptual and motor representations of described scenes. On the “immersed experiencer” account, comprehenders engage motor and perceptual systems to create experiences that someone participating in the described scene would have. We tested two predictions of this view. First, the distance of mentioned objects from the protagonist of a described scene should produce perceptual correlates in mental simulations. And second, mental simulation of perceptual features should be multimodal, like actual perception of such features. In Experiment 1, we found that language about objects at different distances modulated the size of visually simulated objects. In Experiment 2, we found a similar effect for volume in the auditory modality. These experiments lend support to the view that language-driven mental simulation encodes experiencer-specific spatial details. The fact that we obtained similar simulation effects for two different modalities—audition and vision—confirms the multimodal nature of mental simulations during language understanding.

Human conflicts may sometimes benefit wildlife by depopulating wilderness areas but there is evidence from Africa that the impacts tend to be negative. The forested states of West Africa have experienced much recent human conflict but there have been no assessments of impacts on the wildlife. We conducted surveys of mammals in the 710-km2 Gola Forest reserves to assess the impact of the 1991–2001 civil war in Sierra Leone. Gola is the most important remaining tract of lowland forest in the country and a key site for the conservation of the highly threatened forests of the Upper Guinea region. We found that Gola has survived well despite being in the heart of the area occupied by the rebels. We recorded 44 species of larger mammal, including 18 threatened, near-threatened and endemic species, accounting for all species recorded in pre-war surveys and adding several more (African buffalo Syncerus caffer nanus and water chevrotain Hyemoschus aquaticus). Populations of primates were healthy with little evidence of decline. Duiker detection rates were low and further work is required to confirm their numbers as they include five species endemic (or near endemic) to the Upper Guinea region, three of which are threatened. However, the population of African forest elephants Loxodonta cyclotis has collapsed, with only a few individuals remaining from c. 110 in the mid 1980s. We conclude that peacetime pressures from the bushmeat trade, clearance for agriculture, logging and mining are likely to be far greater for Gola than the pressures from the civil war.

Accumulation of information about natural hybridization between GM soybean (Glycine max) and wild soybean (Glycine soja) is required for risk assessment evaluation and to establish biosafety regulations in Japan. This is particularly important in areas where wild relatives of cultivated soybean are grown (i.e. East Asia including Japan). To collect information on temporal and spatial factors affecting variation in hybridization between wild and GM soybean, a two year hybridization experiment was established that included one wild soybean and five GM soybean cultivars with different maturity dates. Hybridization frequencies ranged from 0 to 0.097%. The maximum hybridization frequency (0.097%) was obtained from wild soybean crossed with GM soybean cv. AG6702RR, which were adjacently cultivated with wild soybean, with 25 hybrids out of 25 741 seedlings tested. Cultivar AG6702RR had the most synchronous flowering period with wild soybean. Ten hybrids out of 25 741 were produced by crossing with cv. AG5905RR, which had the second most synchronous flowering period with wild soybean. Most hybrids were found where GM and wild soybeans were adjacently cultivated, whereas only one hybrid was detected from wild soybean plants at 2 m, 4 m and 6 m from a pollen source (GM soybean). Differences in flowering phenology, isolation distance and presence of buffer plants accounted for half of the variation in hybridization frequency in this study. Temporal and spatial isolation will be effective strategies to minimize hybridization between GM and wild soybean.