Naturalness

About: Naturalness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1305 publications have been published within this topic receiving 31737 citations.

Hocus-pocus tricks and moral progressions: the emerging meanings of cultured meat in online news comments

Abstract: ABSTRACT Narratives of cellular agriculture, or food technologies using cell cultivation to produce agricultural products such as cultured meat, promise sustainable, ethical alternatives as well as solutions to global food challenges. Although cultured meat is unavailable to consumers, people have formed opinions about it on the basis of media coverage. Drawing on studies of the meaning system of food and the media publicity surrounding cultured meat, the aim is to analyze the emerging meanings of cultured meat in Finnish online news comments (n = 662). The comments were examined using qualitative content analysis and the results were utilized to construct an emerging meaning system for cultured meat. The results indicate that this system draws from nine themes and three aggregate categories, based on the following questions: Why is cultured meat necessary (environmental, animal wellbeing and healthiness considerations)? What are the anticipated product characteristics (naturalness, potential risks and sensory qualities)? How is cultured meat expected to influence societies (the role of actors, decision-making and inequities caused by cultured meat)? The uncertainties of these issues have led to conflicting interpretations, which prevent the achievement of a shared definition of cultured meat and complicate the establishment of cultured meat as an accepted food.

Some aspects of naturalness and abstractness in phonology

Abstract: generative phonologists are wrong when they regard French orthography as rational or quasi-optimal (see Dell (1973a: 193)), I cannot follow Martinet: generative phonology is not a 'pretext'. This type of criticism is certainly questionable because it is only a posteriori that analysts discover some regularities in the correlation between underlying representations and conventional spelling. According to Martinet (1969b: 105), many verbs of the second and the third conjugations (that is, verbs whose infinitives do not end in -er) have two stem allomorphs: (i) 'Un th4»e plein en consonne': ils 6crivent /il z ekRiv/ ('they write') ( i i ) 'Un ihdie 6court6 de U consonne finale du pr6c6dent'; j ' 6 c r i s e k R i / ('1 w r i t e ' ) Martinet gives the proper morpho-syntactic contexts in which these allomorphs appear. Final schwa is absent from the phonemic representation of the long allomorph (this detail is crucial because other phonologists will posit a word-final schwa in the phonemic representation of ils 6crivent, for instance, or of all items whose final segment in phonetic representations is a consonant: see §V.2.2 and §V.3). In most cases, in fact, phonemic representations (in structuralist works) are similar to phonetic representations, but without redundant features, such as vowel length. In French, nasal vowels, for instance, are phonemic and contrast with sequences of oral vowel plus nasal consonant, or with oral vowels: bon /bo/ ('good', masculine), beau /bo/ ('beautiful'), bonne /ban/ ('good', feminine). In Malmberg (1971b: 312), we read: 'Je continue done 4 Previous accounts 80 coepter les voye 1 les nasales pani les phondies vocaliques'. For Jakobson & Vaugh (1979: 135), 'atteipts to interpret the French nasal vowels as a eere iipleientation of a sequence -oral vowels ♦ nasal consonant — aeet with a nuaber of obstacles1. Among these 'obstacles', Jakobson & Vaugh mention the nasality contrast in liaison: bon ami /ban ami/ ('good friend'), mon ami /mo n ami/ ('my friend'). V .2.2. Gloesenatics The biphonemic interpretation of nasal vowels would entail that the phonetic sequences of oral vowel plus nasal consonant (e.g., bonne ('good', feminine)) are followed by a schwa: as Malmberg (1971b: 312) notes, this step was taken by the Danish glossematic school, led by Hjelmslev. This constitutes a remarkable exception; glossematicians (see Togeby (1951)) interpret bon tbol ('good', masculine) as /bon/, and bonne [ban! ('good', feminine) as /bona/. In the same way, final consonants are truncated: grand [gRal ('large', masculine) = /gRand/, and grande tgRShdl ('large', feminine) = /gRandd/, where the final schwa 'protects' /d/ from truncation, and is itself truncated. However, more 'orthodox' structuralists have frequently objected to this interpretation of French data: 'Un inconvenient qui est evident et qui consiste en une discordance enone entre la substance et la forme, entre le eodeie et sa manifestation physique1 (Malmberg 1971b: 312), or: 'Le principal inconvenient de ce type d'interpretation est qu'il off re une image compldtement deforce du cotporte»ent des f rangais d'aujourd'hui' (Martinet 1969a: 27). It is also true that although the system is simplified, by Previous accounts 81 dispensing with four nasal phonemes, phonemic strings are made more complex: caneton ('duckling') will be phonemicized as /kanjton/ instead of /kanto/, but as Martinet adds, 4i 1 senble que la siiplicite formaliste s'applique exdusiveient au noibre d'uniUs dans le systdee, et non au noibre d'unitts dans la chaine*. As we 6hail see in §V.3, this type of criticism applies equally to the most classical versions of generative phonology.

Analysis of students' positive emotions around the green space in the university campus during the COVID-19 pandemic in China

Abstract: Green space around the university campus is of paramount importance for emotional and psychological restorations in students. Positive emotions in students can be aroused when immersed in green space and naturalness. However, to what extent can perceived naturalness influence students' positive emotion remains unclear, especially in the context of COVID-19 countermeasures. This study, therefore, attempts to investigate in-depth the nature and strength of the relationships between students' positive emotion and their perceived naturalness, place attachment, and landscape preference, which are potentially varying across universities in different social and environmental contexts and different restrictions policies regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. A course of questionnaire-based surveys was administered on two university campuses in Heilongjiang and Hunan Provinces, China, resulting in 474 effective samples. Structural equation modeling was used to explore the hypothetical conceptual framework of latent variables and the indicators. The findings indicate that the higher students' perceived naturalness results in greater positive emotion. Students' perceived naturalness in green spaces of campus has a positive effect on their place attachment and landscape preference. Moreover, the difference between mediate effects of place attachment and landscape preference were addressed, which verifies the contextual influences.

Natural philosophy versus philosophy of naturalness

Abstract: I reflect on some of the basic aspects of present day Beyond the Standard Model particle physics, focusing mostly on the issues of naturalness, in particular on the so-called hierarchy problem. To ...