How do failed coups influence power personalization in dictatorships? While scholars have studied the mechanisms of personalism in dictatorships in detail, little attention has been paid to the timing and determinants of surges in personalism levels. In this article, we propose that personalism can evolve non-linearly, and show that large, quite rapid increases in personalization by dictators occur after a failed coup attempt. The logic is that failed coups are information-revealing events that provide the dictator with strong motives and ample opportunities to accumulate power. The leader uses this window of opportunity to rapidly consolidate his power at the expense of the ruling coalition. We test the theory using time-series, cross-sectional data on dictatorships in 114 countries in the period between 1946 and 2010. Two placebo tests indicate that disruptive events by regime outsiders – failed assassination attempts and civil war onsets – do not promote the rush to personalize.

Major depression is a serious, disabling, often chronic or recurrent mental disorder affecting over 350 million people worldwide. Treatment of major depression is now conceptualized as proceeding through three phases: the acute phase, the continuation phase, and the remission phase. Patients not achieving remission after several treatment trials are defined treatment-resistant, but a debate is ongoing regarding how many trials must fail before a patient can be defined as “treatment-resistant”. It must be acknowledged that depression is a heterogeneous disease, and several personal, socio-cultural and clinical factors should be taken into account in order to develop a personalized management plan for patients with major depression. A new concept of “difficult to treat depression” has been recently proposed. According to this concept, when a complete control of the disorder is not feasible, the treatment should aim at minimizing the impact of symptoms and the side effects of treatments on patients’ daily lives. Moreover, the concept of difficult to treat depression includes the presence of co-occurring problems/ behaviours/ disorders/ situations, which can worsen the course or management of depression. The management of patients with treatment resistant depression includes the optimization of disease management, in terms of symptom control, improvement of daily functioning and of quality of life. However, an approach aiming to personalize treatment of patients with major depressive disorder and focused on the specific clinical features of each patient can be valuable for optimizing the treatment of patients with resistant depression.

Extracurricular reading is important for learning foreign languages. Text recommendation systems typically classify users and documents into levels, and then match users with documents at the same level. Although this approach can be effective, it has two significant shortcomings. First, the levels assume a standard order of language acquisition and cannot be personalized to the users’ learning patterns. Second, recommendation decisions are not transparent because the leveling algorithms can be difficult for users to interpret. We propose a novel method for text recommendation that addresses these two issues. To enhance personalization, an open, editable learner model estimates user knowledge of each word in the foreign language. The documents are ranked by new-word density (NWD) – that is, the percentage of words that are new to the user in the document. The system then recommends documents according to a user-specified target NWD. This design offers complete transparency as users can scrutinize recommendations by reviewing the NWD estimation of the learner model. This article describes an implementation of this method in a mobile app for learners of Chinese as a foreign language. Evaluation results show that users were able to manipulate the learner model and NWD parameters to adjust the difficulty of the recommended documents. In a survey, users reported satisfaction with both the concept and implementation of this text recommendation method.

DocuSky is a personal digital humanities platform for humanities scholars, which aims to become a platform on which a scholar can satisfy all her digital needs with no direct IT assistance. To this end, DocuSky provides tools for a scholar to download material from the Web and prepare (annotating, building metadata) her material, a one-click function to build a full-text searchable database, and tools for analysis and visualization. DocuSky advocates the separation of digital content and tools. Being an open platform, it encourages IT developers to build tools to suit scholars’ needs, and it has already incorporated several popular Web resources and external tools into its environment. Interoperability is ensured through the format DocuXML. In addition to describing the design principles of DocuSky, we will show its main features, together with several important tools and examples. DocuSky was originally developed for Sinological studies. We are enriching it to work in other languages.

The personalization of politics, the decline of political parties and the weakening of political institutions in large democracies are considered to produce instability and to undermine democratic governance. Yet despite having extremely informal and personalized systems with non-ideological parties, small states around the world maintain significantly higher levels of democracy and regime stability than large ones. This article addresses this paradox by offering a systematic literature review of 167 case study publications on personalization and informal politics in 46 small states. The analysis reveals that personalized relations between political elites translate into either fragmentation or power concentration, while pervasive patron–client linkages structure the interaction between citizens and politicians. Despite the obvious downsides of these dynamics for democratic governance, the small state system is functional in the sense that it fulfils the needs of both citizens and politicians, which explains why small states have succeeded in maintaining their political stability.

Emotional appeals have always been an important instrument in the mobilization of political support in modern societies. As found in several experimental studies from the United States, the emotions displayed by leading politicians in their televised public appearances have an impact on the political attitudes and behaviors of the public. Positive emotions such as joy or happiness, pride, and amusement elicit a more positive assessment of politicians, whereas showing negative emotions such as anger or outrage often diminishes the public’s support. This transfer of emotions from sender to recipient has been described as “emotional contagion.” However, under specific circumstances, emotions expressed by politicians can result in counter-empathic reactions among recipients. To examine the role of emotions between political leaders and the public in an institutional and cultural setting outside the United States, this article presents experimental findings on the impact of emotions expressed by two leading German politicians on the German public. The study used emotional displays by Chancellor Angela Merkel and former parliamentary leader of the Left Party, Gregor Gysi, observing how their assessments by the German public changed in response to these displays. Consistent with existing research, we discovered positive effects on the evaluation of both politicians when they displayed positive emotions. However, the impact of negative emotions is different for Merkel and Gysi and can be described as contagion in the former and counter-contagion in the latter case. Furthermore, we found that individual recognition of the expressed emotions modified the effect they had on the evaluation of some leadership characteristics.

This article reviews books which test the personalization of politics, looking at different dimensions of the growing importance of leaders over time, namely for political parties, in electoral behaviour and in the media. Only recently have wide-ranging comparative longitudinal studies on leaders been carried out. The personalization thesis is not equally demonstrated across all dimensions. Indeed, we find something of a puzzle: There is no strong trend towards personalization of party organizations, whereas in electoral behaviour the evidence points to the increasing use by voters of leaders as heuristics. This attests to the decline of the importance of parties. The personalization of media may be the mechanism which explains the change in voting behaviour, and the third and final section of the review looks into that arena. We conclude with some suggestions on further research on the personalization of politics.

Knowledge-based configurators are supporting configuration tasks for complex products such as telecommunication systems, computers, or financial services. Product configurations have to fulfill the requirements articulated by the user and the constraints contained in the configuration knowledge base. If the user requirements are inconsistent with the constraints in the configuration knowledge base, users have to be supported in finding out a way from the no solution could be found dilemma. In this paper we introduce a new algorithm (PersDiag) that allows the determination of personalized diagnoses for inconsistent user requirements in knowledge-based configuration scenarios. We present the results of an empirical study that show the advantages of our approach in terms of prediction quality and efficiency.

The purpose of this study was to provide an empirical measure of bedroom personalization and a descriptive characterization of the types of items included in a personalized space. The study compared the extent of personalization in three types of bedrooms, varying as to their homelike quality (private-homelike, private-institutional, and ward-institutional). A measure of the relative degree of personalization was obtained by recording the number of personal items for each room and dividing the number of items per room by each room's available vertical and horizontal surface area. The degree of personalization was found to be significantly greater in private-homelike rooms than in private-institutional or ward-institutional rooms. This study provides the first demonstration that personalization of a resident's bedroom can be quantified and opens the way for studies of factors contributing to the effect (e.g., facility regulations, family, and staff attitudes) and empirical studies of presumed consequences (e.g., resident satisfaction and improved functioning).