Impulsive people have a compulsion for immediate gratification-certain or uncertain.

Impulsivity has been defined as choosing the smaller more immediate reward over a larger more delayed reward. The purpose of this research was to gain a deeper understanding of the mental processes involved in the decision making. We examined participants' rates of delay discounting and probability discounting to determine their correlation with time-probability trade-offs. To establish the time-probability trade-off rate, participants adjusted a risky, immediate payoff to a delayed, certain payoff. In effect, this yielded a probability equivalent of waiting time. We found a strong, positive correlation between delay discount rates and the time-probability trade-offs. This means that impulsive people have a compulsion for immediate gratification, independent of whether the immediate reward is certain or uncertain. Thus, they seem not to be concerned with risk but rather with time

Combining Visual and Textual Features for Semantic Segmentation of Historical Newspapers

The massive amounts of digitized historical documents acquired over the last decades naturally lend themselves to automatic processing and exploration. Research work seeking to automatically process facsimiles and extract information thereby are multiplying with, as a first essential step, document layout analysis. If the identification and categorization of segments of interest in document images have seen significant progress over the last years thanks to deep learning techniques, many challenges remain with, among others, the use of finer-grained segmentation typologies and the consideration of complex, heterogeneous documents such as historical newspapers. Besides, most approaches consider visual features only, ignoring textual signal. In this context, we introduce a multimodal approach for the semantic segmentation of historical newspapers that combines visual and textual features. Based on a series of experiments on diachronic Swiss and Luxembourgish newspapers, we investigate, among others, the predictive power of visual and textual features and their capacity to generalize across time and sources. Results show consistent improvement of multimodal models in comparison to a strong visual baseline, as well as better robustness to high material variance

Sentiment Analysis for Words and Fiction Characters From The Perspective of Computational (Neuro-)Poetics

Two computational studies provide different sentiment analyses for text segments (e.g., ‘fearful’ passages) and figures (e.g., ‘Voldemort’) from the Harry Potter books (Rowling, 1997 - 2007) based on a novel simple tool called SentiArt. The tool uses vector space models together with theory-guided, empirically validated label lists to compute the valence of each word in a text by locating its position in a 2d emotion potential space spanned by the > 2 million words of the vector space model. After testing the tool’s accuracy with empirical data from a neurocognitive study, it was applied to compute emotional figure profiles and personality figure profiles (inspired by the so-called ‚big five’ personality theory) for main characters from the book series. The results of comparative analyses using different machine-learning classifiers (e.g., AdaBoost, Neural Net) show that SentiArt performs very well in predicting the emotion potential of text passages. It also produces plausible predictions regarding the emotional and personality profile of fiction characters which are correctly identified on the basis of eight character features, and it achieves a good cross-validation accuracy in classifying 100 figures into ‘good’ vs. ‘bad’ ones. The results are discussed with regard to potential applications of SentiArt in digital literary, applied reading and neurocognitive poetics studies such as the quantification of the hybrid hero potential of figures

A Bibliography on the Application of GIS in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) applications to archaeological projects of different scales, chronological contexts and cultural milieux has accrued by now a long history and bibliography. Hopefully the phases of experimentation and almost blind testing are over, even if GIS applications are still sometimes being labeled as “new technologies”

Geographic Availability of Assistance Dogs: Dogs Placed in 2013-2014 by ADI- or IGDF-Accredited or Candidate Facilities in the United States and Canada, and Non-accredited U.S. Facilities.

Assistance dogs' roles have diversified to support people with various disabilities, especially in the U.S. Data presented here are from the U.S. and Canada non-profit facilities (including both accredited and candidate members that fulfilled partial requirements: all here termed "accredited") of Assistance Dogs International (ADI) and the International Guide Dog Federation (IGDF), and from non-accredited U.S. assistance dog training facilities, on the numbers and types of dogs they placed in 2013 and 2014 with persons who have disabilities. ADI categories of assistance dogs are for guide, hearing, and service (including for assistance with mobility, autism, psychiatric, diabetes, seizure disabilities). Accredited facilities in 28 states and 3 provinces responded; accredited non-responding facilities were in 22 states and 1 province (some in states/provinces with responding accredited facilities). Non-accredited facilities in 16 states responded. U.S./Canada responding accredited facilities (55 of 96: 57%) placed 2,374 dogs; non-accredited U.S. facilities (22 of 133: 16.5%) placed 797 dogs. Accredited facilities placed similar numbers of dogs for guiding (n = 918) or mobility (n = 943), but many more facilities placed mobility service dogs than guide dogs. Autism service dogs were third most for accredited (n = 205 placements) and U.S. non-accredited (n = 72) facilities. Psychiatric service dogs were fourth most common in accredited placements (n = 119) and accounted for most placements (n = 526) in non-accredited facilities. Other accredited placements were for: hearing (n = 109); diabetic alert (n = 69), and seizure response (n = 11). Responding non-accredited facilities placed 17 hearing dogs, 30 diabetic alert dogs, and 18 seizure response dogs. Non-accredited facilities placed many dogs for psychiatric assistance, often for veterans, but ADI accreditation is required for veterans to have financial reimbursement. Twenty states and several provinces had no responding facilities; 17 of these states had no accredited facilities. In regions lacking facilities, some people with disabilities may find it inconvenient living far from any supportive facility, even if travel costs are provided. Despite accelerated U.S./Canada placements, access to well-trained assistance dogs continues to be limited and inconvenient for many people with disabilities, and the numerous sources of expensive, poorly trained dogs add confusion for potential handlers

Automatic Palaeographic Exploration of Genizah Manuscripts

The Cairo Genizah is a collection of hand-written documents containing approximately 350,000 fragments of mainly Jewish texts discovered in the late 19th century. The fragments are today spread out in some 75 libraries and private collections worldwide, but there is an ongoing effort to document and catalogue all extant fragments. Palaeographic information plays a key role in the study of the Genizah collection. Script style, and–more specifically–handwriting, can be used to identify fragments that might originate from the same original work. Such matched fragments, commonly referred to as “joins”, are currently identified manually by experts, and presumably only a small fraction of existing joins have been discovered to date. In this work, we show that automatic handwriting matching functions, obtained from non-specific features using a corpus of writing samples, can perform this task quite reliably. In addition, we explore the problem of grouping various Genizah documents by script style, without being provided any prior information about the relevant styles. The automatically obtained grouping agrees, for the most part, with the palaeographic taxonomy. In cases where the method fails, it is due to apparent similarities between related scripts

Hostile gatekeeping: The strategy of engaging with journalists in extremism reporting

This article broadly examines the relationship between strategic communications and journalism with specific reference to the issue of violent extremism. Using a case study of reporting on the Boko Haram conflict in Nigeria, it analyses the nature and consequences of engagement among the various communicators involved. The primary data were drawn from focus groups and individual interviews with thirty-two journalists and strategic communicators, and from analysis of Boko Haram videos and Nigerian security forces’ press releases. The findings suggest that journalists have a tense but interdependent relationship with strategic communicators that is characterised by conflict and cooperation, harassment and intimidation. Strategic communicators’ control of the conflict theatre and use of the Internet to reach audiences directly give them leverage in the relationship. They, however, rely on journalists to help enhance the reach and credibility of their narratives, while journalists depend significantly on their media releases

The Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus: Exemplary Quantitative Narrative Analyses

This paper describes a corpus of about 3,000 English literary texts with about 250 million words extracted from the Gutenberg project that span a range of genres from both fiction and non-fiction written by more than 130 authors (e.g., Darwin, Dickens, Shakespeare). Quantitative narrative analysis (QNA) is used to explore a cleaned subcorpus, the Gutenberg English Poetry Corpus (GEPC), which comprises over 100 poetic texts with around two million words from about 50 authors (e.g., Keats, Joyce, Wordsworth). Some exemplary QNA studies show author similarities based on latent semantic analysis, significant topics for each author or various text-analytic metrics for George Eliot’s poem “How Lisa Loved the King” and James Joyce’s “Chamber Music,” concerning, e.g., lexical diversity or sentiment analysis. The GEPC is particularly suited for research in Digital Humanities, Computational Stylistics, or Neurocognitive Poetics, e.g., as training and test corpus for stimulus development and control in empirical studies