Oppressive Things

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system

Gender-biased expectations of altruism in adolescents

Indexación: Scopus.Research suggests that women, but not men, manifest gender-biased expectations of altruism: while women expect other women to be more altruistic, men expect women to be as generous as men. Do adolescents expect women and men to behave differently regarding altruism? I analyse adolescents' gender beliefs about altruism using a modified Dictator Game. Results indicate that adolescents believe that others of same gender are more altruistic than others of the opposite gender. I also found that adolescents' agreement with the existence of different societal roles for men and women moderates the relationship between gender and gender beliefs. Although it was expected that adolescents who agree with different gender roles would expect women to be more generous, surprisingly, the results presented here confirm this only for male adolescents, but in the opposite direction: the more male adolescents agree with the existence of different gender roles, the more they seem to believe that men are more generous than women. Meanwhile, female adolescents believe that women are more altruistic unconditionally. Thus, the previously documented bias seems to be already in place during adolescence, above and beyond other confounding factors. Adolescents' in-group bias, and their socialization into different cultural values regarding gender roles are discussed as potential explanatory mechanisms for these gender beliefs. © 2018 Salgado.https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00484/ful

Efficient randomized-adaptive designs

Response-adaptive randomization has recently attracted a lot of attention in the literature. In this paper, we propose a new and simple family of response-adaptive randomization procedures that attain the Cramer--Rao lower bounds on the allocation variances for any allocation proportions, including optimal allocation proportions. The allocation probability functions of proposed procedures are discontinuous. The existing large sample theory for adaptive designs relies on Taylor expansions of the allocation probability functions, which do not apply to nondifferentiable cases. In the present paper, we study stopping times of stochastic processes to establish the asymptotic efficiency results. Furthermore, we demonstrate our proposal through examples, simulations and a discussion on the relationship with earlier works, including Efron's biased coin design.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS655 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Quantum Matching Pennies Game

A quantum version of the Matching Pennies (MP) game is proposed that is played using an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm (EPR-Bohm) setting. We construct the quantum game without using the state vectors, while considering only the quantum mechanical joint probabilities relevant to the EPR-Bohm setting. We embed the classical game within the quantum game such that the classical MP game results when the quantum mechanical joint probabilities become factorizable. We report new Nash equilibria in the quantum MP game that emerge when the quantum mechanical joint probabilities maximally violate the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt form of Bell's inequality.Comment: Revised in light of referees' comments, submitted to Journal of the Physical Society of Japan, 14 pages, 1 figur

Sequential monitoring of response-adaptive randomized clinical trials

Clinical trials are complex and usually involve multiple objectives such as controlling type I error rate, increasing power to detect treatment difference, assigning more patients to better treatment, and more. In literature, both response-adaptive randomization (RAR) procedures (by changing randomization procedure sequentially) and sequential monitoring (by changing analysis procedure sequentially) have been proposed to achieve these objectives to some degree. In this paper, we propose to sequentially monitor response-adaptive randomized clinical trial and study it's properties. We prove that the sequential test statistics of the new procedure converge to a Brownian motion in distribution. Further, we show that the sequential test statistics asymptotically satisfy the canonical joint distribution defined in Jennison and Turnbull (\citeyearJT00). Therefore, type I error and other objectives can be achieved theoretically by selecting appropriate boundaries. These results open a door to sequentially monitor response-adaptive randomized clinical trials in practice. We can also observe from the simulation studies that, the proposed procedure brings together the advantages of both techniques, in dealing with power, total sample size and total failure numbers, while keeps the type I error. In addition, we illustrate the characteristics of the proposed procedure by redesigning a well-known clinical trial of maternal-infant HIV transmission.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOS796 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Cooperative Parrondo's Games on a Two-dimensional Lattice

Cooperative Parrondo's games on a regular two dimensional lattice are analyzed based on the computer simulations and on the discrete-time Markov chain model with exact transition probabilities. The paradox appears in the vicinity of the probabilites characterisitic of the "voter model", suggesting practical applications. As in the one-dimensional case, winning and the occurrence of the paradox depends on the number of players.Comment: Presented at the 3rd Int. Conference NEXT-SigmaPhi; Figures not include