Beneficial Assessment Outcomes from Frequent Testing

When faced with deadlines, people tend to procrastinate. Students do this by delaying study time until examinations are so close the only option left is cramming. This procrastination scallop is a well-established behavioral phenomenon in both human and infrahuman species. Distributed practice also has been demonstrated to be superior to massed practice in the cognitive literature. Frequent testing provides opportunities for distributed practice and rehearsals that fill the gap between acquisition and the big test, creating its own mini-scallops. In sections of Introductory Psychology, Research Design, and Learning and Behavior courses, standard pre-post testing was conducted at the start and end of the semester over many years. No weekly quizzes were required in one course for a few semesters,in contrast to the remaining courses. Mean assessment gains were substantially bigger with than without weekly quizzes and the difference was statistically significant. The results indicate beneficial assessment gains in learning from frequent quizzes and suggest potential alternative strategies for faculty to implement low-cost effective instructional practices that students may benefit from

Place of behavior analysis in the changing culture of replication and statistical reporting in psychological science

The “new” psychological science seeks to promote a culture of replication in response to rampant publication bias and some controversial failures to replicate. Two of the solutions adopted are the emphases on the New Statistics by Psychological Science and the growing use of replication repositories. Where does behavior analytic research fit in this effort? Although experimental and applied research methods in behavior analysis naturally are replication focused and replication friendly, trending growth in group designs in different areas of behavior analytic research suggests that we should be sharing the concerns in the broader psychological science community. What measures, if any, are behavior analytic journals taking or should be taking to address these concerns? Not all of the solutions under consideration in the “new” psychological science are amenable to behavior analytic research. How do we proceed? Recommendations include formulating editorial policies in behavior analytic journals and organizational programming collaborations, for example, between Association for Behavior Analysis International and the Association for Psychological Science

Multiscale Investigation of the Nonlinear Rheology of Wormlike Micelles

Wormlike micelles (WLMs) are formed by reversible self-assembly of amphiphilic (e.g. surfactant) molecules usually with the aid of salt which acts to screen the electrostatic repulsion between the micelles to achieve giant structures. Their unique dynamics such as reversible scission give them interesting rheological properties which are sought in several industrial applications. It is therefore imperative to understand and predict these phenomena in WLMs using constitutive equations that incorporate reversible scission into the deformation dynamics of WLMs. We compare the predictions of the Vasquez-Cook-McKinley (VCM) (2007) model which treats WLMs as Hookean dumbbells that break at half-length to form two shorter dumbbells, to an analogous Brownian dynamics (BD) simulation of the same physical model. We find a discrepancy between their predictions and trace it to the absence in the VCM model of the internal position of the nascent breakage point in the long micelle, which is needed to satisfy microscopic reversibility of breakage and fusion. We correct this deficiency in the VCM model by extending an ensemble-averaged bead-spring phase space model of Wiest et al. (1989) to include reversible scission of two-spring chains. The revision tracks the conformations of the two halves of the long micelle and transmits this information to the short micelles upon breakage and thereby recovers complete agreement with the BD results. We extend the reversible scission kinetics to the slip-link tube model of Likhtman (2005) originally formulated for single polymer chains with entanglements. This facilitates the simulation of entangled WLMs and enables us to study the effects of entanglements on WLM rheology. We observe increased stresses for start-up shear flows in the entangled WLMs when breakage time was equal to reptation time. We propose that reversible scission acts as a means of constraint release which re-orientates chain segments in the velocity gradient direction and prevent retraction in the tube thereby causing increased stress. However, stress overshoot caused by the relaxation of the peak stress to a lower steady stress was observed in the fast-breaking regime. This suggests that reversible scission functions as both stress relaxation and constraint release mechanisms. We then investigate strain hardening, a nonlinear rheological property. We explore different kinds of WLMs for strain hardening and systematically study their strain hardening dependence on salt concentration and temperature. By measuring stress relaxation following a step strain, we observe that strain hardening is prevalent over a temperature range of 15 - 25 C for a solution of cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) with the added hydrotrope, sodium salicylate at hydrotrope-to-surfactant concentration ratios between 0.5 - 3.0. The extent of strain hardening upon nonlinear step-strain deformation varies non-monotonically as a function of salt-to-surfactant ratio for different temperatures. A transition from strain hardening to softening or linear response is observed at strains that are dependent on temperature and concentration. Strain hardening was also observed in solutions of CTAB and hydrotrope, sodium 3-hydroxy-2-naphthoate. However, solutions of anionic sodium lauryl sulfate surfactants without hydrotrope but simple salt, sodium chloride strain softened, indicating that the hydrotrope is crucial to obtaining strain hardening in step strains. The results indicate a stress relaxation mechanism that is more complex than that of simple disentanglement and reversible scission, possibly involving strain-induced associations between micelles facilitated by hydrotropes that may act as physical crosslinkers.PHDChemical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145970/1/adamsaa_1.pd

The shaping of a saint-president: Latent clues from Nelson Mandela\u27s autobiography

Nelson Mandela\u27s Long Walk to Freedom provides evidence organized in the form of antecedent-behavior-consequence units, which suggest that a shaping process effected during his many years of incarceration best describes the origins of the outcome represented by the political order in South Africa following his release. The analysis shows that Mandela\u27s radicalism at the start of his imprisonment on Robben Island changed into a saintly presidential aura in the end, through a systematic selection process that actively involved Mandela himself and his political aspirations. The saintly qualities ascribed to Mandela after his release by many around the world are consistent with Skinner\u27s (1971) views on autonomous man

A Study to Improve Warehouse Operation Management in SME in Saudi Arabia

Warehouse management consider as one essential part of the supply chain management. That actually is acting as a backbone, starting from orders and receives goods from the suppliers up to the next stages in the supply chain from releasing and delivering the goods to the customers. Warehouse management plays a very important role in the daily running business flow. In today's global business environment, computer systems are involved in business process providing quality products and efficient services are vital to staying competitive. Companies must eliminate inefficiencies, monitor productivity, and continually improve their operational performance in order to keep pace. In past, warehouses were managed with traditional processing techniques before computers and technologies were introduced to global markets business. Stockholders used to traditionally manage their business processes such as inventory, warehouse, shipping etc. The sole purpose of conducting this research is to improve the warehouse management tools used in our present time, warehouse management software development industry and the techniques that could improve the warehouse management in the organization. The author believes that the warehouse management shall be categorized as an IT field as much as a business field and a good alignment between both these fields will lead any organization to their success

The Day After: What to Expect in Post-Islamic State Mosul

Over recent months, the Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq has lost territory to the Syrian army, opposition forces in Syria, the reorganised Iraqi Security Forces and the Hashed Al-Sha’bi (Popular Mobilization Forces – PMF), as well as to Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq. These losses have led to heightened speculation that an assault on the IS stronghold of Mosul may happen sooner rather than later. However, with such speculation comes the fear of ‘the day after’, and what could be expected to happen in Mosul – a traditional focal point of Arab and Iraqi nationalists – and a city that was the centre of Iraq’s military establishment throughout the twentieth century. Tallha Abdulrazaq and Gareth Stansfield investigate this ‘day after’ question, highlighting the potential problems that may emerge following IS’s departure from the city

Students’ attitudes towards Kurdology Course

This study examines students' attitudes towards studying kurdology course at university level in Duhok. Attitude is considered as a necessary component in language learning. Therefore, a positive attitude is considered as one of the important factors that have an impact on language learning. By providing insight into the attitudes students towards learning Kurdish, It contributes to the teaching of Kurdish as a foreign language. The main purpose of this research is to reveal students' attitudes towards learning Kurdish and find out how to make their attitudes positive. Language educators who know how to develop positive attitudes in students will be able to conduct interesting and effective classroom activities; get them to be more successful in learning Kurdish. The researcher used a questionnaire to obtain data about the learners' attitudes and analyse them. 112 students from different universities in Duhok participated in this study. The findings shows that there is positive relationship between emotional, behavioural and cognitive attitudes towards learning Kurdish language, however the highest value was for behavioural attitudes

A snapshot look at replication and statistical reporting practices in psychology journals

Current efforts started in 2012 by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) appear to be different from previous arguments against null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST), which remained largely rhetorical without specific actions for compliance by researchers in psychology. The APS advocacy involves specific promising implementation tactics. The present study examined the impact of those efforts on replication and statistical reporting practices in four psychology journals from 2011 and 2015. The results showed that amidst increased reporting of NHST statistics in 2015 compared to 2011 and an absence of power reporting in the behavioral journals, there was increased reporting of actual replications in Psychological Science, paradoxically surpassing Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, of CIs in all four journals, and of error bars on graphs in Cognition and Behavioural Processes. These trends suggest need for additional efforts at propagating the APS initiatives to ensure greater impact in the broader psychological community. Additionally, psychologists from all domains need to become advocates of best practices for sustainable impact