197 research outputs found
The psychological perspective on religious experience
It might be expected that those concerned with psychology and religion would have a lot in
common: both are concerned with understanding human life and finding how to live it
better. However, it turns out that each side knows very little about the other, and what they
think they know is often wrong. Some kinds of psychology in the past have been definitely
anti-religious, as in the case of âbehaviourism', which is now extinct since all psychologists
now recognise the importance of cognitive processes and even consciousness. There is also
the fear that psychology will try to explain religion away in entirely human terms
The psychological explanation of religious experience
The article presents a number of empirical studies in the psychology of religion. How often is religious experiences found in surveys? To what extent can religious experience be influenced by drugs? What is the psychological content of religious experience, and what effects does it have on the personal life of the individual involved?The article presents a number of empirical studies in the psychology of religion. How often is religious experiences found in surveys? To what extent can religious experience be influenced by drugs? What is the psychological content of religious experience, and what effects does it have on the personal life of the individual involved
Towards Coding Social Science Datasets with Language Models
Researchers often rely on humans to code (label, annotate, etc.) large sets
of texts. This kind of human coding forms an important part of social science
research, yet the coding process is both resource intensive and highly variable
from application to application. In some cases, efforts to automate this
process have achieved human-level accuracies, but to achieve this, these
attempts frequently rely on thousands of hand-labeled training examples, which
makes them inapplicable to small-scale research studies and costly for large
ones. Recent advances in a specific kind of artificial intelligence tool -
language models (LMs) - provide a solution to this problem. Work in computer
science makes it clear that LMs are able to classify text, without the cost (in
financial terms and human effort) of alternative methods. To demonstrate the
possibilities of LMs in this area of political science, we use GPT-3, one of
the most advanced LMs, as a synthetic coder and compare it to human coders. We
find that GPT-3 can match the performance of typical human coders and offers
benefits over other machine learning methods of coding text. We find this
across a variety of domains using very different coding procedures. This
provides exciting evidence that language models can serve as a critical advance
in the coding of open-ended texts in a variety of applications
Increasing Serversâ Tips: What Managers Can Do and Why They Should Do It
Tipping is generally regarded in the industry as more of a server concern than a managerial one. For this reason, it is the rare restaurant executive or manager who tries to actively influence the level of his or her serversâ tip incomes. I believe that is a mistake --that restaurant executives and managers can and should increase their serversâ tip incomes. First, I present several tactics that servers can use to increase their own tips. Then, I describe the role that executives and managers can play in encouraging serversâ use of these tactics. Finally, I explain how executives and managers will benefit from encouraging servers to try these tactics
The Central Engines of 19 LINERs as Viewed by Chandra
Using archival Chandra observations of 19 LINERs we explore the X-ray
properties of their inner kiloparsec to determine the origin of their nuclear
X-ray emission, to investigate the presence of an AGN, and to identify the
power source of the optical emission lines. The relative numbers of LINER types
in our sample are similar to those in optical spectroscopic surveys. We find
that diffuse, thermal emission is very common and is concentrated within the
central few hundred parsec. The average spectra of the hot gas in spirals and
ellipticals are very similar to those of normal galaxies. They can be fitted
with a thermal plasma (kT~0.5 keV) plus a power law (photon index of 1.3-1.5)
model. There are on average 3 detected point sources in their inner kiloparsec
with L(0.5-10 keV)~10^37-10^40 erg/s. The average cumulative luminosity
functions for sources in spirals and ellipticals are identical to those of
normal galaxies. In the innermost circle of 2.5" radius in each galaxy we find
an AGN in 12 of the 19 galaxies. The AGNs contribute a median of 60% of the
0.5-10 keV luminosity of the central 2.5" region, they have luminosities of
10^37-10^39 erg/s (Eddington ratios 10^-8 to 10^-5). The ionizing luminosity of
the AGNs is not enough to power the observed optical emission lines in this
particular sample. Thus, we suggest that the lines are powered either by the
mechanical interaction of an AGN jet (or wind) with the circumnuclear gas, or
by stellar processes, e.g. photoionization by post-AGB stars or young stars.Comment: Accepted by Ap.J. 23 pages, 8 figures, emulatepj format, images of
fig 1 not included, for complete PDF preprint see
http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/mce/preprints
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Boss competence and worker well-being
Nearly all workers have a supervisor or âboss.â Yet little is known about how bosses influence the quality of employeesâ lives. This study offers new evidence. First, the authors find that a bossâs technical competence is the single strongest predictor of a workerâs job satisfaction. Second, they demonstrate using longitudinal data, after controlling for fixed-effects, that even if a worker stays in the same job and workplace, a rise in the competence of a supervisor is associated with an improvement in the workerâs well-being. Third, the authors report a variety of robustness checks, including tentative instrumental variable results. These findings, which draw on U.S. and British data, contribute to an emerging literature on the role of âexpert leadersâ in organizations
Money, sex and happiness : an empirical study
The links between income, sexual behavior and reported happiness are studied using recent data on a sample of 16,000 adult Americans. The paper finds that sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations. Higher income does not buy more sex or more sexual partners. Married people have more sex than those who are single, divorced, widowed or separated. The happinessâmaximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1. Highly educated females tend to have fewer sexual partners. Homosexuality has no statistically significant effect on happiness
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