Stereotypes as Shared Beliefs: Effects of Group Identity on Dyadic Conversations

Two experiments examined the influence of stereotypes on dyadic conversations. Undergraduate students listened to a recorded interview of a student who was described as either a member of their in-group or of an out-group. The interview contained stereotype-consistent (SC) and stereotype-inconsistent (SI) descriptions of each group. Participants' conversations about the stimulus person were content-analyzed. One most consistent result was that for the out-group target, participants made more SI than SC utterances and spent more time discussing SI information. The difference between SC and SI utterances disappeared (Study 2) or was reversed (Study 1) for the in-group target. These patterns were observed particularly when the stimulus information contained a balanced combination of SC and SI characteristics. Furthermore, the stereotypicality of the conversations was related not only to the participant's own judgments but also to the partner's judgments. The significance of studying stereotypes as collectively shared intergroup attitudes is discussed

Fatal Asthma with Rhabdomyolysis Induced by Hair Dye

Hair dyes have been reported to cause exacerbation of asthma in hairdressers through occupational exposure. We report a 54-year-old housewife who developed a fatal asthma attack following the use of a hair dye at home. She was admitted semiconscious with multiple organ failure. Laboratory findings were indicative of rhabdomyolysis. Skin prick and interdermal tests with hair dyes were performed. Hair dyes can be nonspecific stimuli that cause an asthma attack. But in our case, we cannot deny the possibility that the attack resulted from antigen-antibody reaction by the hair dye. We should warn that hair dyes can cause an asthma attack not only through occupational exposure but also through occasional domestic use

Laser-driven multi-MeV high-purity proton acceleration via anisotropic ambipolar expansion of micron-scale hydrogen clusters

強力なレーザーを使ってエネルギーがそろった純度100％の陽子ビーム発生に成功 --レーザー駆動陽子ビーム加速器の実現へ向けて大きく前進--. 京都大学プレスリリース. 2022-10-13.Multi-MeV high-purity proton acceleration by using a hydrogen cluster target irradiated with repetitive, relativistic intensity laser pulses has been demonstrated. Statistical analysis of hundreds of data sets highlights the existence of markedly high energy protons produced from the laser-irradiated clusters with micron-scale diameters. The spatial distribution of the accelerated protons is found to be anisotropic, where the higher energy protons are preferentially accelerated along the laser propagation direction due to the relativistic effect. These features are supported by three-dimensional (3D) particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations, which show that directional, higher energy protons are generated via the anisotropic ambipolar expansion of the micron-scale clusters. The number of protons accelerating along the laser propagation direction is found to be as high as 1.6 ±0.3 × 10⁹/MeV/sr/shot with an energy of 2.8 ±1.9 MeV, indicating that laser-driven proton acceleration using the micron-scale hydrogen clusters is promising as a compact, repetitive, multi-MeV high-purity proton source for various applications

Agent-based modeling of how national identity affects party preferences in voting

Attitudes concerning national identity (e.g., nationalism, patriotism) are known to correlate with various social behaviorssuch as party preferences in voting. For instance, survey data indicates that Japanese citizens who are proud of beingJapanese (i.e., patriots) and those who are high in a right-wing tendency are more willing to vote for the conservative party(Liberal Democratic Party). In this study, we employed an agent-based modeling approach to understand how nationalidentity affects individual voting intentions. The individual agents and the political party agents interacted with each otherby spreading their political attitudes (e.g., VAT should be increased to maintain the pension insurance system), and therecipients of the messages changed their attitudes (e.g., persuasion). The simulation revealed that the effects of persuasivemessages were moderated by the strength of its own national identity attitudes, and the resultant individual agents votingpreferences simulated the human participants data more precisely

Analysis Method of Laser-accelerated Sub-GeV-class Proton Tracks in Emulsion Cloud Chamber using Deep Learning Technique

In the interaction between intense laser and the target matter, near-100-MeV proton acceleration is demonstrated. It offers that the potential to realize a energy saving compact particle accelerators in the future. To understand the acceleration process mechanism, precise measurement of both the energy spectrum and the two-dimensional distribution is required. Against this background, we have developed a new measurement method for laser-accelerated sub-GeV-class protons using the nuclear emulsion. Based on the Multiple Coulomb Scattering (MCS) method in an Emulsion Cloud Chamber (ECC), which is a stack of nuclear emulsion films and scatterer plates, the incident energies were inversely evaluated by the scattering angle. The proof-of-principle simulation has been conducted with GEANT-4 Monte Carlo code. To analyze the proton tracks, we have applied the deep learning technique to obtain the incident energy from the amount of MCS in each layer of nuclear emulsion. The median of energy determination coefficient is 0.73 with ramp activation function. The coefficients of the present studies are equal or smaller than the conventional regression model, and we are trying to improve the determination coefficient by optimization of the calculation conditions.ICMaSS202

Fatal Asthma with Rhabdomyolysis Induced by Hair Dye

Hair dyes have been reported to cause exacerbation of asthma in hairdressers through occupational exposure. We report a 54-year-old housewife who developed a fatal asthma attack following the use of a hair dye at home. She was admitted semiconscious with multiple organ failure. Laboratory findings were indicative of rhabdomyolysis. Skin prick and interdermal tests with hair dyes were performed. Hair dyes can be nonspecific stimuli that cause an asthma attack. But in our case, we cannot deny the possibility that the attack resulted from antigen-antibody reaction by the hair dye. We should warn that hair dyes can cause an asthma attack not only through occupational exposure but also through occasional domestic use

The Sense of Verisimilitude Has Different Spatial-Temporal Characteristics from Those Producing the Sense of Presence in the Evaluation Process of Audiovisual Contents

Realization of high-definition multimodal displays is keenly required for the advancement of information and communications technologies. As an index of high-definition display systems, the sense of presence has been widely investigated. Both theoretically and empirically such sense has been found to relate more dominantly to background components contained in a scene. In contrast, the appreciative role of foreground components in multimodal contents has not been investigated in detail. Therefore, we have been focusing on the sense of verisimilitude as another index. We recently studied how the sense of verisimilitude and the sense of presence were affected by temporal asynchrony between foreground audio-visual components of a Japanese garden and suggested that the sense of verisimilitude has significantly different characteristics from the sense of presence. To investigate whether this result would be valid more generally, we conducted an experiment using other audio-visual content, namely, a clip of western orchestral music. Results showed the sense of verisimilitude is more sensitive to audiovisual synchronicity than to display size, while the sense of presence is more sensitive to spatial size than the temporal property. Hence, the sense of verisimilitude can be another useful index, distinguishable from the sense of presence