The Heart Wants What It Wants: Effects of Desirability and Body Part Salience on Distance Perceptions (Heath)

Previous research has shown that the desirability of an object influences perceived distance from the object, such that desirable objects are perceived as closer than objects that are not desirable (Balcetis & Dunning, 2010). It has also been suggested that metaphors reflect how our knowledge is represented; so, for example, making the head or heart more salient produces characteristics commonly associated with those body parts (i.e., emotionality for the heart, rationality for the head) (Fetterman & Robinson, 2013). The current study examined the effects of head or heart salience and object desirability on distance perception. We hypothesized that, since common idioms relate the heart to desirability, salience of the heart would cause desirable objects to be perceived as closer than would salience of the head, but there would be no difference between the head and heart conditions when the object was neutral. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments in which participants had their attention drawn to their head or their heart by placing their hand there while making an action-based (haptic) measure of distance to an object. After finding no significant results in Experiment 1, in Experiment 2 a verbal measure of distance perception was added and participants completed a two-minute filler task while touching the assigned body part to strengthen the body part salience effect before estimating distance. Besides replicating Proffitt’s 2006 finding that haptic estimates of environmental features are more accurate than verbal estimates, we found no significant results in Experiment 2

Physicists Thriving with Paperless Publishing

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) libraries have been comprehensively cataloguing the High Energy Particle Physics (HEP) literature online since 1974. The core database, SPIRES-HEP, now indexes over 400,000 research articles, with almost 50% linked to fulltext electronic versions (this site now has over 15 000 hits per day). This database motivated the creation of the first site in the United States for the World Wide Web at SLAC. With this database and the invention of the Los Alamos E-print archives in 1991, the HEP community pioneered the trend to "paperless publishing" and the trend to paperless access; in other words, the "virtual library." We examine the impact this has had both on the way scientists research and on paper-based publishing. The standard of work archived at Los Alamos is very high. 70% of papers are eventually published in journals and another 20% are in conference proceedings. As a service to authors, the SPIRES-HEP collaboration has been ensuring that as much information as possible is included with each bibliographic entry for a paper. Such meta-data can include tables of the experimental data that researchers can easily use to perform their own analyses as well as detailed descriptions of the experiment, citation tracking, and links to full-text documents.Comment: 17 pages, Invited talk at the AAAS Meeting, February 2000 in Washington, D

Averages and moments associated to class numbers of imaginary quadratic fields

For any odd prime $\ell$, let $h_\ell(-d)$ denote the $\ell$-part of the class number of the imaginary quadratic field $\mathbb{Q}(\sqrt{-d})$. Nontrivial pointwise upper bounds are known only for $\ell =3$; nontrivial upper bounds for averages of $h_\ell(-d)$ have previously been known only for $\ell =3,5$. In this paper we prove nontrivial upper bounds for the average of $h_\ell(-d)$ for all primes $\ell \geq 7$, as well as nontrivial upper bounds for certain higher moments for all primes $\ell \geq 3$.Comment: 26 pages; minor edits to exposition and notation, to agree with published versio

Simultaneous Integer Values of Pairs of Quadratic Forms

We prove that a pair of integral quadratic forms in 5 or more variables will simultaneously represent "almost all" pairs of integers that satisfy the necessary local conditions, provided that the forms satisfy a suitable nonsingularity condition. In particular such forms simultaneously attain prime values if the obvious local conditions hold. The proof uses the circle method, and in particular pioneers a two-dimensional version of a Kloosterman refinement.Comment: 63 page

Increasing food familiarity without the tears. A role for visual exposure?

Research has established the success of taste exposure paradigms as a means of increasing children’s acceptance, and liking, of previously unfamiliar or disliked foods. Yet, parents report that they tend to avoid the stress associated with repeatedly offering their children foods that are likely to be rejected. Given that successful taste exposure programmes often enhance children’s familiarity with a food’s appearance, as well as its taste, this article reviews the potential for exposure interventions that do not require repeated tastings to bring about positive attitude changes towards healthy foods. Recent evidence from studies that expose toddlers to picture books about fruit and vegetables suggest that familiarity with the origins and appearance of unfamiliar foods might increase children’s willingness to accept these into their diets