Personality effects on cardiovascular reactivity: need for closure moderates the impact of task difficulty on engagement-related myocardial beta-adrenergic activity

An experiment assessed the joint effect of dispositional need for closure (NFC) and task difficulty on engagement-related myocardial beta-adrenergic activity. Participants who scored either low or high on the NFC scale performed an ambiguous categorization task with either low or high difficulty. Confirming the theory-derived predictions, task difficulty effects on pre-ejection period (PEP) reactivity were moderated by NFC. If difficulty was low, PEP reactivity was low and independent of the participants NFC level. If difficulty was high, participants with high NFC showed increased PEP reactivity compared to participants with low NFC. These results extend previous research on Wright's model of engagement-related cardiovascular reactivity and suggest that the model may provide a useful framework for assessing the impact of personality on cardiovascular response

Machine Translation of Low-Resource Spoken Dialects: Strategies for Normalizing Swiss German

The goal of this work is to design a machine translation (MT) system for a low-resource family of dialects, collectively known as Swiss German, which are widely spoken in Switzerland but seldom written. We collected a significant number of parallel written resources to start with, up to a total of about 60k words. Moreover, we identified several other promising data sources for Swiss German. Then, we designed and compared three strategies for normalizing Swiss German input in order to address the regional diversity. We found that character-based neural MT was the best solution for text normalization. In combination with phrase-based statistical MT, our solution reached 36% BLEU score when translating from the Bernese dialect. This value, however, decreases as the testing data becomes more remote from the training one, geographically and topically. These resources and normalization techniques are a first step towards full MT of Swiss German dialects.Comment: 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan

Teaching Design for Environment in Product Design Classes

The paper presents an approach to teaching design for environment (DFE) in the context of a product design and development course. The teaching method has been applied in our classes for graduate engineering, business, and design students. Our approach includes a step-by-step DFE process and utilizes a recent Herman Miller chair as a case study to illustrate the successful application of each step in the process. The DFE process steps are based on our research at Herman Miller and on several published studies that investigated the integration of DFE into the product development process and which we assembled into the step-by-step DFE process. Furthermore, the teaching method includes a new approach to life cycle thinking by relating the product life cycle to the natural life cycle in order to from a closed-loop system

Identifying individuals\u27 preferences using games: A field experiment in promoting sustainable energy consumption

We present a novel approach to identify individuals’ preferences in the context of sustainable energy consumption by letting them play a public good game (PGG). The study will be conducted using an energy-efficiency website developed by us and operated by an Austrian utility company that currently facilitates 9,929 users out of which 1,000 will be randomly selected as participants. Laboratory experiments on PGGs identified two types of cooperative behavior: free riders and conditional cooperators. While free riders tend to act unaffected by the behavior of others, conditional cooperators are stronger influenced by the perception of their peers. In our study, participants receive normative feedback on their consumption, and we investigate the moderating effects of the PGG’s results on changes in energy consumption. The findings will contribute to the design of information systems to promote environmental sustainability because their effectiveness is increased if the consumption feedback provided reflects the recipient’s preference