5,781 research outputs found
Recommended from our members
To be or not to be an auctioneer: Some thoughts on the legal nature of online eBay auctions and the protection of consumers
This paper discusses the legal classification of online âeBayâ auctions. The discussion has key implications on the scope of consumer protection law as sale by auctions are, for example, excluded from the scope of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. The paper uncovers that online âeBayâ auctions cannot always be considered as traditional auctions and that eBay, as an intermediary, is not to be considered as an auctioneer. This creates difficulties associated with a distributive application of consumer protection laws such as the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000. Another set of difficulties is associated with a lenient legal regime applicable to the liability of eBay under the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002 . The paper concludes that there is an urgent need to clarify the legal classification of online auctions and to rethink the liability of online auction sites to better protect consumers
âVideo Replay: Families, films and fantasyâ as a transformational text: Commentary on Valerie Walkerdine's âVideo Replayâ.
In this commentary I explore the significance of Valerie Walkerdine's paper âVideo Replay: Families, Films and Fantasyâ. I review its impact in 1986 and then discuss how some of its ideas about subjectivity and popular culture â specifically film - can be developed in the contemporary context. A recurring fantasy of Rocky II and its reception is that of social and psychological transformation. I address this theme by drawing on the work of Christopher Bollas to argue that Walkerdine's psychosocial analysis continues to facilitate, across a range of contexts, some of the transformational processes described in her article
Association of metabolic syndrome and change in Unified Parkinson\u27s Disease Rating Scale scores.
OBJECTIVE: To explore the association between metabolic syndrome and the Unified Parkinson\u27s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) scores and, secondarily, the Symbol Digit Modalities Test (SDMT).
METHODS: This is a secondary analysis of data from 1,022 of 1,741 participants of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Exploratory Clinical Trials in Parkinson Disease Long-Term Study 1, a randomized, placebo-controlled trial of creatine. Participants were categorized as having or not having metabolic syndrome on the basis of modified criteria from the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III. Those who had the same metabolic syndrome status at consecutive annual visits were included. The change in UPDRS and SDMT scores from randomization to 3 years was compared in participants with and without metabolic syndrome.
RESULTS: Participants with metabolic syndrome (n = 396) compared to those without (n = 626) were older (mean [SD] 63.9 [8.1] vs 59.9 [9.4] years; p \u3c 0.0001), were more likely to be male (75.3% vs 57.0%; p \u3c 0.0001), and had a higher mean uric acid level (men 5.7 [1.3] vs 5.3 [1.1] mg/dL, women 4.9 [1.3] vs 3.9 [0.9] mg/dL, p \u3c 0.0001). Participants with metabolic syndrome experienced an additional 0.6- (0.2) unit annual increase in total UPDRS (p = 0.02) and 0.5- (0.2) unit increase in motor UPDRS (p = 0.01) scores compared with participants without metabolic syndrome. There was no difference in the change in SDMT scores.
CONCLUSIONS: Persons with Parkinson disease meeting modified criteria for metabolic syndrome experienced a greater increase in total UPDRS scores over time, mainly as a result of increases in motor scores, compared to those who did not. Further studies are needed to confirm this finding.
CLINICALTRIALSGOV IDENTIFIER: NCT00449865
The Paranormal is (Still) Normal: The Sociological Implications of a Survey of Paranormal Experiences in Great Britain
Historically, there has been limited sociological interest in the paranormal and no systematic study of reported paranormal experiences. There are also few medium-to-large-scale survey results with nationally representative populations focusing on paranormal experiences. This paper provides details of an exploratory survey conducted in 2009 with a nationally representative sample of 4,096 adults aged 16 years and over across Great Britain. Our findings show that 37% of British adults report at least one paranormal experience and that women, those who are middle-aged or individuals resident in the South West are more likely to report such experiences. These results establish incidence levels of reported paranormal experiences in contemporary Britain. We argue also that they merit a more sustained sociological consideration of the paranormal. In this respect we renew and update the robust justification and call for serious research positioning the paranormal as a social phenomenon, originally proposed well over thirty years ago by Greeley (1975)
Electron focusing, mode spectroscopy and mass enhancement in small GaAs/AlGaAs rings
A new electron focusing effect has been discovered in small single and
coupled GaAs/AlGaAs rings. The focusing in the single ring is attributed solely
to internal orbits. The focusing effect allows the ring to be used as a small
mass spectrometer. The focusing causes peaks in the magnetoresistance at low
fields, and the peak positions were used to study the dispersion relation of
the one-dimensional magnetoelectric subbands. The electron effective mass
increases with the applied magnetic field by a factor of , at a magnetic
field of . This is the first time this increase has been measured
directly. General agreement obtains between the experiment and the subband
calculations for straight channels.Comment: 13 pages figures are available by reques
Sum of Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow
We compute the sum of the positive Lyapunov exponents of the Hodge bundle
with respect to the Teichmuller geodesic flow. The computation is based on the
analytic Riemann-Roch Theorem and uses a comparison of determinants of flat and
hyperbolic Laplacians when the underlying Riemann surface degenerates.Comment: Minor corrections. To appear in Publications mathematiques de l'IHE
The CMS Tracker Readout Front End Driver
The Front End Driver, FED, is a 9U 400mm VME64x card designed for reading out
the Compact Muon Solenoid, CMS, silicon tracker signals transmitted by the
APV25 analogue pipeline Application Specific Integrated Circuits. The FED
receives the signals via 96 optical fibers at a total input rate of 3.4 GB/sec.
The signals are digitized and processed by applying algorithms for pedestal and
common mode noise subtraction. Algorithms that search for clusters of hits are
used to further reduce the input rate. Only the cluster data along with trigger
information of the event are transmitted to the CMS data acquisition system
using the S-LINK64 protocol at a maximum rate of 400 MB/sec. All data
processing algorithms on the FED are executed in large on-board Field
Programmable Gate Arrays. Results on the design, performance, testing and
quality control of the FED are presented and discussed
Attention and automation: New perspectives on mental underload and performance
There is considerable evidence in the ergonomics literature that automation can significantly reduce operator mental workload. Furthermore, reducing mental workload is not necessarily a good thing, particularly in cases where the level is already manageable. This raises the issue of mental underload, which can be at least as detrimental to performance as overload. However, although it is widely recognized that mental underload is detrimental to performance, there are very few attempts to explain why this may be the case. It is argued in this paper that, until the need for a human operator is completely eliminated, automation has psychological implications relevant in both theoretical and applied domains. The present paper reviews theories of attention, as well as the literature on mental workload and automation, to synthesize a new explanation for the effects of mental underload on performance. Malleable attentional resources theory proposes that attentional capacity shrinks to accommodate reductions in mental workload, and that this shrinkage is responsible for the underload effect. The theory is discussed with respect to the applied implications for ergonomics research
Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world
We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer
online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow
them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade,
establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We
measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and
received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately
after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified
by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence
in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative
(bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals.
Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated
by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the
world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of
repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral
sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study
their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word
ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100,
and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple
redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further
underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On
the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can
be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
- âŠ