2,165 research outputs found
The role of answer fluency and perceptual fluency in the monitoring and control of reasoning: Reply to Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley
In this reply, we provide an analysis of Alter et al. (2013) response to our earlier paper (Thompson et al., 2013). In that paper, we reported difficulty in replicating Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, and Eyre’s (2007) main finding, namely that a sense of disfluency produced by making stimuli difficult to perceive, increased accuracy on a variety of reasoning tasks. Alter, Oppenheimer, and Epley (2013) argue that we misunderstood the meaning of accuracy on these tasks, a claim that we reject. We argue and provide evidence that the tasks were not too difficult for our populations (such that no amount of “metacognitive unease” would promote correct responding) and point out that in many cases performance on our tasks was well above chance or on a par with Alter et al.’s (2007) participants. Finally, we reiterate our claim that the distinction between answer fluency (the ease with which an answer comes to mind) and perceptual fluency (the ease with which a problem can be read) is genuine, and argue that Thompson et al. (2013) provided evidence that these are distinct factors that have different downstream effects on cognitive processe
Use of credit by farm families in southern Iowa and northern Missouri
Changing economic and social conditions necessitate adjustment by farm families. For many families, increased farm size and rising levels of consumption have resulted in larger outlays for the farm business as well as for family living. Increasingly, farm families have turned to credit to augment their own funds. Therefore, more information is needed about the extent to which credit is used, the uses to which credit is put and the association, if any, between credit use and selected family and economic characteristics. Such information should be useful to extension educators working with farm families in educational programs, to governmental policymakers or legislators who influence the legal framework affecting lending practices and to lending institutions interested in providing greater service to their clientele.https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/specialreports/1032/thumbnail.jp
Almost-Euclidean subspaces of via tensor products: a simple approach to randomness reduction
It has been known since 1970's that the N-dimensional -space contains
nearly Euclidean subspaces whose dimension is . However, proofs of
existence of such subspaces were probabilistic, hence non-constructive, which
made the results not-quite-suitable for subsequently discovered applications to
high-dimensional nearest neighbor search, error-correcting codes over the
reals, compressive sensing and other computational problems. In this paper we
present a "low-tech" scheme which, for any , allows to exhibit nearly
Euclidean -dimensional subspaces of while using only
random bits. Our results extend and complement (particularly) recent work
by Guruswami-Lee-Wigderson. Characteristic features of our approach include (1)
simplicity (we use only tensor products) and (2) yielding "almost Euclidean"
subspaces with arbitrarily small distortions.Comment: 11 pages; title change, abstract and references added, other minor
change
Spin Structure of the Proton and Large p_T Processes in Polarized pp Collisions
QCD motivated polarized parton distributions, evolved directly in x-space,
are used to predict rates for prompt photon and Jet production at RHIC and
HERA-N center of mass energies. Various scenarios for the polarized gluon
distributions are considered and compared, and the possibility of using large
p_T processes in polarized pp collision experients to choose between them is
analyzed.Comment: 34 pages, including 18 postscript figures, REVTe
The central limit problem for random vectors with symmetries
Motivated by the central limit problem for convex bodies, we study normal
approximation of linear functionals of high-dimensional random vectors with
various types of symmetries. In particular, we obtain results for distributions
which are coordinatewise symmetric, uniform in a regular simplex, or
spherically symmetric. Our proofs are based on Stein's method of exchangeable
pairs; as far as we know, this approach has not previously been used in convex
geometry and we give a brief introduction to the classical method. The
spherically symmetric case is treated by a variation of Stein's method which is
adapted for continuous symmetries.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, uses xy-pic, 23 pages; v3: added new corollary to Theorem
Charmless two-body B decays: A global analysis with QCD factorization
In this paper, we perform a global analysis of and decays
with the QCD factorization approach. It is encouraging to observe that the
predictions of QCD factorization are in good agreement with experiment. The
best fit is around . The penguin-to-tree ratio of decays is preferred to be larger than 0.3.
We also show the confidence levels for some interesting channels: , and , . For decays, they are expected to have smaller branching ratios with
more precise measurements.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, version to appear in Phys. Rev.
The Mariner 6 and 7 flight paths and their determination from tracking data
Determination of orbit estimates for Mariner 6 and 7 space probe flight
X-ray and Radio Variability of M31*, The Andromeda Galaxy Nuclear Supermassive Black Hole
We confirm our earlier tentative detection of M31* in X-rays and measure its
light-curve and spectrum. Observations in 2004-2005 find M31* rather quiescent
in the X-ray and radio. However, X-ray observations in 2006-2007 and radio
observations in 2002 show M31* to be highly variable at times. A separate
variable X-ray source is found near P1, the brighter of the two optical nuclei.
The apparent angular Bondi radius of M31* is the largest of any black hole, and
large enough to be well resolved with Chandra. The diffuse emission within this
Bondi radius is found to have an X-ray temperature ~0.3 keV and density 0.1
cm-3, indistinguishable from the hot gas in the surrounding regions of the
bulge given the statistics allowed by the current observations. The X-ray
source at the location of M31* is consistent with a point source and a power
law spectrum with energy slope 0.9+/-0.2. Our identification of this X-ray
source with M31* is based solely on positional coincidence.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Ap
- …