A DigitalCAT: A Fusion of Creativity Assessment Theory and HCI

As a ‘gold standard’ creativity assessment method, it is important to reflect on the digital future of Amabile’s Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT). Over the past three decades, the CAT has given creativity researchers a formal tool on which to build a true science out of the subjective phenomenon of creativity in a vast range of domains. Research practice, however, has relied on primitive paper-based tools or only rudimentary digital technology. As a result, it is high time a more sophisticated, standardized research tool is developed to greatly facilitate future creativity research and assessment - a DigitalCAT - building on expertise from the design research, psychology and human-computer interaction (HCI) disciplines

Corporate financing decisions: UK survey evidence

Despite theoretical developments in recent years, our understanding of corporate capital structure remains incomplete. Prior empirical research has been dominated by archival regression studies which are limited in their ability to fully reflect the diversity found in practice. The present paper reports on a comprehensive survey of corporate financing decision-making in UK listed companies. A key finding is that firms are heterogeneous in their capital structure policies. About half of the firms seek to maintain a target debt level, consistent with trade-off theory, but 60 per cent claim to follow a financing hierarchy, consistent with pecking order theory. These two theories are not viewed by respondents as either mutually exclusive or exhaustive. Many of the theoretical determinants of debt levels are widely accepted by respondents, in particular the importance of interest tax shield, financial distress, agency costs and also, at least implicitly, information asymmetry. Results also indicate that cross-country institutional differences have a significant impact on financial decisions

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the 'clash of civilizations' thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the 'secularization thesis'. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are well-documented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically-oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize 'democracy' and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neo-secular age.peer-reviewe

Comparison of real-world treatment outcomes of systemic immunomodulating therapy in atopic dermatitis patients with dark and light skin types

Background Few data exist on differences in treatment effectiveness and safety in atopic dermatitis patients of different skin types. Objective To investigate treatment outcomes of dupilumab, methotrexate, and ciclosporin, and morphological phenotypes in atopic dermatitis patients, stratified by Fitzpatrick skin type. Methods In an observational prospective cohort study, pooling data from the Dutch TREAT (TREatment of ATopic eczema) NL (treatregister.nl) and UK-Irish A-STAR (Atopic eczema Systemic TherApy Register; astar-register.org) registries, data on morphological phenotypes and treatment outcomes were investigated. Results A total of 235 patients were included (light skin types [LST]: Fitzpatrick skin type 1-3, n = 156 [Ethnicity, White: 94.2%]; dark skin types [DST]: skin type 4-6, n = 68 [Black African/Afro-Caribbean: 25%, South-Asian: 26.5%, and Hispanics: 0%]). DST were younger (19.5 vs 29.0 years; P .05). Limitations Unblinded, non-randomized. Conclusion Atopic dermatitis differs in several characteristics between LST and DST. Skin type may influence treatment effectiveness of dupilumab

Extreme differences in 87Sr/86Sr between Samoan lavas and the magmatic olivines they host: Evidence for highly heterogeneous 87Sr/86Sr in the magmatic plumbing system sourcing a single lava

.Investigations of mantle heterogeneity in ocean island basalts (OIB) frequently compare heavy radiogenic isotopes (i.e. 87Sr/86Sr), often measured in whole rock powders, with 3He/4He and δ18O, commonly measured in olivines. However, the 87Sr/86Sr in the olivines, which is dominated by Sr in melt inclusions, may not be in equilibrium with the 87Sr/86Sr in the whole rock. Here we present new 87Sr/86Sr measurements made on Samoan magmatic olivines, where multiple olivine crystals are aggregated for a single isotopic measurement. The olivines host abundant melt inclusions, and yielded relatively large quantities of Sr (13.0 to 100.6 ng) in 19 to 185 mg aliquots of fresh olivine, yielding high Srsample/Srblank ratios (≥ 427). These new data on olivines show that samples can exhibit significant 87Sr/86Sr disequilibrium: in one extreme sample, where the basaltic whole rock 87Sr/86Sr (0.708901) is higher than several different aliquots of aggregate magmatic olivines (0.707385 to 0.707773), the whole rock-olivine 87Sr/86Sr disequilibrium is > 1590 ppm. The 87Sr/86Sr disequilibrium observed between whole rocks and bulk olivines relates to the isotopic disequilibrium between whole rocks and the average 87Sr/86Sr of the population of melt inclusions hosted in the olivines. Therefore, a population of olivines in a Samoan lava must have crystallized from (and trapped melts of) a different 87Sr/86Sr composition than the final erupted lava hosting the olivines. A primary question is how melts with different 87Sr/86Sr can exist in the same magmatic plumbing system and contribute heterogeneous 87Sr/86Sr to a lava and the magmatic olivines it hosts. We explore potential mechanisms for generating heterogeneous melts in magma chambers. The reliance, in part, of chemical geodynamic models of the relationships between isotopic systems measured in whole rocks (87Sr/86Sr) and systems measured in olivines (3He/4He and δ18O) means that whole rock-olivine Sr-isotopic disequilibrium will be important for evaluating relationship among these key isotopic tracer systems. Moving forward, it will be important to evaluate whether whole rock-olivine Sr-isotopic disequilibrium is a pervasive issue in OIB globally

Search for dark matter produced in association with a hadronically decaying vector boson in pp collisions at sqrt (s) = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

A search is presented for dark matter produced in association with a hadronically decaying W or Z boson using 3.2 fb−1 of pp collisions at View the MathML sources=13 TeV recorded by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events with a hadronic jet compatible with a W or Z boson and with large missing transverse momentum are analysed. The data are consistent with the Standard Model predictions and are interpreted in terms of both an effective field theory and a simplified model containing dark matter

Measurement of the View the tt production cross-section using eμ events with b-tagged jets in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper describes a measurement of the inclusive top quark pair production cross-section (σtt¯) with a data sample of 3.2 fb−1 of proton–proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of √s = 13 TeV, collected in 2015 by the ATLAS detector at the LHC. This measurement uses events with an opposite-charge electron–muon pair in the final state. Jets containing b-quarks are tagged using an algorithm based on track impact parameters and reconstructed secondary vertices. The numbers of events with exactly one and exactly two b-tagged jets are counted and used to determine simultaneously σtt¯ and the efficiency to reconstruct and b-tag a jet from a top quark decay, thereby minimising the associated systematic uncertainties. The cross-section is measured to be: σtt¯ = 818 ± 8 (stat) ± 27 (syst) ± 19 (lumi) ± 12 (beam) pb, where the four uncertainties arise from data statistics, experimental and theoretical systematic effects, the integrated luminosity and the LHC beam energy, giving a total relative uncertainty of 4.4%. The result is consistent with theoretical QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order. A fiducial measurement corresponding to the experimental acceptance of the leptons is also presented

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector during 2011 data taking

The performance of the jet trigger for the ATLAS detector at the LHC during the 2011 data taking period is described. During 2011 the LHC provided proton–proton collisions with a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV and heavy ion collisions with a 2.76 TeV per nucleon–nucleon collision energy. The ATLAS trigger is a three level system designed to reduce the rate of events from the 40 MHz nominal maximum bunch crossing rate to the approximate 400 Hz which can be written to offline storage. The ATLAS jet trigger is the primary means for the online selection of events containing jets. Events are accepted by the trigger if they contain one or more jets above some transverse energy threshold. During 2011 data taking the jet trigger was fully efficient for jets with transverse energy above 25 GeV for triggers seeded randomly at Level 1. For triggers which require a jet to be identified at each of the three trigger levels, full efficiency is reached for offline jets with transverse energy above 60 GeV. Jets reconstructed in the final trigger level and corresponding to offline jets with transverse energy greater than 60 GeV, are reconstructed with a resolution in transverse energy with respect to offline jets, of better than 4 % in the central region and better than 2.5 % in the forward direction