Public policy and life insurance

Public policy ; Life insurance companies ; Insurance industry

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

This is a review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

A Community of Characters – the Narrative Self in the Films of Wes Anderson

This essay is a reflection upon the work of writer-director Wes Anderson. Anderson\u27s first three films, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums, contain common themes which I assert provide fertile ground for theological reflection. This discussion will focus on two aspects of the characters that populate Anderson\u27s mythopoetic world(s) – firstly, the construction of the narrative self; and secondly, the vitality of community which fundamentally precedes authentic personhood

Use of inedible wheat residues from the KSC-CELSS breadboard facility for production of fungal cellulase

Cellulose and xylan (a hemicellulose) comprise 50 percent of inedible wheat residue (which is 60 percent of total wheat biomass) produced in the Kennedy Space Center Closed Ecological Life Support System (CELSS) Breadboard Biomass Production Chamber (BPC). These polysaccharides can be converted by enzymatic hydrolysis into useful monosaccharides, thus maximizing the use of BPC volume and energy, and minimizing waste material to be treated. The evaluation of CELSS-derived wheat residues for production for cellulase enzyme complex by Trichoderma reesei and supplemental beta-glucosidase by Aspergillus phoenicis is in progress. Results to date are given

Evidence against continuous variables driving numerical discrimination in infancy

Over the past decades, abundant evidence has amassed that demonstrates infants’ sensitivity to changes in number. Nonetheless, a prevalent view is that infants are more sensitive to continuous properties of stimulus arrays such as surface area and contour length than they are to numerosity. Very little research, however, has directly addressed infants’ sensitivity to contour. Here we used a change detection paradigm to assess infants’ acuity for the cumulative contour length of an array when the array’s surface area and number were held constant. Seven-month-old infants detected a threefold change in contour length but failed to detect a twofold change. These results, in conjunction with previously published data on numerosity discrimination using the same experimental paradigm, suggest that infants are not more sensitive to changes in contour length compared to changes in numerosity. Consequently, these findings undermine the claim that attention towards contour length is the primary driver of numerical discrimination in infancy

Attending to One of Many: When Infants are Surprisingly Poor at Discriminating an Item's Size

Despite a prevailing assumption in the developmental literature that changes in continuous quantities (i.e., surface area, duration) are easier to detect than changes in number, very little research has focused on the verity of this assumption. The few studies that have directly examined infants’ discriminations of continuous extent have revealed that infants discriminate the duration of a single event and the area of a single item with similar levels of precision (Brannon et al., 2006; vanMarle and Wynn, 2006). But what about when items are presented in arrays? Infants appear to be much worse at representing the cumulative surface area compared to the numerosity of an array (Cordes and Brannon, 2008a), however this may be due to a noisy accumulation process and not a general finding pertaining to representations of the extent within an array. The current study investigates how well infants detect changes in the size of individual elements when they are presented within an array. Our results indicate that infants are less sensitive to continuous properties of items when they are presented within a set than when presented in isolation. Specifically we demonstrate that infants required a fourfold change in item size to detect a change when items were presented within a set of homogeneous elements. Rather than providing redundant cues that aided discrimination, presenting a set of identical elements appeared to hamper an infant's ability to detect changes in a single element's size. In addition to providing some of the first evidence to suggest that the presence of multiple items may hinder extent representations, these results provide converging lines of evidence to support the claim that, contrary to popular belief, infants are better at tracking number than continuous properties of a set