Who Believes in the Giant Skeleton Myth? An Examination of Individual Difference Correlates

This study examined individual difference correlates of belief in a narrative about the discovery of giant skeletal remains that contravenes mainstream scientific explanations. A total of 364 participants from Central Europe completed a survey that asked them to rate their agreement with a short excerpt describing the giant skeleton myth. Participants also completed measures of the Big Five personality factors, New Age orientation, anti-scientific attitudes, superstitious beliefs, and religiosity. Results showed that women, as compared with men, and respondents with lower educational qualifications were significantly more likely to believe in the giant skeleton myth, although effect sizes were small. Correlational analysis showed that stronger belief in the giant skeleton myth was significantly associated with greater anti-scientific attitudes, stronger New Age orientation, greater religiosity, stronger superstitious beliefs, lower Openness to Experience scores, and higher Neuroticism scores. However, a multiple regression showed that the only significant predictors of belief in myth were Openness, New Age orientation, and anti-scientific attitudes. These results are discussed in relation to the potential negative consequences of belief in myths

Asynchronous Embryonics with Reconfiguration

As embryonic arrays take inspiration from nature they display biological properties, namely complex structure and fault-tolerance. However, hardware implementations have yet to take advantage of a further biological feature at a fundamental level; asynchronous operation. Scalability and reliability are seen as two areas in which embryonic arrays could benefit from asynchronous design. This paper builds upon a previous asynchronous embryonic architecture simulation. The addition of a two-fold reconfiguration strategy that provides fault-tolerance is detailed. The simulation's design is similar to that of a macromodule library that has been implemented using Xilinx Virtex FPGAs, bringing the possibility of truly asynchronous embryonic circuits a step closer