A simple rack for race tubes

A simple rack for race tube

Conidial harvest from solid media using fiberglass screening.

Conidial harvest from solid media using fiberglass screening

Investigating perceptions and support for transparency and openness in research: Using card sorting in a pilot study with academic librarians

This paper explores the role of academic librarians as advocates for research transparency and open research. We describe the design and piloting of a qualitative card-sorting research protocol that investigates academic librarians' attitudes, awareness and practices related to research transparency. We report on preliminary results from interviews with librarians, presenting their conceptualizations of research transparency and open research, existing library services that support and advocate for both concepts, and potential services that would augment this support and advocacy. Library activities they feel are most important to the advancement of transparency and openness are identified and perceptions of disciplinary differences are noted

Measuring the Impact of (Psycho-)Linguistic and Readability Features and Their Spill Over Effects on the Prediction of Eye Movement Patterns

There is a growing interest in the combined use of NLP and machine learning methods to predict gaze patterns during naturalistic reading. While promising results have been obtained through the use of transformer-based language models, little work has been undertaken to relate the performance of such models to general text characteristics. In this paper we report on experiments with two eye-tracking corpora of naturalistic reading and two language models (BERT and GPT-2). In all experiments, we test effects of a broad spectrum of features for predicting human reading behavior that fall into five categories (syntactic complexity, lexical richness, register-based multiword combinations, readability and psycholinguistic word properties). Our experiments show that both the features included and the architecture of the transformer-based language models play a role in predicting multiple eye-tracking measures during naturalistic reading. We also report the results of experiments aimed at determining the relative importance of features from different groups using SP-LIME.Comment: accepted at ACL 202

The generation effect and source memory

Superior memory performance for self-generated items compared to read or simply perceived items is called the positive generation effect, whereas the reverse pattern is called the negative generation effect. For item memory tasks, a positive generation effect typically occurs (cf., Slamecka & Graf, 1978). In contrast to this, no clear picture exists as to whether a positive or a negative generation effect is bound to emerge for source memory of perceptual attributes, due to empirical evidence for both outcomes. Therefore, the two lines of research investigated in the course of the present dissertation deal with the generation effect and source memory. They aim to shed light on present inconsistencies and contradictions as well as to illuminate unanswered questions. In the first line of research, I addressed the role of the processing of perceptual attributes and of the processing of internal states in memory for the degree of completeness. In the second line of research, I investigated the role of increased conceptual processing for the memory of presentation colour, for which a negative generation effect has been found consistently (e.g., Mulligan, 2004; Mulligan, Lozito, and Rosner, 2006; Riefer et al., 2007). All data were achieved in laboratory experiments and were analysed using the multinomial processing tree model for crossed source dimensions (Meiser & Bröder, 2002). I conclude (a) that self-reference plays a critical role for generation effect studies when attempting to investigate source memory and (b) that conceptual and perceptual processing play a less critical role than assumed – results could rather be interpreted as evidence in favour of a more general account involving visual and non-visual processing

The gaseous pixel device

The Gaseous Pixel Chamber is a new device developed during the last year within the LAA project at CERN. Basically we print electrodes onto a flexible Kapton foil with standard printed circuit technology used in the CERN workshops. We have found a design which allows us to operate the foil as a particle detector working in the gaseous limited streamer mode. This work has been previously reported. We are well satisfied with the operational characteristics that this device has reached so far (efficiency, ease to build and to operate). However, the demands imposed on any detector device at future hadron colliders are very stringent. There are still many possible improvements needed to meet the technical challenge for a device to work at the LHC,SSC or Eloisatron hadron collider (such as time response, space resolution, energy proportionality). Therefore we propose an R&D programme for studying the aspects that are relevant for application of this kind of detector within a hadron collider environment