A Survey of Employee Perceptions of Information Privacy in Organizations

In this study of employees in five multinational corporations, assessment was made of (a) employees\u27 beliefs regarding the types of personal information stored their companies, (b) the accuracy of those perceptions, (c) reactions to various internal and external uses of this personal information, and (d) evaluations of the companies\u27 information handling policies and practices

Towards Computing Inferences from English News Headlines

Newspapers are a popular form of written discourse, read by many people, thanks to the novelty of the information provided by the news content in it. A headline is the most widely read part of any newspaper due to its appearance in a bigger font and sometimes in colour print. In this paper, we suggest and implement a method for computing inferences from English news headlines, excluding the information from the context in which the headlines appear. This method attempts to generate the possible assumptions a reader formulates in mind upon reading a fresh headline. The generated inferences could be useful for assessing the impact of the news headline on readers including children. The understandability of the current state of social affairs depends greatly on the assimilation of the headlines. As the inferences that are independent of the context depend mainly on the syntax of the headline, dependency trees of headlines are used in this approach, to find the syntactical structure of the headlines and to compute inferences out of them.Comment: PACLING 2019 Long paper, 15 page

The changing nature of risk and risk management: the challenge of borders, uncertainty and resilience

No abstract available

The relationship between language production and verbal short-term memory: The role of stress grouping

This study investigates the influence of stress grouping on verbal short-term memory (STM). English speakers show a preference to combine syllables into trochaic groups, both lexically and in continuous speech. In two serial recall experiments, auditory lists of nonsense syllables were presented with either trochaic (STRONG-weak) or iambic (weak-STRONG) stress patterns, or in monotone. The acoustic correlates that carry stress were also manipulated in order to examine the relationship between input and output processes during recall. In Experiment 1, stressed and unstressed syllables differed in intensity and pitch but were matched for spoken duration. Significantly more syllables were recalled in the trochaic stress pattern condition than in the iambic and monotone conditions, which did not differ. In Experiment 2, spoken duration and pitch were manipulated but intensity was held constant. No effects of stress grouping were observed, suggesting that intensity is a critical acoustic factor for trochaic grouping. Acoustic analyses demonstrated that speech output was not identical to the auditory input, but that participants generated correct stress patterns by manipulating acoustic correlates in the same way in both experiments. These data challenge the idea of a language-independent STM store and support the notion of separable phonological input and output processes

Ethnic dissimilarity predicts belonging motive frustration and reduced organizational attachment

Some empirical studies show negative consequences of being demographically different from one’s group, but the underlying psychological mechanisms are not well understood. To address this gap, we investigated the role of the belonging and distinctiveness motives in individuals’ experiences of being ethnically dissimilar from their group. We propose that ethnic dissimilarity satisfies group members’ need for distinctiveness whereas it frustrates members’ need for belonging, and this frustration reduces their organizational attachment. An experimental study showed that ethnic dissimilarity led to heightened arousal of the belonging motive, indicating that this motive was frustrated. In a naturalistic study of real-life student groups, ethnic dissimilarity was associated with frustrated belonging, which in turn was associated with reduced organizational attachment. This paper contributes to the literature on demographic dissimilarity in groups by closely examining the effect of demographic dissimilarity on group members’ fundamental motives and reactions to group membership

Far-Persons

I argue for the moral relevance of a category of individuals I characterize as far-persons. Following Gary Varner, I distinguish near-persons, animals with a " robust autonoetic consciousness " but lacking an adult human's " biographical sense of self, " from the merely sentient, those animals living "entirely in the present." I note the possibility of a third class. Far-persons lack a biographical sense of self, possess a weak autonoetic consciousness, and are able to travel mentally through time a distance that exceeds the capacities of the merely sentient. Far-persons are conscious of and exercise control over short-term cognitive states, states limited by their temporal duration. The animals in question, human and nonhuman, consciously choose among various strategies available to them to achieve their ends, making them subjects of what I call "lyrical experience:" brief and potentially intense pleasures and pains. But their ends expire minute-by-minute, not stretching beyond, I say metaphorically, the present hour. I conclude by discussing the moral status of far-persons

Filled pauses in Hungarian: Their phonetic form and function

Filled pauses are natural occurrences in spontaneous speech and they may turn up at any level of the speech planning process and in a number of functions. The aim of this paper is to find out whether the diverse functions of filled pauses correlate with diverse articulations resulting in diverse acoustic structures. Spontaneous narratives are used as research material. The duration of the filled pauses and the frequency values of their first two formants are analyzed. The most frequent form, schwa, shows function-dependent realizations as confirmed by the durational values and by the second formant values of these vowel-like sounds

Evidence for Shared Cognitive Processing of Pitch in Music and Language

Language and music epitomize the complex representational and computational capacities of the human mind. Strikingly similar in their structural and expressive features, a longstanding question is whether the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms underlying these abilities are shared or distinct – either from each other or from other mental processes. One prominent feature shared between language and music is signal encoding using pitch, conveying pragmatics and semantics in language and melody in music. We investigated how pitch processing is shared between language and music by measuring consistency in individual differences in pitch perception across language, music, and three control conditions intended to assess basic sensory and domain-general cognitive processes. Individuals’ pitch perception abilities in language and music were most strongly related, even after accounting for performance in all control conditions. These results provide behavioral evidence, based on patterns of individual differences, that is consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive mechanisms for pitch processing may be shared between language and music.National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowship ProgramEunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (U.S.) (Grant 5K99HD057522