Evidence of preference construction in a comparison of variants of the standard gamble method

An increasingly important debate has emerged around the extent to which techniques such as the standard gamble, which is used, amongst other things, to value health states, actually serve to construct respondents' preferences rather than simply elicit them. According to standard theory, the variant used should have no bearing on the numbers elicited from respondents, i.e. procedural invariance should hold. This study addresses this debate by comparing two variants of standard gamble in the valuation of health states. It is a mixed methods study that combines a quantitative comparison with the probing of respondents in order to ascertain possible reasons for the differences that emerged. Significant differences were found between variants and, furthermore, there was evidence of an ordering effect. Respondents' responses to probing suggested that they were influenced by the method of elicitation

Equivariant Dimensional Reduction and Quiver Gauge Theories

We review recent applications of equivariant dimensional reduction techniques to the construction of Yang-Mills-Higgs-Dirac theories with dynamical mass generation and exactly massless chiral fermions.Comment: 10 pages; Based on invited talk given by the first author at the 2nd School on "Quantum Gravity and Quantum Geometry" session of the 9th Hellenic School on Elementary Particle Physics and Gravity, Corfu, Greece, September 13-20 2009. To be published in General Relativity and Gravitatio

It’s driving her mad: gender differences in the effects of commuting on psychological well-being

In this paper, we seek to explore the effects of commuting time on the psychological well-being of men and women in the UK. We use annual data from the British Household Panel Survey in a fixed effects panel framework that includes variables known to determine well-being, as well as factors which may provide compensation for commuting such as income, job satisfaction and housing quality. Our results show that, even after all these variables are considered, commuting still has an important detrimental effect on the well-being of women, but not men, and this result is robust to numerous different specifications. We explore possible explanations for this gender difference and can find no evidence that it is due to women´s shorter working hours or weaker occupational position. Rather women´s greater sensitivity to commuting time seems to be a result of their larger responsibility for day-to-day household tasks, including childcare

Labour pain: the hidden influences of anxiety and social deprivation

No abstract available

Noncommutative vector bundles over fuzzy CP^N and their covariant derivatives

We generalise the construction of fuzzy CP^N in a manner that allows us to access all noncommutative equivariant complex vector bundles over this space. We give a simplified construction of polarization tensors on S^2 that generalizes to complex projective space, identify Laplacians and natural noncommutative covariant derivative operators that map between the modules that describe noncommuative sections. In the process we find a natural generalization of the Schwinger-Jordan construction to su(n) and identify composite oscillators that obey a Heisenberg algebra on an appropriate Fock space.Comment: 34 pages, v2 contains minor corrections to the published versio

Shoreline configuration and shoreline dynamics: A mesoscale analysis

The author has identified the following significant results. Atlantic coast barrier island shorelines are seldom straight, but rather sinuous. These shoreline curvatures range in size from cusps to capes. Significant relationships exist between the orientation of shoreline segments within the larger of these sinuous features and shoreline dynamics, with coefficients ranging up to .9. Orientation of the shoreline segments of Assateague Island (60 km) and the Outer Banks of North Carolina (130 km) was measured from LANDSAT 2 imagery (1:80,000) and high altitude aerial photography (1:120,000). Long term trends in shoreline dynamics were established by mapping shoreline and storm-surge penetration changes

LANDSAT application of remote sensing to shoreline-form analysis

The author has identified the following significant results. Orientation of the shoreline segments of Assateague Island (55 km) was measured from LANDSAT 2 imagery enlarged to 1:250,000 and 1:80,000. Long term trends in shoreline dynamics were established by mapping shoreline and storm-surge penetration changes from historical low altitude aerial photography spanning four decades

On the "Universal" Quantum Area Spectrum

There has been much debate over the form of the quantum area spectrum for a black hole horizon, with the evenly spaced conception of Bekenstein having featured prominently in the discourse. In this letter, we refine a very recently proposed method for calibrating the Bekenstein form of the spectrum. Our refined treatment predicts, as did its predecessor, a uniform spacing between adjacent spectral levels of $8\pi$ in Planck units; notably, an outcome that already has a pedigree as a proposed ``universal'' value for this intrinsically quantum-gravitational measure. Although the two approaches are somewhat similar in logic and quite agreeable in outcome, we argue that our version is conceptually more elegant and formally simpler than its precursor. Moreover, our rendition is able to circumvent a couple of previously unnoticed technical issues and, as an added bonus, translates to generic theories of gravity in a very direct manner.Comment: 7 Pages; (v2) now 9 full pages, significant changes to the text and material added but the general theme and conclusions are unchange

Attentional load and sensory competition in human vision: Modulation of fMRI responses by load fixation during task-irrelevant stimulation in the peripheral visual field.

Perceptual suppression of distractors may depend on both endogenous and exogenous factors, such as attentional load of the current task and sensory competition among simultaneous stimuli, respectively. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare these two types of attentional effects and examine how they may interact in the human brain. We varied the attentional load of a visual monitoring task performed on a rapid stream at central fixation without altering the central stimuli themselves, while measuring the impact on fMRI responses to task-irrelevant peripheral checkerboards presented either unilaterally or bilaterally. Activations in visual cortex for irrelevant peripheral stimulation decreased with increasing attentional load at fixation. This relative decrease was present even in V1, but became larger for successive visual areas through to V4. Decreases in activation for contralateral peripheral checkerboards due to higher central load were more pronounced within retinotopic cortex corresponding to 'inner' peripheral locations relatively near the central targets than for more eccentric 'outer' locations, demonstrating a predominant suppression of nearby surround rather than strict 'tunnel vision' during higher task load at central fixation. Contralateral activations for peripheral stimulation in one hemifield were reduced by competition with concurrent stimulation in the other hemifield only in inferior parietal cortex, not in retinotopic areas of occipital visual cortex. In addition, central attentional load interacted with competition due to bilateral versus unilateral peripheral stimuli specifically in posterior parietal and fusiform regions. These results reveal that task-dependent attentional load, and interhemifield stimulus-competition, can produce distinct influences on the neural responses to peripheral visual stimuli within the human visual system. These distinct mechanisms in selective visual processing may be integrated within posterior parietal areas, rather than earlier occipital cortex

Modified Laplace transformation method at finite temperature: application to infra-red problems of N component ϕ4\phi^4 theory

Modified Laplace transformation method is applied to N component $\phi^4$ theory and the finite temperature problem in the massless limit is re-examined in the large N limit. We perform perturbation expansion of the dressed thermal mass in the massive case to several orders and try the massless approximation with the help of modified Laplace transformation. The contribution with fractional power of the coupling constant is recovered from the truncated massive series. The use of inverse Laplace transformation with respect to the mass square is crucial in evaluating the coefficients of fractional power terms.Comment: 16pages, Latex, typographical errors are correcte