Racial assumptions color the mental representation of social class

We investigated the racial content of perceivers’ mental images of different socioeconomic categories. We selected participants who were either high or low in prejudice toward the poor. These participants saw 400 pairs of visually noisy face images. Depending on condition, participants chose the face that looked like a poor person, a middle income person, or a rich person. We averaged the faces selected to create composite images of each social class. A second group of participants rated the stereotypical Blackness of these images. They also rated the face images on a variety of psychological traits. Participants high in economic prejudice produced strongly class-differentiated mental images. They imagined the poor to be Blacker than middle income and wealthy people. They also imagined them to have less positive psychological characteristics. Participants low in economic prejudice also possessed images of the wealthy that were relatively White, but they represented poor and middle class people in a less racially differentiated way. We discuss implications for understanding the intersections of race and class in social perception

Modeling the effects of religious belief and affiliation on prosociality

publishedVersio

Solving Problems with the Percentage Bar

At the end of primary school all children more of less know what a percentage is, but yet they often struggle with percentage problems. This article describes a study in which students of 13 and 14 years old were given a written test with percentage problems and a week later were interviewed about the way they solved some of these problems. In a teaching experiment the students were then taught the use of the percentage bar. Although the teaching experiment was very short - just one lesson - the results confirm that the percentage bar is a powerful model that deserves a central place in the teaching of percentages

A longitudinal study of team-fan role identity on self-reported attendance behavior and future intentions

Attendance at college sporting events generates billions of dollars annually for athletic departments at the college level in the United States. Based on Identity Theory and prior research, we developed and tested two models that were successful in predicting actual attendance, attendance intentions (conative loyalty), and support for the team across time. Respondents (N = 165; 60% female, 59% Caucasian) filled out three surveys across the year. In Model A (RMSEA = .066, χ2/df = 50.02/29 = 1.73), prior season attendance, number of games intending to attend, and preseason team-fan role identity (Time 1) explained 63% of self-reported attendance behavior (Time 2). Those variables and postseason role identity (Time 2) explained 48.5% of attendance intentions (Time 3; Model A) and 43% of supporting the team in the future (Time 3; Model B, RMSEA = .060, χ2/df = 46.16/29 = 1.59). Sports marketers need to take into account both the impact of role identity as a fan of the team and attendance intentions, not just prior attendance behavior when predicting future attendance behavior and support for the tea

Ye Ink Stand

Letters from fans in Mythril #

Design and development of a deployable self-inflating adaptive membrane

Space structures nowadays are often designed to serve just one objective during their mission life, examples include truss structures that are used as support structures, solar sails for propulsion or antennas for communication. Each and every single one of these structures is optimized to serve just their distinct purpose and are more or less useless for the rest of the mission and therefore dead weight. By developing a smart structure that can change its shape and therefore adapt to different mission requirements in a single structure, the flexibility of the spacecraft can be increased by greatly decreasing the mass of the entire system. This paper will introduce such an adaptive structure called the Self-inflating Adaptive Membrane (SAM) concept which is being developed at the Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory of the University of Strathclyde. An idea presented in this paper is to adapt these basic changeable elements from nature’s heliotropism. Heliotropism describes a movement of a plant towards the sun during a day; the movement is initiated by turgor pressure change between adjacent cells. The shape change of the global structure can be significant by adding up these local changes induced by local elements, for example the cell’s length. To imitate the turgor pressure change between the motor cells in plants to space structures, piezoelectric micro pumps are added between two neighboring cells. A passive inflation technique is used for deploying the membrane at its destination in space. The trapped air in the spheres will inflate the spheres when subjected to vacuum, therefore no pump or secondary active deployment methods are needed. The paper will present the idea behind the adaption of nature’s heliotropism principle to space structures. The feasibility of the residual air inflation method is verified by LS-DYNA simulations and prototype bench tests under vacuum conditions. Additionally, manufacturing techniques and folding patterns are presented to optimize the actual bench test structure and to minimize the required storage volume. It is shown that through a bio-inspired concept, a high ratio of adaptability of the membrane can be obtained. The paper concludes with the design of a technology demonstrator for a sounding rocket experiment to be launched in March 2013 from the Swedish launch side Esrange

Temporal Cross-Media Retrieval with Soft-Smoothing

Multimedia information have strong temporal correlations that shape the way modalities co-occur over time. In this paper we study the dynamic nature of multimedia and social-media information, where the temporal dimension emerges as a strong source of evidence for learning the temporal correlations across visual and textual modalities. So far, cross-media retrieval models, explored the correlations between different modalities (e.g. text and image) to learn a common subspace, in which semantically similar instances lie in the same neighbourhood. Building on such knowledge, we propose a novel temporal cross-media neural architecture, that departs from standard cross-media methods, by explicitly accounting for the temporal dimension through temporal subspace learning. The model is softly-constrained with temporal and inter-modality constraints that guide the new subspace learning task by favouring temporal correlations between semantically similar and temporally close instances. Experiments on three distinct datasets show that accounting for time turns out to be important for cross-media retrieval. Namely, the proposed method outperforms a set of baselines on the task of temporal cross-media retrieval, demonstrating its effectiveness for performing temporal subspace learning.Comment: To appear in ACM MM 201

Mononuclear Cells From Human Lung Parenchyma Support Antigen‐Induced T Lymphocyte Proliferation

We have previously demonstrated that there is a subpopulation of loosely adherent pulmonary mononuclear cells that can be isolated from minced and enzyme‐digested lung tissue with a potent capacity to stimulate allogeneic T lymphocyte proliferation. We now demonstrate that these cells are also capable of stimulating an autologous mixed leukocyte reaction (AMLR) and presenting antigen to autologous T lymphocytes. These loosely adherent mononuclear cells (LAM) were more effective than either alveolar macrophages or monocytes as antigen‐presenting cells. Depletion of phagocytic or Fc receptor‐positive cells from the LAM population enhanced the stimulation of an reaction AMLR while preserving antigen‐induced T lymphocyte proliferation. These results indicate that there are nonphagocytic, Fc receptor‐negative accessory cells in human lung parenchyma capable of activating resting T cells in an AMLR and supporting antigen‐specific T lymphocyte proliferation. The identity of these cells is uncertain, but the data strongly suggest that the cell is not a classical monocyte‐derived macrophage. These antigen‐presenting cells may be critical in the initiation of immune responses within the lung.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141257/1/jlb0336.pd

Separation of Potent and Poorly Functional Human Lung Accessory Cells Based on Autofluorescence

Human alveolar macrophages obtained by bronchoalveolar lavage are usually poor accessory cells in in vitro lymphoprollferation assays. However, we recently described a subpopulation of pulmonary mononuclear cells, obtained from minced and enzyme‐digested lung, which were potent stimulators of allogeneic T‐lymphocyte proliferation. These cells were enriched in loosely adherent mononuclear cell (LAM) fractions, but further study of these accessory cells was hampered by the heterogeneous nature of LAM. It was observed that in the majority of lung tissue sections, most alveolar macrophages were autofluorescent, whereas most interstitial HLA‐DR positive cells were not. Therefore autofluorescence was utilized to fractionate LAM in an attempt to remove alveolar macrophages and selectively purify interstitial accessory cells. LAM were separated by flow cytometry using forward and side scatter to exclude lymphocytes, and red autofluorescence to obtain brightly autofluorescent (A pos) and relatively nonautofluorescent (A neg) mononuclear cells. Although both populations contained over 80% HLA‐DR positive cells, A pos cells were poor accessory cells, whereas A neg cells were extremely potent stimulators of a mixed leukocyte reaction at all stimulator ratios tested. When A pos cells were added to A neg cells, T‐cell proliferation was markedly suppressed in the majority of experiments. Morphologically, A pos cells appeared similar to classical alveolar macrophages with 95% of the cells being large and intensely nonspecific esterase positive. In contrast, the majority of A neg were smaller, B‐cell antigen‐negative, nonspecific esterase negative, and had a distinctive morphology on Wright‐stained smears. We conclude that fractionation of LAM based on autofluorescence is a powerful tool to isolate and characterize lung mononuclear cells that act either as stimulators or as suppressors of immune responses in the lung.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141667/1/jlb0458.pd