When Do Rewards Have Enhancement Effects? An Availability Valence Approach

It is commonly argued that although rewards induce behaviors, they undermine attitudes and motivation for subsequent action. This perspective has been applied in a consumer setting to suggest that sales promotions such as coupons will undermine consumer brand evaluations and brand loyalty. Instead of focusing on the undermining effects of promotional rewards, this research applies the availability valence hypothesis (Tybout, Sternthal, & Calder, 1983) to predict and explain when rewards will enhance recipient response. Two experiments demonstrate that an immediate reward from a product-related source enhances product evaluations by making favorable information more accessible than unfavorable information. Promotions enhance the relative accessibility of favorable information when their benefits are directly experienced and the salience of the promotion’s task-contingency is diminished by maximizing consumer behavioral freedom

Business Ethics: The Promise of Neuroscience

Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience research portend well for furthering understanding of many of the fundamental questions in the field of business ethics, both normative and empirical. This article provides an overview of neuroscience methodology and brain structures, and explores the areas in which neuroscience research has contributed findings of value to business ethics, as well as suggesting areas for future research. Neuroscience research is especially capable of providing insight into individual reactions to ethical issues, while also raising challenging normative questions about the nature of moral responsibility, autonomy, intent, and free will. This article also provides a brief summary of the papers included in this special issue, attesting to the richness of scholarly inquiry linking neuroscience and business ethics. We conclude that neuroscience offers considerable promise to the field of business ethics, but we caution against overpromise

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Now I Walk on Foreign Soil: Settler Colonialism in Argentina’s Southern Borderlands, 1867-1899

“Now I Walk On Foreign Soil: Settler Colonialism in Argentina’s Southern Borderlands, 1867-1899” examines the relationship between military violence, Indigenous resistance, and settler colonial state formation in Argentina. This dissertation charts how during the so-called “Conquest of the Desert” (1879-1885), formerly autonomous Indigenous peoples in the pampas and Patagonia were subjugated to Argentine state rule through military violence, and discursively erased from Argentina’s national community. Employing the methodologies of microhistory and ethnohistory, alongside the frameworks of settler colonial theory and genocide studies, it examines the intertwined forms of military and nonmilitary violence intended to physically and ideologically eradicate Indigenous people from Argentina. Furthermore, it analyzes many forms of Indigenous resistance to this project of settler colonial elimination, arguing that Indigenous interventions shaped the course of Argentine nation-state formation, even as these populations were being expunged from Argentina’s official narrative of national history. Each chapter reconstructs the lived experiences of individuals and groups who weathered this violent period in Argentine history. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 are primarily concerned with questions of frontiers, borderlands, and boundary lines. Chapter 1 reconstructs the interethnic character of Argentina’s southern borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century, and highlights the uneven impacts of Argentina\u27s 1867 Frontier Law in the borderlands region. Chapters 2 and 3 narrate the so-called “Conquest of the Desert,” showing how these military campaigns attempted to redefine not only the geographic limits of the national territory but also the racial and cultural boundaries of Argentine national identity. These chapters also examine various national policy decisions regarding the frontier, showcasing the disconnect between state fantasies of territorial control and on-the-ground dynamics of resistance and contestation. Chapters 4 and 5 turn to themes of displacement, confinement, and assimilation. These final two chapters follow the trajectories of Indigenous people who were imprisoned during the military campaigns. These captives, many of them women and children, were trafficked throughout the country and subject to various schemes of unfree labor and forced assimilation. Although formally under the purview of the national government, these populations navigated a new social space in which they were increasingly treated as “remnants” of a disappearing past. Ultimately, this dissertation calls for a critical reexamination of the “Conquest of the Desert,” which has long been mythologized as the ultimate triumph of Argentine “civilization” over Indigenous “barbarism.” It recovers the centrality of Indigenous actors in shaping Argentine nation-state formation, and in doing so, counters a common myth of Argentina as a nation with no Indigenous past or present

Microbial Water Quality through a Full-Scale Advanced Wastewater Treatment Demonstration Facility

The fates of viruses, bacteria, and antibiotic resistance genes during advanced wastewater treatment are important to assess for implementation of potable reuse systems. Here, a full-scale advanced wastewater treatment demonstration facility (ozone, biological activated carbon filtration, micro/ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, and advanced oxidation) was sampled over three months. Atypically, no disinfectant residual was applied before the microfiltration step. Microbial cell concentrations and viability were assessed via flow cytometry and adenosine triphosphate (ATP). Concentrations of bacteria (16S rRNA gene), viruses (human adenovirus and JC polyomavirus), and antibiotic resistance genes (sul1 and blaTEM) were assessed via quantitative PCR following the concentration of large sample volumes by dead-end ultrafiltration. In all membrane filtration permeates, microbial concentrations were higher than previously reported for chloraminated membranes, and log10 reduction values were lower than expected. Concentrations of 16S rRNA and sul1 genes were reduced by treatment but remained quantifiable in reverse osmosis permeate. It is unclear whether sul1 in the RO permeate was from the passage of resistance genes or new growth of microorganisms, but the concentrations were on the low end of those reported for conventional drinking water distribution systems. Adenovirus, JC polyomavirus, and blaTEM genes were reduced below the limit of detection (∼10–2 gene copies per mL) by microfiltration. The results provide insights into how treatment train design and operation choices affect microbial water quality as well as the use of flow cytometry and ATP for online monitoring and process control

Efficacy and safety of transdermal buprenorphine in the management of children with cancer-related pain

The current study investigated the efficacy, safety, tolerability, and compliance of a transdermal buprenorphine delivery system for the management of chronic cancer pain in the pediatric population