Dynamic testing of gifted and average-ability children's analogy problem solving: Does executive functioning play a role?

Article / Letter to editorInstituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologi

Dynamic testing of gifted and average-ability children's analogy problem solving: Does executive functioning play a role?

Article / Letter to editorInstituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologi

Dynamic testing of gifted and average-ability children's analogy problem solving: Does executive functioning play a role?

status: publishe

Dynamic testing of gifted and average-ability children's analogy problem solving: Does executive functioning play a role?

Article / Letter to editorInstituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologie;Instituut Psychologi

Pure Spinor Integration from the Collating Formula

We use the technique developed by Becchi and Imbimbo to construct a well-defined BRST-invariant path integral formulation of pure spinor amplitudes. The space of pure spinors can be viewed from the algebraic geometry point of view as a collection of open sets where the constraints can be solved and a free independent set of variables can be defined. On the intersections of those open sets, the functional measure jumps and one has to add boundary terms to construct a well-defined path integral. The result is the definition of the pure spinor integration measure constructed in term of differential forms on each single patch.Comment: 22 page

Religious Belief and Cognitive Conflict Sensitivity: A Preregistered fMRI Study

In the current preregistered fMRI study, we investigated the relationship between religiosity and behavioral and neural mechanisms of conflict processing, as a conceptual replication of the study by Inzlicht et al., (2009). Participants (N=193) performed a gender-Stroop task and afterwards completed standardized measures to assess their religiosity. As expected, the task induced cognitive conflict at the behavioral level and at a neural level this was reflected in increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). However, individual differences in religiosity were not related to performance on the Stroop task as measured in accuracy and interference effects, nor to neural markers of response conflict (correct responses vs. errors) or informational conflict (congruent vs. incongruent stimuli). Overall, we obtained moderate to strong evidence in favor of the null hypotheses that religiosity is unrelated to cognitive conflict sensitivity. We discuss the implications for the neuroscience of religion and emphasize the importance of designing studies that more directly implicate religious concepts and behaviors in an ecologically valid manner.Action Contro

Expanding Paramedicine in the Community (EPIC): study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundThe incidence of chronic diseases, including diabetes mellitus (DM), heart failure (HF) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is on the rise. The existing health care system must evolve to meet the growing needs of patients with these chronic diseases and reduce the strain on both acute care and hospital-based health care resources. Paramedics are an allied health care resource consisting of highly-trained practitioners who are comfortable working independently and in collaboration with other resources in the out-of-hospital setting. Expanding the paramedic's scope of practice to include community-based care may decrease the utilization of acute care and hospital-based health care resources by patients with chronic disease.Methods/designThis will be a pragmatic, randomized controlled trial comparing a community paramedic intervention to standard of care for patients with one of three chronic diseases. The objective of the trial is to determine whether community paramedics conducting regular home visits, including health assessments and evidence-based treatments, in partnership with primary care physicians and other community based resources, will decrease the rate of hospitalization and emergency department use for patients with DM, HF and COPD. The primary outcome measure will be the rate of hospitalization at one year. Secondary outcomes will include measures of health system utilization, overall health status, and cost-effectiveness of the intervention over the same time period. Outcome measures will be assessed using both Poisson regression and negative binomial regression analyses to assess the primary outcome.DiscussionThe results of this study will be used to inform decisions around the implementation of community paramedic programs. If successful in preventing hospitalizations, it has the ability to be scaled up to other regions, both nationally and internationally. The methods described in this paper will serve as a basis for future work related to this study.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov: NCT02034045. Date: 9 January 2014

Minimizing the Total Completion Time On-line on a Single Machine, Using Restarts

We give an algorithm to minimize the total completion time on-line on a single machine, using restarts, with a competitive ratio of 3/2. The optimal competitive ratio without using restarts is 2 for deterministic algorithms and $e/(e-1) approx 1.582$ for randomized algorithms. This is the first restarting algorithm to minimize the total completion time that is proved to be better than an algorithm that does not restart