Pupil response as an indicator of hazard perception during simulator driving

We investigate the pupil response to hazard perception during driving simulation. Complementary to gaze movement and physiological stress indicators, pupil size changes can provide valuable information on traffic hazard perception with a relatively low temporal delay. We tackle the challenge of identifying those pupil dilation events associated with hazardous events from a noisy signal by a combination of wavelet transformation and machine learning. Therefore, we use features of the wavelet components as training data of a support vector machine. We further demonstrate how to utilize the method for the analysis of actual hazard perception and how it may differ from the behavioral driving response

Der Kulti war prägend: Zur historischen Nutzung des Kulturpalastes

Dass der Autor 1965 im Jahr der Fertigstellung einer mehrfach überarbeiteten Gesamtkonzeption für ein „Haus der Sozialistischen Kultur“ hier in Dresden geboren ist, tut nichts zur Sache. Wohl aber der Umstand, dass der Kulti ihn fast fünf Jahrzehnte begleitet hat. Über die beschriebene Zeitspanne hinweg haben Schülerkonzerte, Jugendclub-Mitgliedschaft, Dixieland-Festival, Ferienarbeit, Tanzfestival, Tauschbörsen, vergessene Anoraks und ein über Stunden verloren geglaubter Sohn des Autors das Verhältnis eng geschmiedet. Die berufsbedingte Übernahme und Betreuung des Kulturpalast-Archivbestandes durch das Stadtarchiv ab 2012 tat ihr Übriges dazu. Mit Freude erlebte das Stadtarchiv die intensive Benutzung des Kulturpalast-Aktenbestandes für den geplanten Umbau. Die Vollständigkeit der Überlieferung war für dieses Interesse ein Glücksfall

How the Swiss federal drug policy spreads to cantons and cities: an evaluation

Since the early 1990s, the Swiss Confederation has been promoting the “Four-Pillars” model to address drug-related issues. This model seeks to reduce drugrelated problems by intervention using the four fields of prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and repression. Since the Confederation has no constitutional competence in drug policy, it cannot enforce this model in a top-down manner. Instead, it must rely on other means in order to convince the main players of Swiss drug policy – the cantons and the cities – to adopt its ideas

Testing different function fitting methods for mobile eye-tracker calibration

During calibration, an eye-tracker fits a mapping function from features to a target gaze point. While there is research on which mapping function to use, little is known about how to best estimate the function's parameters. We investigate how different fitting methods impact accuracy under different noise factors, such as mobile eye-tracker imprecision or detection errors in feature extraction during calibration. For this purpose, a simulation of binocular gaze was developed for a) different calibration patterns and b) different noise characteristics. We found the commonly used polynomial regression via least-squares-error fit often lacks to find good mapping functions when compared to ridge regression. Especially as data becomes noisier, outlier-tolerant fitting methods are of importance. We demonstrate a reduction in mean MSE of 20% by simply using ridge over polynomial fit in a mobile eye-tracking experiment

Struktur und Entwicklung des Oberrheingrabens als europäischer Wirtschaftsstandort - Kurzfassung

In dieser Arbeit wird die ökonomische Situation des Oberrheingrabens anhand der Themenbereiche Beschäftigung und Arbeitslosigkeit, Forschung und Entwicklung, Wachstum und Produktivität und Unternehmensgründungen analysiert. Zudem werden die wichtigsten infrastrukturellen Rahmenbedingungen, die Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Unterschiede in der Besteuerung und in den Genehmigungsverfahren innerhalb des trinationalen Oberrheingrabens dargestellt. Darauf aufbauend wird das Potential und die mögliche Rolle der Region als europäischer Wirtschaftsstandort diskutiert. Die Untersuchung entstand in Zusammenarbeit zwischen dem Institut für angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung, IAW, in Tübingen, der Konjunkturforschung Basel AG, BAK, in Basel und dem Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung, ZEW, in Mannheim. Dabei übernahm das IAW die Untersuchung der Bevölkerungsentwicklung, des Arbeitsmarktes, der Gewerbeflächen und des Wohnungsmarktes. Das BAK untersuchte das regionale Wachstum, die Produktivitätsentwicklung und die nationalen Genehmigungsverfahren. Die Kapitel über die Verkehrsinfrastruktur, die Besteuerung der Unternehmen, Forschung und Entwicklung und Unternehmensgründungen wurden vom ZEW erstellt. Die Schlußfolgerungen wurden gemeinsam von den drei Instituten erarbeitet

A two-center pilot study on the effects of clinical ethics support on coercive measures in psychiatry.

BACKGROUND The use of formal coercion such as seclusion, mechanical restraint, and forced medication is one of the most challenging and complex issues in mental health care, on the clinical, the legal, and the ethical level. Clinical ethics support aims at assisting healthcare practitioners in determining the morally most justifiable course of action in these situations. However, the effectiveness of clinical ethics support has hardly been studied so far. METHODS Monthly moral case deliberation (MCD) was implemented in two acute wards of two different psychiatric hospitals in Switzerland. Frequency and intensity of coercion was measured on ward level (npatients = 405), and the Moral Attentiveness Scale, Knowledge on Coercion Scale, and Staff Attitudes towards Coercion Scale were applied on healthcare practitioner level (nHP = 46). Pre-post-comparisons were conducted using multi-level modeling where appropriate. RESULTS After implementation of MCD, formal coercion was less frequent (particularly seclusion, small effect size; 9.6 vs. 16.7%, p = .034, Cramér's V = .105) and less intense (particularly mechanical restraint, large effect size; 86.8 ± 45.3 vs. 14.5 ± 12.1 h, exact p = .019, r = -.74), and approval for coercive measures among healthcare practitioners was lower when controlling for the number of MCD sessions attended. CONCLUSIONS Clinical ethics support such as MCD may be a hitherto underutilized service for the reduction of coercion, complementing existing strategies and programs. Implementing clinical ethics support may help improve quality of care for persons suffering from severe mental illness

Quantifying the retention of emotions across story retellings

Story retelling is a fundamental medium for the transmission of information between individuals and among social groups. Besides conveying factual information, stories also contain affective information. Though natural language processing techniques have advanced considerably in recent years, the extent to which machines can be trained to identify and track emotions across retellings is unknown. This study leverages the powerful RoBERTa model, based on a transformer architecture, to derive emotion-rich story embeddings from a unique dataset of 25,728 story retellings. The initial stories were centered around five emotional events (joy, sadness, embarrassment, risk, and disgust—though the stories did not contain these emotion words) and three intensities (high, medium, and low). Our results indicate (1) that RoBERTa can identify emotions in stories it was not trained on, (2) that the five emotions and their intensities are preserved when they are transmitted in the form of retellings, (3) that the emotions in stories are increasingly well-preserved as they experience additional retellings, and (4) that among the five emotions, risk and disgust are least well-preserved, compared with joy, sadness, and embarrassment. This work is a first step toward quantifying situation-driven emotions with machines