244 research outputs found
Effects of fear on donations to climate change mitigation
Despite 70 years of research, there is no consensus about the effects of threat messages on behavior, partly because of publication bias. The lack of consensus concerns situations such as climate change where people tend to believe that they cannot easily make a major difference. Using a 2 × 2, (threat, neutral) × (efficacy, no efficacy) between-subjects design, we tested four hypotheses: the effect of threat stimuli on (1) mitigation of climate change and (2) experienced fear depends on efficacy information, (3) threat stimuli increase monetary donations to mitigation regardless of efficacy information, and (4) the effect of the threat stimuli depends on political identity. The threat stimuli were climate change related pictures and a prompt to write either about one’s knowledge of or about the threat of climate change. The efficacy stimuli were an efficacy related picture and written information about the efficacy of a climate change mitigating organization. We collected a representative online sample of 1517 U.S. citizens. The manipulations affected experienced fear and self-efficacy, but there was no statistically significant main effect of threat on donations nor a statistically significant interaction between threat and efficacy or between threat and political identity. It is concluded that threat appeals do not increase climate change mitigation behavior by more than a very small amount compared to making people think about the subject.publishedVersionPeer reviewe
The influence of role awareness, empathy induction and trait empathy on dictator game giving
We ask how state empathy, trait empathy, and role awareness influence dictator game giving in a monetarily incentivized experiment. We manipulated two factors: role awareness (role certainty vs. role uncertainty) and state empathy induction (no empathy induction vs. empathy induction). Under role uncertainty, participants did not know their role as a dictator or a recipient when making their choices. State empathy was induced by asking the dictators to consider what the recipient would feel when learning about the decision. Each participant was randomly assigned into one of the four conditions, and in each condition, participants were randomly assigned into dictator and receiver roles. The role assignment took place before or after decisions were made, depending on the condition. We also studied the direct influence of trait empathy on dictator game giving as well as its interaction with the experimental manipulations. Trait empathy was measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Questionnaire of Cognitive and Affective Empathy (QCAE) before the experiment. Of our experimental manipulations, role awareness had an effect on dictator game giving; participants donated more under role uncertainty than under role certainty. Instead, we did not observe an effect of state empathy induction. Of trait empathy subscales, only affective empathy was positively associated with dictator game giving. Finally, role awareness did not influence all participants similarly but had a larger impact on those with low scores on trait empathic concern or trait affective empathy. Our results indicate that specific measures to induce altruistic sharing can be effective but their effect may vary depending on certain personal characteristics. </p
Public Service Motivation: a rationalist critique
There has been significant and growing interest and empirical research around Public Service Motivation (PSM) in recent years. There are few critiques of the construct, and none from a rationalist perspective. Given that the origins of PSM lie in attempts by public administration scholars to counter rationalist explanations of bureaucratic behaviour, this lack of a counter-criticism is surprising. This article provides a rationalist critique of PSM. It argues that PSM is consistent with, not an alternative to, rationalist understandings of what motivates individuals. It also argues that a significant gap in the PSM literature is around how civil servants and others make decisions; decisions about the public interest, and thus how and when to allocate public resources. By seeing PSM as consistent with rationality, and specifically as a form of expressive interests, answers many of the remaining questions about PSM and addresses the substantive gaps in the construct
The Murchison Widefield Array: Design Overview
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a dipole-based aperture array
synthesis telescope designed to operate in the 80-300 MHz frequency range. It
is capable of a wide range of science investigations, but is initially focused
on three key science projects. These are detection and characterization of
3-dimensional brightness temperature fluctuations in the 21cm line of neutral
hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) at redshifts from 6 to 10,
solar imaging and remote sensing of the inner heliosphere via propagation
effects on signals from distant background sources,and high-sensitivity
exploration of the variable radio sky. The array design features 8192
dual-polarization broad-band active dipoles, arranged into 512 tiles comprising
16 dipoles each. The tiles are quasi-randomly distributed over an aperture
1.5km in diameter, with a small number of outliers extending to 3km. All
tile-tile baselines are correlated in custom FPGA-based hardware, yielding a
Nyquist-sampled instantaneous monochromatic uv coverage and unprecedented point
spread function (PSF) quality. The correlated data are calibrated in real time
using novel position-dependent self-calibration algorithms. The array is
located in the Murchison region of outback Western Australia. This region is
characterized by extremely low population density and a superbly radio-quiet
environment,allowing full exploitation of the instrumental capabilities.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Proceedings
of the IEE
A new layout optimization technique for interferometric arrays, applied to the MWA
Antenna layout is an important design consideration for radio interferometers
because it determines the quality of the snapshot point spread function (PSF,
or array beam). This is particularly true for experiments targeting the 21 cm
Epoch of Reionization signal as the quality of the foreground subtraction
depends directly on the spatial dynamic range and thus the smoothness of the
baseline distribution. Nearly all sites have constraints on where antennas can
be placed---even at the remote Australian location of the MWA (Murchison
Widefield Array) there are rock outcrops, flood zones, heritages areas,
emergency runways and trees. These exclusion areas can introduce spatial
structure into the baseline distribution that enhance the PSF sidelobes and
reduce the angular dynamic range. In this paper we present a new method of
constrained antenna placement that reduces the spatial structure in the
baseline distribution. This method not only outperforms random placement
algorithms that avoid exclusion zones, but surprisingly outperforms random
placement algorithms without constraints to provide what we believe are the
smoothest constrained baseline distributions developed to date. We use our new
algorithm to determine antenna placements for the originally planned MWA, and
present the antenna locations, baseline distribution, and snapshot PSF for this
array choice.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Interferometric imaging with the 32 element Murchison Wide-field Array
The Murchison Wide-field Array (MWA) is a low frequency radio telescope,
currently under construction, intended to search for the spectral signature of
the epoch of re-ionisation (EOR) and to probe the structure of the solar
corona. Sited in Western Australia, the full MWA will comprise 8192 dipoles
grouped into 512 tiles, and be capable of imaging the sky south of 40 degree
declination, from 80 MHz to 300 MHz with an instantaneous field of view that is
tens of degrees wide and a resolution of a few arcminutes. A 32-station
prototype of the MWA has been recently commissioned and a set of observations
taken that exercise the whole acquisition and processing pipeline. We present
Stokes I, Q, and U images from two ~4 hour integrations of a field 20 degrees
wide centered on Pictoris A. These images demonstrate the capacity and
stability of a real-time calibration and imaging technique employing the
weighted addition of warped snapshots to counter extreme wide field imaging
distortions.Comment: Accepted for publication in PASP. This is the draft before journal
typesetting corrections and proofs so does contain formatting and journal
style errors, also has with lower quality figures for space requirement
The Murchison Widefield Array
It is shown that the excellent Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory site
allows the Murchison Widefield Array to employ a simple RFI blanking scheme and
still calibrate visibilities and form images in the FM radio band. The
techniques described are running autonomously in our calibration and imaging
software, which is currently being used to process an FM-band survey of the
entire southern sky.Comment: Accepted for publication in Proceedings of Science [PoS(RFI2010)016].
6 pages and 3 figures. Presented at RFI2010, the Third Workshop on RFI
Mitigation in Radio Astronomy, 29-31 March 2010, Groningen, The Netherland
The EoR Sensitivity of the Murchison Widefield Array
Using the final 128 antenna locations of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA),
we calculate its sensitivity to the Epoch of Reionization (EoR) power spectrum
of red- shifted 21 cm emission for a fiducial model and provide the tools to
calculate the sensitivity for any model. Our calculation takes into account
synthesis rotation, chro- matic and asymmetrical baseline effects, and excludes
modes that will be contaminated by foreground subtraction. For the fiducial
model, the MWA will be capable of a 14{\sigma} detection of the EoR signal with
one full season of observation on two fields (900 and 700 hours).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, Accepted for publication in MNRAS
Letters. Supplementary material will be available in the published version,
or by contacting the author
The Murchison Widefield Array: the Square Kilometre Array Precursor at low radio frequencies
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is one of three Square Kilometre Array
Precursor telescopes and is located at the Murchison Radio-astronomy
Observatory in the Murchison Shire of the mid-west of Western Australia, a
location chosen for its extremely low levels of radio frequency interference.
The MWA operates at low radio frequencies, 80-300 MHz, with a processed
bandwidth of 30.72 MHz for both linear polarisations, and consists of 128
aperture arrays (known as tiles) distributed over a ~3 km diameter area. Novel
hybrid hardware/software correlation and a real-time imaging and calibration
systems comprise the MWA signal processing backend. In this paper the as-built
MWA is described both at a system and sub-system level, the expected
performance of the array is presented, and the science goals of the instrument
are summarised.Comment: Submitted to PASA. 11 figures, 2 table
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