Making Memories: Why Time Matters

In the last decade advances in human neuroscience have identified the critical importance of time in creating long-term memories. Circadian neuroscience has established biological time functions via cellular clocks regulated by photosensitive retinal ganglion cells and the suprachiasmatic nuclei. Individuals have different circadian clocks depending on their chronotypes that vary with genetic, age, and sex. In contrast, social time is determined by time zones, daylight savings time, and education and employment hours. Social time and circadian time differences can lead to circadian desynchronization, sleep deprivation, health problems, and poor cognitive performance. Synchronizing social time to circadian biology leads to better health and learning, as demonstrated in adolescent education. In-day making memories of complex bodies of structured information in education is organized in social time and uses many different learning techniques. Research in the neuroscience of long-term memory (LTM) has demonstrated in-day time spaced learning patterns of three repetitions of information separated by two rest periods are effective in making memories in mammals and humans. This time pattern is based on the intracellular processes required in synaptic plasticity. Circadian desynchronization, sleep deprivation, and memory consolidation in sleep are less well-understood, though there has been considerable progress in neuroscience research in the last decade. The interplay of circadian, in-day and sleep neuroscience research are creating an understanding of making memories in the first 24-h that has already led to interventions that can improve health and learning

Nailing Down the Price of New Nonresidential Building Construction: Expanding the PPI to Include Indexes by Region and Type of Contractor

[Excerpt] In the early 2000s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Producer Price Index (PPI) program began developing price indexes to cover the new nonresidential construction segment of the U.S. economy. This event was precipitated by feedback from industry analysts, economic agencies, and trade associations indicating that there was a lack of regularly available construction data based on a clearly defined methodology. In particular, the Bureau of Economic Analysis needed price indexes for the calculation of the nonresidential construction segment of the nominal gross domestic product. As a result, five new nonresidential building PPIs were created: • New warehouse building construction • New school building construction • New office building construction • New industrial building construction • New healthcare building construction The types of buildings mentioned in these indexes were selected because they covered a majority of the new, nonresidential building construction segment of the economy. The new nonresidential building construction indexes were introduced into publication piecemeal between 2005 and 2013. Although these indexes represented a significant accomplishment in terms of expanding PPI coverage, some data users were looking for more detailed price index information for the construction sector. In December 2016, in response to the requests for regional data, BLS created two additional index structures that reflected more detailed data: • New nonresidential building construction by contractor type and region (236400) • New nonresidential building construction by region (236500) This Beyond the Numbers article explains how these indexes are calculated, what their structures are like, and how analysts can use the data to better understand price movements in the nonresidential building construction sector of the U.S. economy

"Goethe's Plant Morphology: The Seeds of Evolution"

I argue that Goethe’s scientific writings carry in them the seeds of the theory of evolution. Goethe’s works on plant morphology reflects the conflicting ideas of his era on the discreteness and on the stability of species. Goethe’s theory of plant morphology provides a link between the discontinuous view of nature, as exemplified in works of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), and the continuous view of nature, as exemplified in the work of the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Investigation of Attitudes Towards Security Behaviors

Cybersecurity attacks have increased as Internet technology has proliferated. Symantec’s 2013 Internet Security Report stated that two out of the top three causes of data breaches in 2012 were attributable to human error (Pelgrin, 2014). This suggests a need to educate end users so that they engage in behaviors that increase their cybersecurity. This study researched how a user’s knowledge affects their engagement in security behaviors. Security behaviors were operationalized into two categories: cyber hygiene and threat response behaviors. A sample of 194 San José State University students were recruited to participate in an observational study. Students completed a card sort, a semantic knowledge quiz, and a survey of their intention to perform security behaviors. A personality inventory was included to see if there would be any effects of personality on security behaviors. Multiple regression was used to see how card sorting and semantic knowledge quiz scores predicted security behaviors, but the results were not significant. Despite this, there was a correlation between cyber hygiene behaviors and threat response behaviors, as well as the Big Five personality traits. The results showed that many of the Big Five personality traits correlated with each other, which is consistent with other studies’ findings. The only personality trait that had a correlation with one of the knowledge measures was neuroticism, in which neuroticism had a negative correlation with the semantic knowledge quiz. Implications for future research are discussed to understand how knowledge, cyber hygiene behaviors, and threat response behaviors relate