Modeling the effects of religious belief and affiliation on prosociality

publishedVersio

Temperament Style and Substance Abuse Characteristics

The relationship of temperament to different patterns and types of alcohol abuse has received much attention over the last decade in order to provide clues to matching patients optimally to treatment strategies. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of temperament with a number of relevant substance abuse characteristics in a substance abusing population. One hundred forty-five male veterans were interviewed on their lifetime use of substances and on their psychiatric symptoms, problems associated with use, context, and family history of substance abuse. Subjects filled out the TPQ and the MPQ, which were subjected to factor analysis and revealed four factors: (1) Negative Affectivity/Impulsivity, (2) Positive Affectivity/Sociability, (3) Persistence/Achievement, and (4) Constraint. There was partial support for the hypotheses. Impulsivity was negatively correlated with age of onset and positively correlated with substance-related problems and a family history of substance abuse. Subjects with a history of depression scored significantly lower on the Positive Affectivity/Sociability factor than those who had not experienced a significant depression. Individuals who used alone scored lower on this factor than those who used in social contexts. The temperament factors of Persistence/Achievement and Constraint were, for the most part, unrelated to substance abuse.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45666/1/11226_2004_Article_410694.pd

Parthenon -- a performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement framework

On the path to exascale the landscape of computer device architectures and corresponding programming models has become much more diverse. While various low-level performance portable programming models are available, support at the application level lacks behind. To address this issue, we present the performance portable block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) framework Parthenon, derived from the well-tested and widely used Athena++ astrophysical magnetohydrodynamics code, but generalized to serve as the foundation for a variety of downstream multi-physics codes. Parthenon adopts the Kokkos programming model, and provides various levels of abstractions from multi-dimensional variables, to packages defining and separating components, to launching of parallel compute kernels. Parthenon allocates all data in device memory to reduce data movement, supports the logical packing of variables and mesh blocks to reduce kernel launch overhead, and employs one-sided, asynchronous MPI calls to reduce communication overhead in multi-node simulations. Using a hydrodynamics miniapp, we demonstrate weak and strong scaling on various architectures including AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, Intel and AMD x86 CPUs, IBM Power9 CPUs, as well as Fujitsu A64FX CPUs. At the largest scale on Frontier (the first TOP500 exascale machine), the miniapp reaches a total of $1.7\times10^{13}$ zone-cycles/s on 9,216 nodes (73,728 logical GPUs) at ~92% weak scaling parallel efficiency (starting from a single node). In combination with being an open, collaborative project, this makes Parthenon an ideal framework to target exascale simulations in which the downstream developers can focus on their specific application rather than on the complexity of handling massively-parallel, device-accelerated AMR.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in IJHPCA, Codes available at https://github.com/parthenon-hpc-la

Exploring the future of data-driven product design

Connected devices present new opportunities to advance design through data collection in the wild, similar to the way digital services evolve through analytics. However, it is still unclear how live data transmitted by connected devices informs the design of these products, going beyond performance optimisation to support creative practices. Design can be enriched by data captured by connected devices, from usage logs to environmental sensors, and data about the devices and people around them. Through a series of workshops, this paper contributes industry and academia perspectives on the future of data-driven product design. We highlight HCI challenges, issues and implications, including sensemaking and the generation of design insight. We further challenge current notions of data-driven design and envision ways in which future HCI research can develop ways to work with data in the design process in a connected, rich, human manner

Projected resurgence of COVID-19 in the United States in July—December 2021 resulting from the increased transmissibility of the Delta variant and faltering vaccination

In Spring 2021, the highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant began to cause increases in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in parts of the United States. At the time, with slowed vaccination uptake, this novel variant was expected to increase the risk of pandemic resurgence in the US in summer and fall 2021. As part of the COVID-19 Scenario Modeling Hub, an ensemble of nine mechanistic models produced 6-month scenario projections for July–December 2021 for the United States. These projections estimated substantial resurgences of COVID-19 across the US resulting from the more transmissible Delta variant, projected to occur across most of the US, coinciding with school and business reopening. The scenarios revealed that reaching higher vaccine coverage in July–December 2021 reduced the size and duration of the projected resurgence substantially, with the expected impacts was largely concentrated in a subset of states with lower vaccination coverage. Despite accurate projection of COVID-19 surges occurring and timing, the magnitude was substantially underestimated 2021 by the models compared with the of the reported cases, hospitalizations, and deaths occurring during July–December, highlighting the continued challenges to predict the evolving COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccination uptake remains critical to limiting transmission and disease, particularly in states with lower vaccination coverage. Higher vaccination goals at the onset of the surge of the new variant were estimated to avert over 1.5 million cases and 21,000 deaths, although may have had even greater impacts, considering the underestimated resurgence magnitude from the model

Global Carbon Budget 2023

Accurate assessment of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their redistribution among the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere in a changing climate is critical to better understand the global carbon cycle, support the development of climate policies, and project future climate change. Here we describe and synthesize data sets and methodology to quantify the five major components of the global carbon budget and their uncertainties. Fossil CO2 emissions (EFOS) are based on energy statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on land-use and land-use change data and bookkeeping models. Atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly, and its growth rate (GATM) is computed from the annual changes in concentration. The ocean CO2 sink (SOCEAN) is estimated with global ocean biogeochemistry models and observation-based f CO2 products. The terrestrial CO2 sink (SLAND) is estimated with dynamic global vegetation models. Additional lines of evidence on land and ocean sinks are provided by atmospheric inversions, atmospheric oxygen measurements, and Earth system models. The resulting carbon budget imbalance (BIM), the difference between the estimated total emissions and the estimated changes in the atmosphere, ocean, and terrestrial biosphere, is a measure of imperfect data and incomplete understanding of the contemporary carbon cycle. All uncertainties are reported as ±1σ. For the year 2022, EFOS increased by 0.9 % relative to 2021, with fossil emissions at 9.9 ± 0.5 Gt C yr−1 (10.2 ± 0.5 Gt C yr−1 when the cement carbonation sink is not included), and ELUC was 1.2 ± 0.7 Gt C yr−1, for a total anthropogenic CO2 emission (including the cement carbonation sink) of 11.1 ± 0.8 Gt C yr−1 (40.7±3.2 Gt CO2 yr−1). Also, for 2022, GATM was 4.6±0.2 Gt C yr−1 (2.18±0.1 ppm yr−1; ppm denotes parts per million), SOCEAN was 2.8 ± 0.4 Gt C yr−1, and SLAND was 3.8 ± 0.8 Gt C yr−1, with a BIM of −0.1 Gt C yr−1 (i.e. total estimated sources marginally too low or sinks marginally too high). The global atmospheric CO2 concentration averaged over 2022 reached 417.1 ± 0.1 ppm. Preliminary data for 2023 suggest an increase in EFOS relative to 2022 of +1.1 % (0.0 % to 2.1 %) globally and atmospheric CO2 concentration reaching 419.3 ppm, 51 % above the pre-industrial level (around 278 ppm in 1750). Overall, the mean of and trend in the components of the global carbon budget are consistently estimated over the period 1959–2022, with a near-zero overall budget imbalance, although discrepancies of up to around 1 Gt C yr−1 persist for the representation of annual to semi-decadal variability in CO2 fluxes. Comparison of estimates from multiple approaches and observations shows the following: (1) a persistent large uncertainty in the estimate of land-use changes emissions, (2) a low agreement between the different methods on the magnitude of the land CO2 flux in the northern extra-tropics, and (3) a discrepancy between the different methods on the strength of the ocean sink over the last decade. This living-data update documents changes in methods and data sets applied to this most recent global carbon budget as well as evolving community understanding of the global carbon cycle. The data presented in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.18160/GCP-2023 (Friedlingstein et al., 2023)

Overlapping Mental Magisteria: Implications of Experimental Psychology for a Theory of Religious Belief as Misattribution.

Subjective religious and spiritual experiences (RS) are believed by many to be reliable indicators of external agency. A set of related phenomena are used to support this view that typically involve intuitions or attributions of mental interaction or experiences with RS agents. The present review integrates empirical findings from the fields of the Cognitive Sciences of Religion, experimental social psychology, and neuropsychology to support the position that individuals misattribute RS thoughts and experiences. That is, these experiences are believed to be veridical indicators of external agency when in fact they are subject to materialistic causal influences. This tendency varies as a function of individual differences and contextual conditions. RS phenomena can be artificially generated in a way that is phenomenologically indistinguishable from spontaneous experiences. Intuitions of external agency are rationalized and confabulated, leaving the mistaken impression of validation by analytic processes. The theoretical and philosophical implications of findings are discussed

Overlapping Mental Magisteria: Implications of Experimental Psychology for a Theory of Religious Belief as Misattribution.

Subjective religious and spiritual experiences (RS) are believed by many to be reliable indicators of external agency. A set of related phenomena are used to support this view that typically involve intuitions or attributions of mental interaction or experiences with RS agents. The present review integrates empirical findings from the fields of the Cognitive Sciences of Religion, experimental social psychology, and neuropsychology to support the position that individuals misattribute RS thoughts and experiences. That is, these experiences are believed to be veridical indicators of external agency when in fact they are subject to materialistic causal influences. This tendency varies as a function of individual differences and contextual conditions. RS phenomena can be artificially generated in a way that is phenomenologically indistinguishable from spontaneous experiences. Intuitions of external agency are rationalized and confabulated, leaving the mistaken impression of validation by analytic processes. The theoretical and philosophical implications of findings are discussed