Access to general health care services by a New Zealand population with serious mental illness.

INTRODUCTION: Literature suggests that good quality health care access can have a positive impact on the health of people with serious mental illness (SMI), but literature relating to patterns of access by this group is equivocal. AIM: This study was designed to explore health care access patterns in a group of people with SMI and to compare them with a general New Zealand population group, in order for health providers to understand how they might contribute to positive health outcomes for this group. METHODS: The study surveyed 404 mental health consumers aged 18-65 years receiving care from one district health board in Auckland about their patterns of health care access. Results were compared with those from the New Zealand Health Survey of the general population. RESULTS: Findings suggest that the SMI consumer respondents had poorer physical health than the general population respondents, accessed health care services in more complex ways and were more particular about who they accessed for their care than the general population respondents. There was some concern from SMI consumers around discrimination from health care providers. The study also suggested that some proactive management with SMI consumers for conditions such as metabolic syndrome was occurring within the health care community. DISCUSSION: The first point of access for SMI consumers with general health problems is not always the family general practitioner and so other health professionals may sometimes need to consider the mental and physical health of such consumers in a wider context than their own specialism

Not by number alone: The effect of teachers’ knowledge and its value in evaluating “sins of omission”

What constitutes good teaching, and what factors do learners consider when evaluating teachers? Prior developmental work suggests that even young children accurately recognize and evaluate under-informativeness. Building on prior work, we propose a Bayesian model of teacher evaluation that infers the teacher’s quality from how carefully he selected demonstrations given what he knew. We test the predictions of our model across 15 conditions in which participants saw a teacher who demonstrated all or a subset of functions of a novel device and rated his helpfulness. Our results suggest that human adults seamlessly integrate information about the number of functions taught, their values, as well as what the teacher knew, to make nuanced judgments about the quality of teaching; the quantitative pattern is well predicted by our mode

So Good It Has to Be True: Wishful Thinking in Theory of Mind

In standard decision theory, rational agents are objective, keeping their beliefs independent from their desires. Such agents are the basis for current computational models of Theory of Mind (ToM), but the accuracy of these models are unknown. Do people really think that others do not let their desires color their beliefs? In two experiments we test whether people think that others engage in wishful thinking. We find that participants do think others believe that desirable events are more likely to happen, and that undesirable ones are less likely to happen. However, these beliefs are not well calibrated as people do not let their desires influence their beliefs in the task. Whether accurate or not, thinking that others wishfully think has consequences for reasoning about them. We find one such consequence—people learn more from an informant who thinks an event will happen despite wishing it was otherwise. People’s ToM therefore appears to be more nuanced than the current rational accounts in that it allows other’s desires to directly affect their subjective probability of an event

Against the complex versus simple distinction

This paper examines three proposals on the difference between complex and simple views about personal identity: Parfit’s original introduction of the distinction, Gasser and Stefan’s definition and Noonan’s recent proposal. I argue that the first two classify the paradigm cases of simplicity as complex, while Noonan’s proposal makes simplicity and complexity turn on features whose relevance for the distinction is questionable. Given these difficulties, I examine why we should be interested in whether a position is complex or simple. I describe two purposes of having a distinction, and show that extant accounts of the complex vs. simple distinction fail to serve these. I argue that unless we find a satisfying account of the difference between complex and simple positions, we should not frame discourses on personal identity in these terms.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Dynamic analysis of the EBR-II plant with the DSNP-ND simulation package

Development and initial testing have been completed for a special version of the DSNP simulation language software package, DSNP-ND, which simulates EBR-II based on the models of the primary system components used in the NATDEMO program. Preliminary results are included for a comparison with an original NATDEMO prediction for the SHRT-45 transient. 7 refs

Comparing early adolescents’ positive bystander responses to cyberbullying and traditional bullying: the impact of severity and gender

Young people are frequently exposed to bullying events in the offline and online domain. Witnesses to these incidents act as bystanders and play a pivotal role in reducing or encouraging bullying behaviour. The present study examined 868 (47.2% female) 11-13-year-old early adolescent pupils’ bystander responses across a series of hypothetical vignettes based on traditional and cyberbullying events. The vignettes experimentally controlled for severity across mild, moderate, and severe scenarios. The findings showed positive bystander responses (PBRs) were higher in cyberbullying than traditional bullying incidents. Bullying severity impacted on PBRs, in that PBRs increased across mild, moderate, and severe incidents, consistent across traditional and cyberbullying. Females exhibited more PBRs across both types of bullying. Findings are discussed in relation to practical applications within the school. Strategies to encourage PBRs to all forms of bullying should be at the forefront of bullying intervention methods

What Research Has to Say About Gender-Linked Differences in CMC and Does Elementary School Children’s E-mail Use Fit This Picture?

This paper first reviews the literature on computer mediated communication (CMC) to examine whether claims about gender-linked differences in specific attitudes, styles and content in CMC have been validated. Empirical studies were limited, with considerable variation in audiences, tasks, and contexts that was related to varied outcomes. The paper next describes an empirical study on the e-mail communication of elementary school children from ten Dutch classrooms. No gender-linked preference for a person or task-oriented attitude was found. Girls significantly more often employed an elaborate style. Differences between boys and girls on content of communication were subtle rather than robust. The conclusion discusses the functional embedding of CMC and the need to examine jointly antecedents, language acts and consequences. (http://www.springerlink.com/content/28181t88lxg835q2

Comparative transient analysis of metal and oxide fueled LMFBR. [Loop-type and pool-type designs]

The neutronics and thermodynamics of an LMFBR primary system have been simulated using the DSNP simulation language. A detailed fuel pin and its subchannel model were developed and included in the DSNP library. This permits the reactor core to be simulated with any number of pins having any number of radial and axial nodes. The metal fueled core transients were compared to transients of an oxide fueled core, the conclusion being that for the same perturbations the temperature transients are faster in the metal core. A comparison between pool-type and loop-type reactors was also performed, leading to a conclusion that the transients in the upper plenum temperatures are much slower in the pool-type reactor than in the loop-type reactor

So good it has to be true: Wishful thinking in theory of mind

In standard decision theory, rational agents are objective, keeping their beliefs independent from their desires (Berger, 1985). Such agents are the basis for current computational models of Theory of Mind (ToM), but this fundamental as- sumption of the theory remains untested. Do people think that others’ beliefs are objective, or do they think that others’ de- sires color their beliefs? We describe a Bayesian framework for exploring this relationship and its implications. Motivated by this analysis, we conducted two experiments testing the a priori independence of beliefs and desires in people’s ToM and find that, contrary to fully-normative accounts, people think that others engage in wishful thinking. In the first ex- periment, we found that people think others believe both that desirable events are more likely to happen, and that undesir- able ones are less likely to happen. In the second experiment, we found that social learning leverages this intuitive under- standing of wishful thinking: participants learned more from the beliefs of an informant whose desires were contrary to his beliefs. People’s ToM therefore appears to be more nuanced than the current rational accounts, but consistent with a model in which desire directly affects the subjective probability of an event