Playing “Sherlock Holmes”: Enhancing students’ understanding of prejudice and stereotyping

A very simple, innovative classroom exercise designed to heighten students\u27 understanding of stereotyping and prejudice is described. Students\u27 evaluation of the exercise was very positive. Students reported greater awareness and understanding of their own and others’ stereotypes and prejudice and of the negative effects of prejudice, with females more than males reporting enhanced awareness of others’ stereotyping. Students also rated the exercise as very enjoyable. There was a trend among Non-White more than White students to report that the exercise helped show them how to reduce stereotypes and more Non-White than White students offered solutions for reducing prejudice that involved actively reaching out and interacting with others different from themselves. Additional suggestions for instructors are discussed

Deep and superficial amygdala nuclei projections revealed in vivo by probabilistic tractography

Copyright © 2011 Society for Neuroscience and the authors. The The Journal of Neuroscience uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.Despite a homogenous macroscopic appearance on magnetic resonance images, subregions of the amygdala express distinct functional profiles as well as corresponding differences in connectivity. In particular, histological analysis shows stronger connections for superficial (i.e., centromedial and cortical), compared with deep (i.e., basolateral and other), amygdala nuclei to lateral orbitofrontal cortex and stronger connections of deep compared with superficial, nuclei to polymodal areas in the temporal pole. Here, we use diffusion weighted imaging with probabilistic tractography to investigate these connections in humans. We use a data-driven approach to segment the amygdala into two subregions using k-means clustering. The identified subregions are spatially contiguous and their location corresponds to deep and superficial nuclear groups. Quantification of the connection strength between these amygdala clusters and individual target regions corresponds to qualitative histological findings in non-human primates, indicating such findings can be extrapolated to humans. We propose that connectivity profiles provide a potentially powerful approach for in vivo amygdala parcellation and can serve as a guide in studies that exploit functional and anatomical neuroimaging.The Wellcome Trust, a Max Planck Research Award and Swiss National Science Foundation

A population-based case-control study on social factors and risk of testicular germ cell tumours

Objectives Incidence rates for testicular cancer have risen over the last few decades. Findings of an association between the risk of testicular cancer and social factors are controversial. The association of testicular cancer and different indicators of social factors were examined in this study.<p></p> Design Case–control study.<p></p> Setting Population-based multicentre study in four German regions (city states Bremen and Hamburg, the Saarland region and the city of Essen).<p></p> Participants The study included 797 control participants and 266 participants newly diagnosed with testicular cancer of which 167 cases were classified as seminoma and 99 as non-seminoma. The age of study participants ranged from 15 to 69 years.<p></p> Methods Social position was classified by educational attainment level, posteducational training, occupational sectors according to Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarrero (EGP) and the socioeconomic status (SES) on the basis of the International SocioEconomic Index of occupational status (ISEI). ORs and corresponding 95% CIs (95% CIs) were calculated for the whole study sample and for seminoma and non-seminoma separately.<p></p> Results Testicular cancer risk was modestly increased among participants with an apprenticeship (OR=1.7 (95% CI 1.0 to 2.8)) or a university degree (OR=1.6 (95% CI 0.9 to 2.8)) relative to those whose education was limited to school. Analysis of occupational sectors revealed an excess risk for farmers and farm-related occupations. No clear trend was observed for the analyses according to the ISEI-scale.<p></p> Conclusions Social factors based on occupational measures were not a risk factor for testicular cancer in this study. The elevated risk in farmers and farm-related occupations warrants further research including analysis of occupational exposures.<p></p&gt

Potential of a Neutrino Detector in the ANDES Underground Laboratory for Geophysics and Astrophysics of Neutrinos

The construction of the Agua Negra tunnels that will link Argentina and Chile under the Andes, the world longest mountain range, opens the possibility to build the first deep underground labo- ratory in the Southern Hemisphere. This laboratory has the acronym ANDES (Agua Negra Deep Experiment Site) and its overburden could be as large as \sim 1.7 km of rock, or 4500 mwe, providing an excellent low background environment to study physics of rare events like the ones induced by neutrinos and/or dark matter. In this paper we investigate the physics potential of a few kiloton size liquid scintillator detector, which could be constructed in the ANDES laboratory as one of its possible scientific programs. In particular, we evaluate the impact of such a detector for the studies of geoneutrinos and galactic supernova neutrinos assuming a fiducial volume of 3 kilotons as a reference size. We emphasize the complementary roles of such a detector to the ones in the Northern Hemisphere neutrino facilities through some advantages due to its geographical location.Comment: 20 pages, 16 figures and 9 table

Neutrino and antineutrino charge-exchange reactions on 12C

We extend the formalism of weak interaction processes, obtaining new expressions for the transition rates, which greatly facilitate numerical calculations, both for neutrino-nucleus reactions and muon capture. Explicit violation of CVC hypothesis by the Coulomb field, as well as development of a sum rule approach for the inclusive cross sections have been worked out. We have done a thorough study of exclusive (ground state) properties of $^{12}$B and $^{12}$N within the projected quasiparticle random phase approximation (PQRPA). Good agreement with experimental data achieved in this way put in evidence the limitations of standard RPA and the QRPA models, which come from the inability of the RPA in opening the $p_{3/2}$ shell, and from the non-conservation of the number of particles in the QRPA. The inclusive neutrino/antineutrino ($\nu/\tilde{\nu}$) reactions $^{12}$C($\nu,e^-)^{12}$N and $^{12}$C($\tilde{\nu},e^+)^{12}$B are calculated within both the PQRPA, and the relativistic QRPA (RQRPA). It is found that the magnitudes of the resulting cross-sections: i) are close to the sum-rule limit at low energy, but significantly smaller than this limit at high energies both for $\nu$ and $\tilde{\nu}$, ii) they steadily increase when the size of the configuration space is augmented, and particulary for $\nu/\tilde{\nu}$ energies $> 200$ MeV, and iii) converge for sufficiently large configuration space and final state spin. The quasi-elastic $^{12}$C($\nu,\mu^-)^{12}$N cross section recently measured in the MiniBooNE experiment is briefly discussed. We study the decomposition of the inclusive cross-section based on the degree of forbiddenness of different multipoles. A few words are dedicated to the $\nu/\tilde{\nu}$-$^{12}$C charge-exchange reactions related with astrophysical applications.Comment: 21 pages, 13 figures, 1 table, submitted to Physical Review

Combined model-free and model-sensitive reinforcement learning in non-human primates

Contemporary reinforcement learning (RL) theory suggests that potential choices can be evaluated by strategies that may or may not be sensitive to the computational structure of tasks. A paradigmatic model-free (MF) strategy simply repeats actions that have been rewarded in the past; by contrast, modelsensitive (MS) strategies exploit richer information associated with knowledge of task dynamics. MF and MS strategies should typically be combined, because they have complementary statistical and computational strengths; however, this tradeoff between MF/MS RL has mostly only been demonstrated in humans, often with only modest numbers of trials. We trained rhesus monkeys to perform a two-stage decision task designed to elicit and discriminate the use of MF and MS methods. A descriptive analysis of choice behaviour revealed directly that the structure of the task (of MS importance) and the reward history (of MF and MS importance) significantly influenced both choice and response vigour. A detailed, trial-by-trial computational analysis confirmed that choices were made according to a combination of strategies, with a dominant influence of a particular form of model sensitivity that persisted over weeks of testing. The residuals from this model necessitated development of a new combined RL model which incorporates a particular credit assignment weighting procedure. Finally, response vigor exhibited a subtly different collection ofMFand MS influences. These results provide new illumination onto RL behavioural processes in non-human primates

Weak Long-Ranged Casimir Attraction in Colloidal Crystals

We investigate the influence of geometric confinement on the free energy of an idealized model for charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions. The mean-field Poisson-Boltzmann formulation for this system predicts pure repulsion among macroionic colloidal spheres. Fluctuations in the simple ions' distribution provide a mechanism for the macroions to attract each other at large separations. Although this Casimir interaction is long-ranged, it is too weak to influence colloidal crystals' dynamics.Comment: 5 pages 2 figures ReVTe