Rekindling the Human Spirit Through Urban Design: Creating Spaces for Joy

What makes people joyful? How can we foster happy, healing spaces through urban design that allow for all community members to channel emotional wellbeing? In a fast paced, consumer-oriented economy, the importance of maintaining mental health and well-being is often ignored. This paper seeks to answer these questions through the synthesis of existing literature on urban design, society, and case study analyses of existing public spaces. Although the research focuses on social transformation through the implementation of urban design principles, the disciplines of city planning, public health, sociology, and psychology are discussed as well. The research explores techniques that would allow individuals to lead more fulfilling lives through simple changes to the urban environment

Regulatory goals in a globalized world

This research examines the impact of a salient global (or local) identity on individual’s regulatory goals. Specifically, we show that when people’s identity as a global citizen is salient, they are more likely to focus on promotion goals; whereas when their identity as a local citizen is salient, they are more likely to focus on prevention goals. We further show that this arises because people are likely to adopt a more abstract or higher level (vs. concrete or lower level) construal when their global (local) identity is salient. Evidence from three studies supports this central proposition.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141228/1/jcpy270.pd

Price Promotions Are Inherently More Arousing for Interdependents

The ubiquity of promotions and price discounts has prompted much research to understand how consumers respond to deals. In this research, we present an affective perspective for why some consumers may be more deal prone than others. Specifically, we propose that for interdependents (vs. independents), chancing upon a deal leads to heightened arousal and greater purchase intention for the discounted product. We further propose that this effect arises because interdependents (vs. independents) are more likely to possess a comparative mindset. Findings from five studies provide converging evidence to support our propositions. Across the studies, we adopt different operationalizations of self-construal (via country, cultural prime, self-construal scale and prime), measures of arousal (skin conductance and self-report measures) and use different product categories. We further show that when a comparative mindset is made salient for independents and interdependents, the observed effect dissipates

Telling stories in the use of portfolio assessment in higher education: some implementation issues

Evidence has shown that the results of traditional standardized tests characterized by pencil and paper formats, multiple-choice responses and time-restricted completion are not sufficient in telling how pupils engage in the learning process and their progress in learning. In addition, these tests tend to emphasize on the assessment of basic skills but fail to measure higher level thinking and problem solving skills. This inadequacy can be addressed by incorporating authentic assessment approaches such as performance tasks, portfolios, and grading for team effort. This paper aims to tell stories from an action learning research group whose members have used ‘portfolio’ as an alternative assessment strategy in higher education

Does upgrade to tri-ventricular pacemaker improve long-term clinical response in non-responders to biventricular cardiac resynchronization therapy?

Up to one third of patients with biventricular (BiV) cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) are non-responders.1 § Greater clinical response to CRT has been shown in patients given TriV CRT compared to BiV CRT as de novo device therapy. 2 This abstract investigates if upgrade to TriV CRT in non-responders to BiV CRT will improve long-term clinical outcom

Data augmentation with Mobius transformations

Data augmentation has led to substantial improvements in the performance and generalization of deep models, and remain a highly adaptable method to evolving model architectures and varying amounts of data---in particular, extremely scarce amounts of available training data. In this paper, we present a novel method of applying Mobius transformations to augment input images during training. Mobius transformations are bijective conformal maps that generalize image translation to operate over complex inversion in pixel space. As a result, Mobius transformations can operate on the sample level and preserve data labels. We show that the inclusion of Mobius transformations during training enables improved generalization over prior sample-level data augmentation techniques such as cutout and standard crop-and-flip transformations, most notably in low data regimes

The impact of emerging technologies and AI on human resources in Singapore

The technology-driven world coupled by recent developments in future of work brings upon the challenges faced by Singapore organisations in adapting to these changes, particularly in Artificial Intelligence. Over the last few years, technological developments related to Industry 4.0 have created headlines in relation to its impact on the future of work. Although the developments in Artificial Intelligence promises great economic benefits, research has shown the effective application of AI to HR poses different challenges as compared to other areas; the challenges range from functional to theoretical and when data science is applied to decisions about people, it can create severe disputes with what the society deems as crucial for making significant decisions about individuals. This study aims to determine how emerging technologies particularly AI contribute positively to the HR Singapore organisations. Building on existing studies on AI and HR, the study aims to find the effects of AI on organisation and to what extent does AI revolutionise the HR function. The research was conducted through a qualitative method and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 participants. The findings show that emerging technologies drives productivity and efficiency and AI supports the HR functions particularly in talent acquisition in Singapore organisations

Joint Modeling and Registration of Cell Populations in Cohorts of High-Dimensional Flow Cytometric Data

In systems biomedicine, an experimenter encounters different potential sources of variation in data such as individual samples, multiple experimental conditions, and multi-variable network-level responses. In multiparametric cytometry, which is often used for analyzing patient samples, such issues are critical. While computational methods can identify cell populations in individual samples, without the ability to automatically match them across samples, it is difficult to compare and characterize the populations in typical experiments, such as those responding to various stimulations or distinctive of particular patients or time-points, especially when there are many samples. Joint Clustering and Matching (JCM) is a multi-level framework for simultaneous modeling and registration of populations across a cohort. JCM models every population with a robust multivariate probability distribution. Simultaneously, JCM fits a random-effects model to construct an overall batch template -- used for registering populations across samples, and classifying new samples. By tackling systems-level variation, JCM supports practical biomedical applications involving large cohorts