Colorblind Ideology and Perceptions of Minority Children During a Fictionalized Parent-Child Discipline Scene

Belief in colorblind ideology among 200 social service providers and its associations with their evaluations of a fictionalized minority family were examined. Perceptions of the family in the first scenes of the movie Crooklyn included the mother’s competency, abusiveness, supportiveness, and irresponsibility, as well as her children’s respectfulness, obedience, lack of control, and aggressiveness. Colorblind ideology was operationalized as participants’ reported degree of belief that differences should be ignored when encountering others. Significant associations were found between degree of belief in ignoring differences and perceptions of the children as aggressive and out-of-control. Therefore, as the tendency to believe in ignoring differences increased, the tendency to see the Crooklyn children as aggressive and out-of- control also increased. Imposing colorblind ideologies when evaluating minority children may be associated with increasingly negative perceptions, and therefore may not be in the children’s best interest. Implications for improving social service-provision also are discussed

Advanced smoke meter development survey and analysis

Ideal smoke meter characteristics are determined to provide a basis for evaluation of candidate systems. Five promising techniques are analyzed in detail to evaluate compilance with the practical smoke meter requirements. Four of the smoke measurement concepts are optical methods: Modulated Transmission (MODTRAN), Cross Beam Absorption Counter (CBAC), Laser Induced Incandescence (LIN), and Photoacoustic Spectroscopy (PAS). A rapid response filter instrument called a Taper Element Oscillating Microbalance (TEOM) is also evaluated. For each technique, the theoretical principles are described, the expected performance is determined, and the advantages and disadvantages are discussed The expected performance is evaluated against each of the smoke meter specifications, and the key questions for further study are given. The most promising smoke meter technique analyzed was MODTRAN, which is a variation on a direct transmission measurement. The soot-laden gas is passed through a transmission cell, and the gas pressure is modulated by a speaker

Dynamical Linked Cluster Expansions: A Novel Expansion Scheme for Point-Link-Point-Interactions

Dynamical linked cluster expansions are linked cluster expansions with hopping parameter terms endowed with their own dynamics. This amounts to a generalization from 2-point to point-link-point interactions. We develop an associated graph theory with a generalized notion of connectivity and describe an algorithmic generation of the new multiple-line graphs. We indicate physical applications to spin glasses, partially annealed neural networks and SU(N) gauge Higgs systems. In particular the new expansion technique provides the possibility of avoiding the replica-trick in spin glasses. We consider variational estimates for the SU(2) Higgs model of the electroweak phase transition. The results for the transition line, obtained by dynamical linked cluster expansions, agree quite well with corresponding high precision Monte Carlo results.Comment: 41 pages, latex2e, 10 postscript figure

Study of resonance light scattering for remote optical probing

Enhanced scattering and fluorescence processes in the visible and UV were investigated which will enable improved remote measurements of gas properties. The theoretical relationship between scattering and fluorescence from an isolated molecule in the approach to resonance is examined through analysis of the time dependence of re-emitted light following excitation of pulsed incident light. Quantitative estimates are developed for the relative and absolute intensities of fluorescence and resonance scattering. New results are obtained for depolarization of scattering excited by light at wavelengths within a dissociative continuum. The experimental work was performed in two separate facilities. One of these utilizes argon and krypton lasers, single moded by a tilted etalon, and a 3/4 meter double monochromator. This facility was used to determine properties of the re-emission from NO2, I2 and O3 excited by visible light. The second facility involves a narrow-line dye laser, and a 3/4 meter single monochromator. The dye laser produces pulsed light with 5 nsec pulse duration and 0.005 nm spectral width

A recurrent neural network with ever changing synapses

A recurrent neural network with noisy input is studied analytically, on the basis of a Discrete Time Master Equation. The latter is derived from a biologically realizable learning rule for the weights of the connections. In a numerical study it is found that the fixed points of the dynamics of the net are time dependent, implying that the representation in the brain of a fixed piece of information (e.g., a word to be recognized) is not fixed in time.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX, 4 figure

Hierarchical Self-Programming in Recurrent Neural Networks

We study self-programming in recurrent neural networks where both neurons (the `processors') and synaptic interactions (`the programme') evolve in time simultaneously, according to specific coupled stochastic equations. The interactions are divided into a hierarchy of $L$ groups with adiabatically separated and monotonically increasing time-scales, representing sub-routines of the system programme of decreasing volatility. We solve this model in equilibrium, assuming ergodicity at every level, and find as our replica-symmetric solution a formalism with a structure similar but not identical to Parisi's $L$-step replica symmetry breaking scheme. Apart from differences in details of the equations (due to the fact that here interactions, rather than spins, are grouped into clusters with different time-scales), in the present model the block sizes $m_i$ of the emerging ultrametric solution are not restricted to the interval $[0,1]$, but are independent control parameters, defined in terms of the noise strengths of the various levels in the hierarchy, which can take any value in [0,\infty\ket. This is shown to lead to extremely rich phase diagrams, with an abundance of first-order transitions especially when the level of stochasticity in the interaction dynamics is chosen to be low.Comment: 53 pages, 19 figures. Submitted to J. Phys.