Potential Problems in Objectivist Research

The authors discuss potential problems in music therapy research design and methods

Design, fabrication, and test of a steel spar wind turbine blade

The design and fabrication of wind turbine blades based on 60 foot steel spars are discussed. Performance and blade load information is given and compared to analytical prediction. In addition, performance is compared to that of the original MOD-O aluminum blades. Costs for building the two blades are given, and a projection is made for the cost in mass production. Design improvements to reduce weight and improve fatigue life are suggested

Depression and Anxiety in the Elderly: Translating Clinical Methods for Use by Non-Professionals

Because seniors suffer depression and anxiety and professional help is not always available, a simple structure is proposed for non-professionals to provide effective help to seniors. These potential helpers who are present in the seniors’ daily environments can then assist the seniors in adjusting to their stage of life and avoid the distress arising from loneliness, purposelessness and physical/mental decline, the factors accounting for the bulk of seniors’ problems. The few therapeutic skills these willing helpers need are described and embedded in a sequence of procedural steps they can use. Mental health professionals are encouraged to teach these skills at every opportunity

Translating the Research: Keyword Advertising for Lean Start-Ups

This paper extracts and translates for application findings emerging from the research on keyword advertising. Five conclusions emerge. First, developing a comprehensive collection of keywords for a new product or service is useful for all businesses, whether or not keyword ads will ultimately be bought. Second, analyzing keyword searches identifies the existence and trend of demand from user search frequency for all businesses. Third, keyword advertising is too expensive for many products and some services, and most lean start-ups. Fourth, there are effective alternates to keyword advertising. Fifth, the skills for keyword advertising are readily learnable: an advertising firm may not be needed

Mirrors, portraits, and member checking: Managing difficult moments of knowledge exchange in the social sciences.

Consultation is an important feature of research, and increasingly, researchers are required to work in partnership with stakeholders to improve the impact of their work. Our aim was to demonstrate what can be learned from the scholarship on, and practice of, member checking to facilitate productive knowledge exchange. Using dialogical analysis, we explored 3 member check interactions from 3 different qualitative psychology projects, focusing our analysis on difficult moments between researchers and participants conceptualized here as “sore spots”. We identified 2 major genres in these sequences: participant ambivalence and participant challenge. We then considered passages that allowed us to explore a more theoretical understanding of these 2 genres in terms of the metaphor of portraits and mirrors. Overall, we outline how implicit epistemologies and theories of subjectivity (uncomplicated, blank, and complex) may be linked to the way in which stakeholders approach research. We also provide a map regarding the theories within which member checks can be undertaken, associated research practices in terms of a range of researcher responses to stakeholder ambivalence and challenge, and implications of these moments for knowledge exchange for qualitative research but also for quantitative health and social sciences. We conclude that sore spots in the knowledge exchange process can be productive opportunities for transformational validity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved

Tragedy of the common canal

This paper uses laboratory experiments to investigate the effects of alternative solutions to a common-pool resource with a unidirectional flow. The focus is on the comparative economic efficiency of communications, bilateral “Coasian” bargaining, auctions and price-based allocations. All treatments improve allocative efficiency relative to a baseline environment. Communication and bilateral bargaining are not generally as effective as market allocations. An exogenously imposed, optimal fee results in the greatest efficiency gain, followed by auction allocations that determine the usage fee endogenously.externalities, experiments, auctions, Coasian bargaining, common pool resource

Increasing University Enrollment in Times of Declining Demand: Industrial-Organizational Psychology Program Exemplar

The specific examples are provided to demonstrate concrete ways in which a university without a renowned brand can adopt tactics which will increase its market for quality products which are in demand. The requirements are that the university renders its use of media advertising current in method and sufficient in amount. It may also be necessary to assume equilibrium and counter it by advertising in a manner for which the assumptions required for equilibrium are weak or not present. Finally, it is proposed that the exemplar graduate school program methods can be replicated, mutatis mutandis, in undergraduate programs and other types of graduate programs as well

Structural templating as a route to improved photovoltaic performance in copper phthalocyanine/fullerene (C60) heterojunctions

We have developed a method to improve the short circuit current density in copper phthalocyanine (CuPc)/fullerene (C60) organic solar cells by ~60% by modifying the CuPc crystal orientation through use of a molecular interlayer to maximize charge transport in the direction between the two electrodes. Powder x-ray diffraction and electronic absorption spectroscopy show that a thin 3,4,9,10-perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydride interlayer before CuPc growth templates the CuPc film structure, forcing the molecules to lie flat with respect to the substrate surface, although the intrastack orientation is unaffected. This modified stacking configuration facilitates charge transport and improves charge collection

Bayesian estimation applied to multiple species

Observed data are often contaminated by undiscovered interlopers, leading to biased parameter estimation. Here we present BEAMS (Bayesian estimation applied to multiple species) which significantly improves on the standard maximum likelihood approach in the case where the probability for each data point being “pure” is known. We discuss the application of BEAMS to future type-Ia supernovae (SNIa) surveys, such as LSST, which are projected to deliver over a million supernovae light curves without spectra. The multiband light curves for each candidate will provide a probability of being Ia (pure) but the full sample will be significantly contaminated with other types of supernovae and transients. Given a sample of N supernovae with mean probability, ⟨P⟩, of being Ia, BEAMS delivers parameter constraints equal to N⟨P⟩ spectroscopically confirmed SNIa. In addition BEAMS can be simultaneously used to tease apart different families of data and to recover properties of the underlying distributions of those families (e.g. the type-Ibc and II distributions). Hence BEAMS provides a unified classification and parameter estimation methodology which may be useful in a diverse range of problems such as photometric redshift estimation or, indeed, any parameter estimation problem where contamination is an issue