The Social Perspective Taking Process: What motivates individuals to take another’s perspective?

Background/Context: A growing literature describes multiple benefits of social perspective taking – many of which are particularly important for schools. Despite these potential benefits for administrators, counselors, teachers, and students, little is known about social perspective taking as a process. Purpose/Research Question: If educational researchers are ultimately to design interventions to help improve the perspective taking capacities of those in schools, they need to fully understand the underlying process. Particularly important is the need to understand: What initially motivates individuals to take the perspective of others? Participants: To investigate this question, a sample of 18 adults from an array of different professions (who were nominated as adept perspective takers) and 13 high school students (who were nominated as struggling with social perspective taking) participated in the study. Research Design: Participants completed a survey, a performance task, and in-depth interviews as part of this mixed-method, exploratory study. The interviews served as the primary source of data and were coded for evidence of what triggered (or inhibited) participants’ motivation to engage in the social perspective taking process. Findings: The interview data established the existence of at least thirteen specific factors that impacted participants’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking across a wide array of contexts. Seven factors generally enhanced individuals’ motivation to engage in social perspective taking; three factors were mixed; and three factors inhibited their motivation. Conclusions/Recommendations: This research indicates that not only might individuals be motivated to engage in social perspective taking through multiple pathways, but that these pathways might be combined and/or interact with one another. These motivating factors raise important issues for further research. In addition, at a practical level, they provide a foundation for developing structures to motivate individuals in schools to engage in perspective taking more often

The effectiveness of public health interventions to reduce the health impact of climate change:a systematic review of systematic reviews

Climate change is likely to be one of the most important threats to public health in the coming years. Yet despite the large number of papers considering the health impact of climate change, few have considered what public health interventions may be of most value in reducing the disease burden. We aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of public health interventions to reduce the disease burden of high priority climate sensitive diseases

Repeatability of beach morphology change under identical wave forcing

Laboratory investigations of beach morphology change under wave action are undertaken to gain insight into coastal processes, design coastal structures and validate the predictions of numerical models. For the results of such experiments to be reliable, it is necessary that they are repeatable. The equilibrium beach concept, that beach morphology will evolve to a quasi-static equilibrium shape for a given forcing suggests that experiments should be repeatable to some degree. However, sediment transport in turbulent breaking and broken waves is complex and highly variable and the level of repeatability at different temporal and spatial scales is challenging to measure, as such, previous work has restricted comparisons to small numbers of waves. Here we use the results of two identical, 20-h large-scale wave flume experiments to investigate the repeatability of sediment transport and beach morphology change under waves at timescales down to individual swash events. It is shown that while flow characteristics from identical swash events are very repeatable, the sediment transported can be very different in both magnitude and direction due to differences in turbulence, sediment advection and morphological feedback. Over longer periods containing multiple matching swash events however, the beach responds in a very similar manner, with the level of morphological repeatability increasing with time. The results also demonstrate that gross swash zone sediment transport remains high even as a beach profile approaches quasi-equilibrium, but the proportion of individual swash events that cause large sediment fluxes (>±7.5 kg/event/m) reduces with time. The results of this laboratory study indicate that beach morphology change has a level of determinism over timescales of several minutes and longer, giving confidence in the results from physical modelling studies. However, the large differences in sediment transport from apparently identical swash events questions the value in pursuing numerical predictions of sediment transport at the wave-by-wave timescale unless the reversals in sediment transport between apparently near identical swash events can also be predicted

Combined distributed turbo coding and space frequency block coding techniques

The distributed space-time (frequency) coding and distributed channel turbo coding used independently represent two cooperative techniques that can provide increased throughput and spectral efficiency at an imposed maximum Bit Error Rate (BER) and delay required from the new generation of cellular networks. This paper proposes two cooperative algorithms that employ jointly the two types of techniques, analyzes their BER and spectral efficiency performances versus the qualities of the channels involved, and presents some conclusions regarding the adaptive employment of these algorithms. © 2010 V. Bota et al.FP7/ICT/2007/21547

Combined distributed turbo coding and space frequency block coding techniques

The distributed space-time (frequency) coding and distributed channel turbo coding used independently represent two cooperative techniques that can provide increased throughput and spectral efficiency at an imposed maximum Bit Error Rate (BER) and delay required from the new generation of cellular networks. This paper proposes two cooperative algorithms that employ jointly the two types of techniques, analyzes their BER and spectral efficiency performances versus the qualities of the channels involved, and presents some conclusions regarding the adaptive employment of these algorithms. © 2010 V. Bota et al.FP7/ICT/2007/21547

Combined distributed turbo coding and space frequency block coding techniques

The distributed space-time (frequency) coding and distributed channel turbo coding used independently represent two cooperative techniques that can provide increased throughput and spectral efficiency at an imposed maximum Bit Error Rate (BER) and delay required from the new generation of cellular networks. This paper proposes two cooperative algorithms that employ jointly the two types of techniques, analyzes their BER and spectral efficiency performances versus the qualities of the channels involved, and presents some conclusions regarding the adaptive employment of these algorithms. © 2010 V. Bota et al.FP7/ICT/2007/21547

Bistability in Apoptosis by Receptor Clustering

Apoptosis is a highly regulated cell death mechanism involved in many physiological processes. A key component of extrinsically activated apoptosis is the death receptor Fas, which, on binding to its cognate ligand FasL, oligomerize to form the death-inducing signaling complex. Motivated by recent experimental data, we propose a mathematical model of death ligand-receptor dynamics where FasL acts as a clustering agent for Fas, which form locally stable signaling platforms through proximity-induced receptor interactions. Significantly, the model exhibits hysteresis, providing an upstream mechanism for bistability and robustness. At low receptor concentrations, the bistability is contingent on the trimerism of FasL. Moreover, irreversible bistability, representing a committed cell death decision, emerges at high concentrations, which may be achieved through receptor pre-association or localization onto membrane lipid rafts. Thus, our model provides a novel theory for these observed biological phenomena within the unified context of bistability. Importantly, as Fas interactions initiate the extrinsic apoptotic pathway, our model also suggests a mechanism by which cells may function as bistable life/death switches independently of any such dynamics in their downstream components. Our results highlight the role of death receptors in deciding cell fate and add to the signal processing capabilities attributed to receptor clustering.Comment: Accepted by PLoS Comput Bio

interPopula: a Python API to access the HapMap Project dataset

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The HapMap project is a publicly available catalogue of common genetic variants that occur in humans, currently including several million SNPs across 1115 individuals spanning 11 different populations. This important database does not provide any programmatic access to the dataset, furthermore no standard relational database interface is provided.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>interPopula is a Python API to access the HapMap dataset. interPopula provides integration facilities with both the Python ecology of software (e.g. Biopython and matplotlib) and other relevant human population datasets (e.g. Ensembl gene annotation and UCSC Known Genes). A set of guidelines and code examples to address possible inconsistencies across heterogeneous data sources is also provided.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>interPopula is a straightforward and flexible Python API that facilitates the construction of scripts and applications that require access to the HapMap dataset.</p

A Comprehensive Workflow for General-Purpose Neural Modeling with Highly Configurable Neuromorphic Hardware Systems

In this paper we present a methodological framework that meets novel requirements emerging from upcoming types of accelerated and highly configurable neuromorphic hardware systems. We describe in detail a device with 45 million programmable and dynamic synapses that is currently under development, and we sketch the conceptual challenges that arise from taking this platform into operation. More specifically, we aim at the establishment of this neuromorphic system as a flexible and neuroscientifically valuable modeling tool that can be used by non-hardware-experts. We consider various functional aspects to be crucial for this purpose, and we introduce a consistent workflow with detailed descriptions of all involved modules that implement the suggested steps: The integration of the hardware interface into the simulator-independent model description language PyNN; a fully automated translation between the PyNN domain and appropriate hardware configurations; an executable specification of the future neuromorphic system that can be seamlessly integrated into this biology-to-hardware mapping process as a test bench for all software layers and possible hardware design modifications; an evaluation scheme that deploys models from a dedicated benchmark library, compares the results generated by virtual or prototype hardware devices with reference software simulations and analyzes the differences. The integration of these components into one hardware-software workflow provides an ecosystem for ongoing preparative studies that support the hardware design process and represents the basis for the maturity of the model-to-hardware mapping software. The functionality and flexibility of the latter is proven with a variety of experimental results

Assessing Levels of Attention Using Low Cost Eye Tracking

The emergence of mobile eye trackers embedded in next generation smartphones or VR displays will make it possible to trace not only what objects we look at but also the level of attention in a given situation. Exploring whether we can quantify the engagement of a user interacting with a laptop, we apply mobile eye tracking in an in-depth study over 2 weeks with nearly 10.000 observations to assess pupil size changes, related to attentional aspects of alertness, orientation and conflict resolution. Visually presenting conflicting cues and targets we hypothesize that it's feasible to measure the allocated effort when responding to confusing stimuli. Although such experiments are normally carried out in a lab, we are able to differentiate between sustained alertness and complex decision making even with low cost eye tracking "in the wild". From a quantified self perspective of individual behavioral adaptation, the correlations between the pupil size and the task dependent reaction time and error rates may longer term provide a foundation for modifying smartphone content and interaction to the users perceived level of attention.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables. The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/DOIxxx, when published as part of the HCI International 2016 Conference Proceeding