Are there booms and busts in the UK housing market?

This paper examines the historical record of UK house prices to establish if there is evidence to suggest that there have been significant changes in the prices of houses. It does this be examining a measure of affordability. This is defined as the average UK house price over the Average wage. This paper attempts to generate a simple model of the housing market and compares this with the actual data to make a forecast of likely movementHouseprice, markets, booms

Psychopathy and Fear Enjoyment: The Role of Invincibility

Previous research has found a significant positive relationship between psychopathic traits and fear enjoyment (Book et al., 2020; Hosker-Field et al., 2016a). Because enjoyment of fear may be contingent on not feeling like one is actually in danger (Hitchcock, 1949), the current study investigated whether a sense of invincibility could explain the relationship between psychopathy and fear enjoyment. Participants included two online samples, one from two universities, and one from MTURK (Total N = 825). Participants viewed exciting and fear-inducing videos and completed affective appraisals for each video. As expected, psychopathic traits were associated with less negative and more positive responses to the fear-inducing video. Also as expected, invincibility partially explained the relationship between psychopathy and fear enjoyment. Mediation analyses confirmed a significant indirect effect for negative (but not positive) ratings of the fear-inducing video. The results of the current study supply further support for the Fear Enjoyment Hypothesis (Hosker-Field et al., 2016a) and support invincibility as one possible mechanism of the relationship between psychopathy and fear enjoyment

Visual motion processing in one-month-old infants: Preferential looking experiments

AbstractThe ability of infants to discriminate between opposite directions of motion was assessed using forced-choice preferential looking between a random-dot pattern which was segregated into regions which moved in opposite directions, and a uniform pattern in which all the dots moved in the same direction. The first experiment measured velocity thresholds ( νmin and νmax) for direction discrimination; between 10 and 13 weeks νmin decreased, while at the same time νmax increased. The second experiment explored possible implications of this expanding velocity range for direction discrimination by younger infants. One-month-olds showed no evidence for direction discrimination at any of a number of test velocities in the range 1–43 deg/sec. The 1-month-olds were also tested with two additional conditions: they could discriminate between moving and static patterns at velocities of 10 deg/sec or above, and they could also discriminate between coherent and incoherent motion at velocities of 21 deg/sec or below. Neither of these discriminations depends on sensitivity to the direction of the coherent motion. The results suggest that 1-month-olds may not be sensitive to the direction of visual motion

Review of The Literature Associated Wth 2 D Stock Cutting

ABSTRAK The cutting stock problem arises from many physical applications in industry. This paper looks specifically at the literature associated with tit.° dimensional stock cutting. There have been solutions suggested to One dimensional problems, and suggested solutions for the two dimensional problem. In both cases 11w algorithms suggested are dependent on the number of items to be fitted to the \u27stock\u27, and in certain cases pre selected placement strategies. A review of the available literature will provide the background for an exploration of the current and past attempts to solve this problem. it ss ill also provide a suggested focus for future work, and suitable computer algorithms and graphical layouts to aid the cutting processes. Key Words : Cutting stock, Bin Packin

The Development of Visual Motion Processing in Human Infants

The experiments of this thesis have used apparent motion in random-dot patterns to explore the development of motion processing in infants. Most of the experiments involved discrimination of a segregated pattern, in which different regions moved in different ways (eg opposite directions), from a uniform pattern containing just one kind of motion. Maximum displacement limits (dmax) for discrimination of coherent from incoherent motion, and for discrimination of opposite directions of coherent motion, increased between 8 and 15 weeks. The higher threshold of adults indicated that this increase continues beyond 15 weeks. The effect of changing the interval between displacements indicated two processes underlying the increase in direction discrimination dmax: a maturation of the temporal properties of motion detectors (eg improving sensitivity to high temporal frequencies), which is largely complete by about 12 weeks; and a more prolonged development of their spatial properties which dominates the change in dmax after 12 weeks, and may also be involved before this. Measurements of coherence thresholds for direction discrimination showed that, in addition to the rise in dmax with age, there is a substantial improvement in motion sensitivity at displacements below dmax. Hence a uniform increase in sensitivity across all displacements is likely to be an important factor behind the development of dmax. However there may be additional specific improvements in sensitivity to large displacements, perhaps reflecting the emergence of low spatial frequency channels. A series of habituation and preferential looking experiments failed to find evidence for direction discrimination before 6 weeks, though positive evidence was obtained at 6-8 weeks. The results suggest that directionality emerges at about 7 weeks of age. Interestingly, despite their success at discriminating direction in a segregated stimulus, 6-8-week-olds were insensitive to the absolute direction of uniform motion. This suggests that they have not yet learnt to combine measurements of retinal image motion with information about eye movements

Characterising the physicality of everyday buttons

A significant milestone in the development of physically-dynamic surfaces is the ability for buttons to protrude outwards from any location on a touch-screen. As a first step toward developing interaction requirements for this technology we conducted a survey of 1515 electronic push buttons in everyday home environments. We report a characterisation that describes the features of the data set and discusses important button properties that we expect will inform the design of future physically-dynamic devices and surfaces

An exploration of Indonesian students’ experiences of transitioning from studying in their home countries to studying in a UK university.

This study explores the experiences of three Indonesian students of transitioning from their home country to studying at the University of Sheffield. There has been a considerable amount of work already published regarding the experiences of Chinese students who study in the UK but little on Indonesian students despite over 3000 every year enrolling for study at UK universities. In a series of unstructured interviews with three Indonesian students (two female and one male) who were currently or had recently been enrolled at the University of Sheffield, this study sought to discover what their expectations had been about studying in the UK before they left Indonesia, what challenges they encountered when they arrived and how their feelings changed as they progressed through their degree. The interview transcripts were thematically analysed (Braun & Clark 2006) and Bourdieu’s notions of capital, habitus and field were utilised as a conceptual framework to interpret participants’ experiences as reported in their interviews. Gale and Parker’s (2014) transition typology was also drawn on to identify different types of transition experienced by participants. Several themes emerged as important to all three participants when describing their experiences of transition. These were: differences in teaching methods between the two countries; difficulties in adapting to the style of academic English used at Sheffield; differing expectations of what UK higher education would be like; and the impact of different socio-economic backgrounds when arriving in the UK. Using the typology of Gale and Parker (2014), the study concludes that all participants completed the first two types of transition: T1 (induction) and T2 (development). Successful completion of T3 (becoming), where individuals reach a stage of feeling ‘at home’ in their new environment was harder to establish. Some recommendations for how Indonesian students might be more effectively supported by UK universities are also made