“You can't kid a kidder”: association between production and detection of deception in an interactive deception task

Both the ability to deceive others, and the ability to detect deception, has long been proposed to confer an evolutionary advantage. Deception detection has been studied extensively, and the finding that typical individuals fare little better than chance in detecting deception is one of the more robust in the behavioral sciences. Surprisingly, little research has examined individual differences in lie production ability. As a consequence, as far as we are aware, no previous study has investigated whether there exists an association between the ability to lie successfully and the ability to detect lies. Furthermore, only a minority of studies have examined deception as it naturally occurs; in a social, interactive setting. The present study, therefore, explored the relationship between these two facets of deceptive behavior by employing a novel competitive interactive deception task (DeceIT). For the first time, signal detection theory (SDT) was used to measure performance in both the detection and production of deception. A significant relationship was found between the deception-related abilities; those who could accurately detect a lie were able to produce statements that others found difficult to classify as deceptive or truthful. Furthermore, neither ability was related to measures of intelligence or emotional ability. We, therefore, suggest the existence of an underlying deception-general ability that varies across individuals

The Case for Trauma-Informed Corrections

This banded dissertation focuses on the beneficial impact of trauma-informed practices with women in correctional facilities—a vital issue given that there has been a 700% increase in women’s incarceration rates since 1980. The conceptual paper argues that a trauma-informed correctional system benefits both incarcerated women and correctional staff. The qualitative case study presents findings from semi-structured interviews with correctional staff, officers, and administrators about their experiences implementing trauma-informed practice in a women’s correctional facility. The third product in this banded dissertation is a presentation of the case study findings at a peer-reviewed regional conference in the field of criminal justice (October 2018)

Automatic detection and removal of ineffective mutants for the mutation analysis of relational database schemas

Data is one of an organization’s most valuable and strategic assets. Testing the relational database schema, which protects the integrity of this data, is of paramount importance. Mutation analysis is a means of estimating the fault-finding “strength” of a test suite. As with program mutation, however, relational database schema mutation results in many “ineffective” mutants that both degrade test suite quality estimates and make mutation analysis more time consuming. This paper presents a taxonomy of ineffective mutants for relational database schemas, summarizing the root causes of ineffectiveness with a series of key patterns evident in database schemas. On the basis of these, we introduce algorithms that automatically detect and remove ineffective mutants. In an experimental study involving the mutation analysis of 34 schemas used with three popular relational database management systems—HyperSQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite—the results show that our algorithms can identify and discard large numbers of ineffective mutants that can account for up to 24% of mutants, leading to a change in mutation score for 33 out of 34 schemas. The tests for seven schemas were found to achieve 100% scores, indicating that they were capable of detecting and killing all non-equivalent mutants. The results also reveal that the execution cost of mutation analysis may be significantly reduced, especially with “heavyweight” DBMSs like PostgreSQL

Hitchhikers Need Free Vehicles! Shared Repositories for Statistical Analysis in SBST

As a means for improving the maturity of the data analysis methods used in the search-based software testing field, this paper presents the need for shared repositories of well-documented statistical analysis code and replication data. In addition to explaining the benefits associated with using these repositories, the paper gives suggestions (e.g., the testing of analysis code) for improving the study of data arising from experiments with randomized algorithms

Virtual Mutation Analysis of Relational Database Schemas

Relational databases are a vital component of many modern soft- ware applications. Key to the definition of the database schema — which specifies what types of data will be stored in the database and the structure in which the data is to be organized — are integrity constraints. Integrity constraints are conditions that protect and preserve the consistency and validity of data in the database, preventing data values that violate their rules from being admitted into database tables. They encode logic about the application concerned, and like any other component of a software application, need to be properly tested. Mutation analysis is a technique that has been successfully applied to integrity constraint testing, seeding database schema faults of both omission and commission. Yet, as for traditional mutation analysis for program testing, it is costly to perform, since the test suite under analysis needs to be run against each individual mutant to establish whether or not it exposes the fault. One overhead incurred by database schema mutation is the cost of communicating with the database management system (DBMS). In this paper, we seek to eliminate this cost by performing mutation analysis virtually on a local model of the DBMS, rather than on an actual, running instance hosting a real database. We present an empirical evaluation of our virtual technique revealing that, across all of the studied DBMSs and schemas, the virtual method yields an average time saving of 51% over the baseline

SchemaAnalyst: Search-Based Test Data Generation for Relational Database Schemas

Data stored in relational databases plays a vital role in many aspects of society. When this data is incorrect, the services that depend on it may be compromised. The database schema is the artefact responsible for maintaining the integrity of stored data. Because of its critical function, the proper testing of the database schema is a task of great importance. Employing a search-based approach to generate high-quality test data for database schemas, SchemaAnalyst is a tool that supports testing this key software component. This presented tool is extensible and includes both an evaluation framework for assessing the quality of the generated tests and full-featured documentation. In addition to describing the design and implementation of SchemaAnalyst and overviewing its efficiency and effectiveness, this paper coincides with the tool’s public release, thereby enhancing practitioners’ ability to test relational database schemas

Constructive role of dissipation for driven coupled bosonic modes

We describe four cases of childhood B-cell progenitor acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (BCP-ALL) and one of T-cell (T-ALL) with unexpected numbers of interphase signals for ETV6 with an ETV6-RUNX1 fusion probe. Three fusion negative cases each had a telomeric part of 12p terminating within intron 2 of ETV6, attached to sequences from 5q, 7p and 7q, respectively. Two fusion positive cases, with partial insertions of ETV6 into chromosome 21, also had a breakpoint in intron 2. Fluorescence in situ hybridisation ( FISH), array comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) and Molecular Copy-Number Counting (MCC) results were concordant for the T-cell case. Sequences downstream of TLX3 on chromosome 5 were deleted, leaving the intact gene closely apposed to the first two exons of ETV6 and its upstream promoter. qRT-PCR showed a significant upregulation of TLX3. In this study we provide the first incontrovertible evidence that the upstream promoter of ETV6 attached to the first two exons of the gene was responsible for the ectopic expression of a proto-oncogene that became abnormally close as the result of deletion and translocation. We have also shown breakpoints in intron 2 of ETV6 in two cases of insertion with ETV6-RUNX1 fusion

Galactic Plane Hα\alpha Surveys: IPHAS & VPHAS+

The optical Galactic Plane H$\alpha$ surveys IPHAS and VPHAS+ are dramatically improving our understanding of Galactic stellar populations and stellar evolution by providing large samples of stars in short lived, but important, evolutionary phases, and high quality homogeneous photometry and images over the entire Galactic Plane. Here I summarise some of the contributions these surveys have already made to our understanding of a number of key areas of stellar and Galactic astronomy.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, refereed proceeding of the "The Universe of Digital Sky Surveys" conference, November 2014, to be published in the Astrophysics and Space Science Proceeding

Depression and social anxiety in children: Differential links with coping strategies

Background: Strategies that children use for coping with stressors are known to be related to emotional adjustment, but not enough is understood about specific links with social anxiety and depression. The present investigation tested differentiated associations of social anxiety and depression with specific types of coping strategies, and evaluated the direction of these associations over time. Methods: In Study 1, 404 children aged 8-13 years completed a coping scale modified from Kochenderfer-Ladd and Skinner (2002) in order to evaluate factor structure and subscale internal consistency. In Study 2, 270 8-11-year-old children completed depression and social anxiety scales, a sociometric survey, and the coping scale from Study 1, with a follow-up timepoint 9 months later. Results: In Study 1, factor analysis revealed six internally consistent coping subscales. In Study 2, social anxiety and depression were found to have distinctive longitudinal associations with subsequent coping strategies. Decreased problem-solving, social support-seeking, and distraction were uniquely predicted by depression but not by social anxiety. Internalising coping was a stronger outcome of social anxiety, and increased externalising was uniquely predicted by depression. There was also some evidence for a moderating role of peer relations. However, none of the coping strategies predicted changes in depression or social anxiety over the two timepoints. Conclusions: These results highlight the impact that emotional adjustment may have on childrens coping strategies, and clarify important distinctions between social anxiety and depression in relation to coping. Keywords: social anxiety, depression, coping, peer relations, longitudina

Atomic force microscopy study of the biofouling and mechanical properties of virgin and industrially fouled reverse osmosis membranes

The mechanical properties of virgin and industrially fouled reverse osmosis membranes (composite polyamide) used for the purification and desalination of seawater in desalination processes were characterised using novel atomic force microscopy (AFM) methods. Polymeric surface elasticity has previously been demonstrated to strongly affect the adhesion of bacteria; hence the study examined membrane surface elasticity to demonstrate how AFM can be used to assess the bio-fouling potential of membranes. An AFM colloid probe technique was used to determine the mechanical properties of the membrane, the adhesion forces and the work of adhesion at the membrane surfaces. The mean values of Young's modulus for the virgin membrane decreased in magnitude with increasing pH values, where these values were significantly different (p < 0.017) between both pH 3 (1450 kPa), pH 7 (1327 kPa) and pH 9 (788 kPa). These differences were attributed to differences in membrane swelling and indicate possible control parameters that could be exploited to improve membrane cleaning regimes. A membrane with a higher modulus will be stronger and potentially more resistant to chemical and physical processes during operation and cleaning. Significant differences (p < 0.017) in force measurements were also found between different electrolytic conditions for each of the membranes, where for the virgin membrane the adhesion force values were 6.00 nN at pH 3, 1.77 nN at pH 7 and 0.98 N at pH 9, and also the work of adhesion were 153.6 nJ at pH 3, 22.8nJ at pH 7 and 9.9 nJ at pH 9 in 0.6 M NaCl. These observations further confirm the importance of the electrolytic environment on the nanoscale interactions of the membrane which should be considered to control fouling during operation and cleaning cycles. AFM images and streaming potential measurements of virgin and fouled membranes were also obtained to aid analysis of the industrial membrane system. The novel application of AFM to membranes to measure Young's moduli and work of adhesion is a new addition to the AFM tools that can be used to unravel separation processes at the membrane surface. In addition, this study further demonstrates that AFM force spectroscopy can be used as part of a sophisticated membrane autopsy procedure for the elucidation of the mechanisms involved in membrane fouling