Deep, effortless concentration: re-examining the flow concept and exploring relations with inattention, absorption, and personality

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Psychological Research. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1031-6Conceptualizing the construct of flow in terms of ‘deep and effortless concentration’, we developed two measurement scales designed to index individual differences in flow during ‘internal’ tasks, such as thinking (deep effortless concentration: internal—DECI) and during ‘external’ tasks, such as while playing a sport (deep effortless concentration: external—DECE). These scales were highly correlated, indicating that individuals prone to experiencing flow in external contexts are also prone to experience flow in internal contexts. Nonetheless, a measurement model construing internal and external flow as related, but separate, constructs was found to fit the data significantly better than a model where they were construed as a single construct. We then explored associations between flow and various forms of everyday inattention. In addition, we explored the relation between flow and the Tellegen Absorption Scale (TAS), an index of absorption, as well as the Big Five personality traits. Amongst other things, we found that flow was negatively related to inattention, indicating that people who experience flow more frequently may experience relatively less inattention in everyday contexts.NSERC Discovery Grant, RGPIN-2014-0645

Vidéopoésie

Canadian digital artist and videopoet Valerie LeBlanc and Canadian poet, musician, and videopoet ******** Daniel H. Dugas have been working together since 1990. Daniel H. Dugas was born in Montréal, QC. Poet, videographer, essayist and musician, Dugas has exhibited and participated in exhibitions, festivals and literary events in Canada and internationally. His ninth book of poetry: L’esprit du temps/The Spirit of the Time won the 2016 Antonine-Maillet-Acadie Vie award and the 2018 Éloizes: Artiste de l’année en littérature. daniel.basicbruegel.com | Videos distributed through: vtape.org *********** Pluridisciplinary artist and writer, Valerie LeBlanc was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She has worked and presented throughout Canada and internationally. LeBlanc’s first video: Homecoming was collected and screened by the National Gallery of Canada. She is the creator of the MediaPackBoard (MPB), a portable screening / performance device. valerie.basicbruegel.com | Videos distributed through: vtape.org ********** Their specific uniqueness within the videopoetry world also lies in the musicality of speaking two languages. LeBlanc’s first language is English and her second French; and Dugas’ is French with English second. (Sarah Tremlett)This project is supported by the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts at Brock University and the New Brunswick Arts Board. / Ce projet est soutenu par le Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts à Brock University et par le Conseil des arts du Nouveau-Brunswick

ℵk\aleph_k-free cogenerators

We prove in ZFC that an abelian group $C$ is cotorsion if and only if $\operatorname{Ext}(F,C) = 0$ for every $\aleph_k$-free group $F$, and discuss some consequences and related results. This short note includes a condensed overview of the $\bar\lambda$-Black Box for $\aleph_k$-free constructions in ZFC

Benchmarking of 4C-seq pipelines based on real and simulated data

"jats:sec" "jats:title"Motivation"/jats:title" "jats:p"With its capacity for high-resolution data output in one region of interest, chromosome conformation capture combined with high-throughput sequencing (4C-seq) is a state-of-the-art next-generation sequencing technique that provides epigenetic insights, and regularly advances current medical research. However, 4C-seq data are complex and prone to biases, and while specialized programs exist, an unbiased, extensive benchmarking is still lacking. Furthermore, neither substantial datasets with fully characterized ground truth, nor simulation programs for realistic 4C-seq data have been published."/jats:p" "/jats:sec" "jats:sec" "jats:title"Results"/jats:title" "jats:p"We conducted a benchmarking study on 66 4C-seq samples from 20 datasets, and developed a novel 4C-seq simulation software, Basic4CSim, to allow for detailed comparisons of 4C-seq algorithms on 50 simulated datasets with 10–120 samples each. Simulations and benchmarking were adapted to address different characteristics of 4C-seq data. Simulated data were compared with published samples to validate simulation settings. We identified differences between 4C-seq algorithms in terms of precision, recall, interaction structure, and run time, and observed general trends. Novel differential pipeline versions of single-sample based 4C-seq algorithms were included in the benchmarking. While no single tool was optimally suited for both near-cis and far-cis, and both single-sample and differential analyses, choosing a high-performing algorithm variant did improve results considerably. For near-cis scenarios, r3Cseq, peakC and FourCSeq offered high precision, while fourSig demonstrated high overall F1 scores in far-cis analyses. Finally, 4C-seq simulations may aid in the development of improved analysis algorithms."/jats:p" "/jats:sec" "jats:sec" "jats:title"Availability and implementation"/jats:title" "jats:p"Basic4CSim is available at https://github.com/walter–ca/Basic4CSim."/jats:p" "/jats:sec" "jats:sec" "jats:title"Supplementary information"/jats:title" "jats:p"Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online."/jats:p" "/jats:sec Document type: Articl

Assessing and Improving the Usability of the Medical Data Models Portal

Case report forms (CRF) specify data definitions and encodings for data to be collected in clinical trials. To enable exchange of data definitions and in this way to avoid creation of variants of CRF for similar study designs, the Medical Data Model portal (MDM) has been developed since 2011. This work aims at studying the usability of the MDM portal. We identify issues that hamper its adoption by researchers in order to derive measurements for improving it. We selected relevant tools (e.g. Nibbler, Hotjar, SUPR-Q) for usability testing and generated a structured test protocol. More specifically, the portal was assessed by means of a static analysis, user analysis (n=10), a usability test (n=10) and statistical evaluations. Regarding accessibility and technology, the static code analysis resulted in high scores. Presentation of information and functions as well as interaction with the portal still has to be improved: The results show that only limited functions of the webpage are used regularly and some user navigation errors occur due to the portal's design. In total, six major problems were identified which will be addressed in future. A continuous evaluation using the same structured test protocol allows to continuously measure the website quality, to compare it after changes have been implemented and in this way, to realise a continuous improvement. The effort for a repeated evaluation of the same evaluation with 10 persons is estimated with 10 hours

Long-term cycling behavior of asymmetric activated carbon/MnO2 aqueous electrochemical supercapacitor

Activated carbon–MnO2 hybrid electrochemical supercapacitor cells have been assembled and characterized in K2SO4 aqueous media. A laboratory cell achieved 195,000 cycles with stable performance. The maximal cell voltage was 2V associated with 21±2Fg−1 of total composite electrode materials (including activated carbon andMnO2, binder and conductive additive) and an equivalent serie resistance (ESR) below1.3cm2. Long-life cycling was achieved by removing dissolved oxygen from the electrolyte, which limits the corrosion of current collectors. Scaling up has been realized by assembling several electrodes in parallel to build a prismatic cell. A stable capacity of 380 F and a cell voltage of 2V were maintained over 600 cycles. These encouraging results show the interest of developing such devices, including non-toxic and safer components as compared to the current organic-based devices

SegMap: 3D Segment Mapping using Data-Driven Descriptors

When performing localization and mapping, working at the level of structure can be advantageous in terms of robustness to environmental changes and differences in illumination. This paper presents SegMap: a map representation solution to the localization and mapping problem based on the extraction of segments in 3D point clouds. In addition to facilitating the computationally intensive task of processing 3D point clouds, working at the level of segments addresses the data compression requirements of real-time single- and multi-robot systems. While current methods extract descriptors for the single task of localization, SegMap leverages a data-driven descriptor in order to extract meaningful features that can also be used for reconstructing a dense 3D map of the environment and for extracting semantic information. This is particularly interesting for navigation tasks and for providing visual feedback to end-users such as robot operators, for example in search and rescue scenarios. These capabilities are demonstrated in multiple urban driving and search and rescue experiments. Our method leads to an increase of area under the ROC curve of 28.3% over current state of the art using eigenvalue based features. We also obtain very similar reconstruction capabilities to a model specifically trained for this task. The SegMap implementation will be made available open-source along with easy to run demonstrations at www.github.com/ethz-asl/segmap. A video demonstration is available at https://youtu.be/CMk4w4eRobg