413 research outputs found
Income Rank and Upward Comparisons
Many studies have argued that relative income predicts individual well-being. More recently, it has been suggested that the relative rank of an individualâs income, rather than how that income compares to a mean or reference income, is important. Here the relative rank hypothesis is examined along with the additional hypothesis that individuals compare their incomes predominantly with those of slightly higher earners. A study of over 12,000 British adults using the British Household Panel Survey (a) confirms the importance of rank and (b) finds evidence that individuals compare upwards and to those most similar. This paper appears to be the first to show in fixed effect well-being equations that the influence of rank is more important than the influence of relative pay.Rank ; social comparison ; life satisfaction ; relative income ; BHPS
A rank based social norms model of how people judge their levels of drunkenness whilst intoxicated
Background:
A rank based social norms model predicts that drinkersâ judgements about their drinking will be based on the rank of their breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the immediate environment, rather than their actual breath alcohol level, with lower relative rank associated with greater feelings of safety. This study tested this hypothesis and examined how people judge their levels of drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking whilst they are intoxicated in social drinking environments.
Methods:
Breath alcohol testing of 1,862 people (mean ageâ=â26.96Â years; 61.86Â % male) in drinking environments. A subset (Nâ=â400) also answered four questions asking about their perceptions of their drunkenness and the health consequences of their drinking (plus background measures).
Results:
Perceptions of drunkenness and the health consequences of drinking were regressed on: (a) breath alcohol level, (b) the rank of the breath alcohol level amongst that of others in the same environment, and (c) covariates. Only rank of breath alcohol level predicted perceptions: How drunk they felt (b 3.78, 95Â % CI 1.69 5.87), how extreme they regarded their drinking that night (b 3.7, 95Â % CI 1.3 6.20), how at risk their long-term health was due to their current level of drinking (b 4.1, 95Â % CI 0.2 8.0) and how likely they felt they would experience liver cirrhosis (b 4.8. 95Â % CI 0.7 8.8). People were more influenced by more sober others than by more drunk others.
Conclusion:
Whilst intoxicated and in drinking environments, people base judgements regarding their drinking on how their level of intoxication ranks relative to that of others of the same gender around them, not on their actual levels of intoxication. Thus, when in the company of others who are intoxicated, drinkers were found to be more likely to underestimate their own level of drinking, drunkenness and associated risks. The implications of these results, for example that increasing the numbers of sober people in night time environments could improve subjective assessments of drunkenness, are discussed
Does wage rank affect employees' well-being?
How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual's wage within a comparison group. âRankâ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, quits in a workplace are correlated with pay distribution skewness
Decision by sampling
We present a theory of decision by sampling (DbS) in which, in contrast with traditional models, there are no underlying psychoeconomic scales. Instead, we assume that an attributeâs subjective value is constructed from a series of binary, ordinal comparisons to a sample of attribute values drawn from memory and is its rank within the sample. We assume that the sample reflects both the immediate distribution of attribute values from the current decisionâs context and also the background, real-world distribution of attribute values. DbS accounts for concave utility functions; losses looming larger than gains; hyperbolic temporal discounting; and the overestimation of small probabilities and the underestimation of large probabilities
The manipulation of massive ro-vibronic superpositions using time-frequency-resolved coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (TFRCARS): from quantum control to quantum computing
Molecular ro-vibronic coherences, joint energy-time distributions of quantum
amplitudes, are selectively prepared, manipulated, and imaged in
Time-Frequency-Resolved Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering (TFRCARS)
measurements using femtosecond laser pulses. The studies are implemented in
iodine vapor, with its thermally occupied statistical ro-vibrational density
serving as initial state. The evolution of the massive ro-vibronic
superpositions, consisting of 1000 eigenstates, is followed through
two-dimensional images. The first- and second-order coherences are captured
using time-integrated frequency-resolved CARS, while the third-order coherence
is captured using time-gated frequency-resolved CARS. The Fourier filtering
provided by time integrated detection projects out single ro-vibronic
transitions, while time-gated detection allows the projection of arbitrary
ro-vibronic superpositions from the coherent third-order polarization. Beside
the control and imaging of chemistry, the controlled manipulation of massive
quantum coherences suggests the possibility of quantum computing. We argue that
the universal logic gates necessary for arbitrary quantum computing - all
single qubit operations and the two-qubit controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate - are
available in time resolved four-wave mixing in a molecule. The molecular
rotational manifold is naturally "wired" for carrying out all single qubit
operations efficiently, and in parallel. We identify vibronic coherences as one
example of a naturally available two-qubit CNOT gate, wherein the vibrational
qubit controls the switching of the targeted electronic qubit.Comment: PDF format. 59 pages, including 22 figures. To appear in Chemical
Physic
Model-independent search for CP violation in D0âKâK+ÏâÏ+ and D0âÏâÏ+Ï+Ïâ decays
A search for CP violation in the phase-space structures of D0 and View the MathML source decays to the final states KâK+ÏâÏ+ and ÏâÏ+Ï+Ïâ is presented. The search is carried out with a data set corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0 fbâ1 collected in 2011 by the LHCb experiment in pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. For the KâK+ÏâÏ+ final state, the four-body phase space is divided into 32 bins, each bin with approximately 1800 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 9.1%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 6.5% observed. The phase space of the ÏâÏ+Ï+Ïâ final state is partitioned into 128 bins, each bin with approximately 2500 decays. The p-value under the hypothesis of no CP violation is 41%, and in no bin is a CP asymmetry greater than 5.5% observed. All results are consistent with the hypothesis of no CP violation at the current sensitivity
Measurement of the Isolated Photon Cross Section in p-pbar Collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV
The cross section for the inclusive production of isolated photons has been
measured in p anti-p collisions at sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV with the D0 detector at the
Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The photons span transverse momenta 23 to 300 GeV
and have pseudorapidity |eta|<0.9. The cross section is compared with the
results from two next-to-leading order perturbative QCD calculations. The
theoretical predictions agree with the measurement within uncertainties.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys.Lett.
Search for the lepton-flavor-violating decays Bs0âe±Όâ and B0âe±Όâ
A search for the lepton-flavor-violating decays Bs0âe±Όâ and B0âe±Όâ is performed with a data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 1.0ââfb-1 of pp collisions at âs=7ââTeV, collected by the LHCb experiment. The observed number of Bs0âe±Όâ and B0âe±Όâ candidates is consistent with background expectations. Upper limits on the branching fractions of both decays are determined to be B(Bs0âe±Όâ)101ââTeV/c2 and MLQ(B0âe±Όâ)>126ââTeV/c2 at 95% C.L., and are a factor of 2 higher than the previous bounds
Measurement of the branching fraction
The branching fraction is measured in a data sample
corresponding to 0.41 of integrated luminosity collected with the LHCb
detector at the LHC. This channel is sensitive to the penguin contributions
affecting the sin2 measurement from The
time-integrated branching fraction is measured to be . This is the most precise measurement to
date
Branching fraction and CP asymmetry of the decays B+âK0SÏ+ and B+âK0SK+
An analysis of B+ â K0
SÏ+ and B+ â K0
S K+ decays is performed with the LHCb experiment. The pp
collision data used correspond to integrated luminosities of 1 fbâ1 and 2 fbâ1 collected at centre-ofmass
energies of
â
s = 7 TeV and
â
s = 8 TeV, respectively. The ratio of branching fractions and the
direct CP asymmetries are measured to be B(B+ â K0
S K+
)/B(B+ â K0
SÏ+
) = 0.064 ± 0.009 (stat.) ±
0.004 (syst.), ACP(B+ â K0
SÏ+
) = â0.022 ± 0.025 (stat.) ± 0.010 (syst.) and ACP(B+ â K0
S K+
) =
â0.21 ± 0.14 (stat.) ± 0.01 (syst.). The data sample taken at
â
s = 7 TeV is used to search for
B+
c
â K0
S K+ decays and results in the upper limit ( fc · B(B+
c
â K0
S K+
))/( fu · B(B+ â K0
SÏ+
)) <
5.8 Ă 10â2 at 90% confidence level, where fc and fu denote the hadronisation fractions of a ÂŻb
quark
into a B+
c or a B+ meson, respectively
- âŠ