Automated Pilot Advisory System

An Automated Pilot Advisory System (APAS) was developed and operationally tested to demonstrate the concept that low cost automated systems can provide air traffic and aviation weather advisory information at high density uncontrolled airports. The system was designed to enhance the see and be seen rule of flight, and pilots who used the system preferred it over the self announcement system presently used at uncontrolled airports

Agent-based Social Psychology: from Neurocognitive Processes to Social Data

Moral Foundation Theory states that groups of different observers may rely on partially dissimilar sets of moral foundations, thereby reaching different moral valuations. The use of functional imaging techniques has revealed a spectrum of cognitive styles with respect to the differential handling of novel or corroborating information that is correlated to political affiliation. Here we characterize the collective behavior of an agent-based model whose inter individual interactions due to information exchange in the form of opinions are in qualitative agreement with experimental neuroscience data. The main conclusion derived connects the existence of diversity in the cognitive strategies and statistics of the sets of moral foundations and suggests that this connection arises from interactions between agents. Thus a simple interacting agent model, whose interactions are in accord with empirical data on conformity and learning processes, presents statistical signatures consistent with moral judgment patterns of conservatives and liberals as obtained by survey studies of social psychology.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 C codes, to appear in Advances in Complex System

Around consensual non-monogamies – assessing attitudes toward non-exclusive relationships

Consensual non-monogamy is a term used to describe intimate romantic relationships which are sexually and/or emotionally non-exclusive. The present study examined the social norms which are violated by different forms of consensual nonmonogamy,and the negative judgements that result. We asked 375 participants to rate hypothetical vignettes of people involved in one of five relationship types (monogamy, polyamory, an open relationship, swinging, and cheating) on items related to relationship satisfaction, morality, and cognitive abilities. The monogamous couple was perceived most favourably, followed by the polyamorous couple, then the open and swinging couples who were rated equally. Participants judged the cheating couple most negatively. Although social norms of sexual and emotional monogamy are important, we conclude that the aspect that has the most effect on judgements is whether the relationship structure has been agreed to by all parties

Beyond Purity: Moral Disgust toward Bad Character

Previous studies support a link between moral disgust and impurity, while anger is linked to harm. We challenge this strict correspondence, and show that disgust is sensitive to information about moral character, even for harm violations. By contrast, anger is sensitive to information about actions, including their moral wrongness and consequences. Study 1 examined disgust and anger toward an action that indicates especially bad moral character (animal cruelty) versus an action that is more wrong (domestic abuse). Animal cruelty was associated with more disgust, whereas domestic abuse was associated with more anger. Studies 2 and 3 manipulated character by varying the agent’s desire to cause harm, and also varied the action’s harmful consequences. Desire to harm predicted only disgust (controlling for anger), while consequences were more closely related to anger (controlling for disgust). Taken together, these results indicate disgust responds to evidence of bad moral character, not just to impurity

The curvature of F2p(x,Q2)F_2^p(x,Q^2) as a probe of the range of validity of perturbative QCD evolutions in the small-xx region

Perturbative NLO and NNLO QCD evolutions of parton distributions are studied, in particular in the (very) small-$x$ region, where they are in very good agreement with all recent precision measurements of $F_2^p(x,Q^2)$. These predictions turn out to be also rather insensitive to the specific choice of the factorization scheme ($\bar{\rm MS}$ or DIS). A characteristic feature of perturbative QCD evolutions is a {\em{positive}} curvature of $F_2^p$ which increases as $x$ decreases. This perturbatively stable prediction provides a sensitive test of the range of validity of perturbative QCD.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables; minor corrections, to appear in EPJ

Properties of Regge Trajectories

Early Chew-Frautschi plots show that meson and baryon Regge trajectoies are approximately linear and non-intersecting. In this paper, we reconstruct all Regge trajectories from the most recent data. Our plots show that meson trajectories are non-linear and intersecting. We also show that all current meson Regge trajectories models are ruled out by data.Comment: 30 pages, latex, 18 figures, to be published in Physical Review

Vague heuristics

Even when they are defined with precision, one can often read and hear judgments about the vagueness of heuristics in debates about heuristic reasoning. This opinion is not just frequent but also quite reasonable. In fact, during the 1990s, there was a certain controversy concerning this topic that confronted two of the leading groups in the field of heuristic reasoning research, each of whom held very different perspectives. In the present text, we will focus on two of the papers published in Psychological Review, wherein the arguments of each of these groups were presented:

Menstrual cycle phase does not predict political conservatism

Recent authors have reported a relationship between women's fertility status, as indexed by menstrual cycle phase, and conservatism in moral, social and political values. We conducted a survey to test for the existence of a relationship between menstrual cycle day and conservatism. 2213 women reporting regular menstrual cycles provided data about their political views. Of these women, 2208 provided information about their cycle date, 1260 provided additional evidence of reliability in self-reported cycle date, and of these, 750 also indicated an absence of hormonal disruptors such as recent hormonal contraception use, breastfeeding or pregnancy. Cycle day was used to estimate day-specific fertility rate (probability of conception); political conservatism was measured via direct self-report and via responses to the "Moral Foundations” questionnaire. We also recorded relationship status, which has been reported to interact with menstrual cycle phase in determining political preferences. We found no evidence of a relationship between estimated cyclical fertility changes and conservatism, and no evidence of an interaction between relationship status and cyclical fertility in determining political attitudes. Our findings were robust to multiple inclusion/exclusion criteria and to different methods of estimating fertility and measuring conservatism. In summary, the relationship between cycle-linked reproductive parameters and conservatism may be weaker or less reliable than previously thought

The Physics of Hadronic Tau Decays

Hadronic tau decays represent a clean laboratory for the precise study of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Observables (sum rules) based on the spectral functions of hadronic tau decays can be related to QCD quark-level calculations to determine fundamental quantities like the strong coupling constant, parameters of the chiral Lagrangian, |V_us|, the mass of the strange quark, and to simultaneously test the concept of quark-hadron duality. Using the best available measurements and a revisited analysis of the theoretical framework, the value alpha_s(m_tau) = 0.345 +- 0.004[exp] +- 0.009[theo] is obtained. Taken together with the determination of alpha_s(m_Z) from the global electroweak fit, this result leads to the most accurate test of asymptotic freedom: the value of the logarithmic slope of 1/alpha_s(s) is found to agree with QCD at a precision of 4%. In another approach, the tau spectral functions can be used to determine hadronic quantities that, due to the nonperturbative nature of long-distance QCD, cannot be computed from first principles. An example for this is the contribution from hadronic vacuum polarization to loop-dominated processes like the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. This article reviews the measurements of nonstrange and strange tau spectral functions and their phenomenological applications.Comment: 89 pages, 32 figures; final version accepted for publication by Reviews of Modern Physic