Older Adults and Forgoing Cancer Screening

Although there is a growing recognition that older adults and those with extensive comorbid conditions undergo cancer screening too frequently, there is little information about patients’ perceptions regarding cessation of cancer screening. Information on older adults’ views of screening cessation would be helpful both for clinicians and for those designing interventions to reduce overscreening

Cross-Cultural Psychology and the Rise of Academic Capitalism : Linguistic Changes in CCR and JCCP Articles, 1970-2014

Recently, several studies have investigated developments in academic language over the last four decades: An analysis of a large number of PubMed abstracts by Vinkers, Tijdink, and Otte showed a dramatic rise in use of positive words such as “innovative,” “robust,” “novel,” and “unprecedented.” In the field of psychology, Pritschet, Powell, and Horne found an increase in mentions of marginally significant statistical findings, and social psychologist Michael Billig raised concerns about a surge of technical jargon in the social sciences. All these phenomena are believed to be a consequence of higher publication pressure and the need to become visible as a researcher in an increasingly competitive climate that is often referred to as academic capitalism. In our study, we tested the aforementioned indicators of linguistic change for a sample of 1,680 research articles from the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology (JCCP) and 657 research articles from Cross-Cultural Research (CCR), published between 1970 and 2014. Overall, we found a consistent increase in positive framing, a rise in reports of marginally significant statistical findings, and indicators for growth in technical jargon. These findings suggest that self-marketing strategies are also on the rise in cross-cultural psychology.Peer reviewe

Unique Ergodicity for Fractionally Dissipated, Stochastically Forced 2D Euler Equations

We establish the existence and uniqueness of an ergodic invariant measure for 2D fractionally dissipated stochastic Euler equations on the periodic box, for any power of the dissipation term

Mass Economies with Vital Small Coalitions; The f-Core Approach

A mass-economy is one with many, many agents where each agent is negligible and each trading group is also negligible with respect to the mass-economy. Feasible allocations are those which are virtually attainable by trades only among members of coalitions contained in feasible (“measure-consistent”) partitions of the agent set. A feasible allocation is in the core, called the f -core, if it cannot be improved upon by any finite coalition. We show that in a private goods economy with indivisibilities and without externalities, the f -core, the A -core (Aumann’s core concept) and the Walrasian allocations coincide. In the presence of widespread externalities, the f -core and the Walrasian allocations coincide but the definition of the A -core is problematic. The conceptual significance of these results will be discussed

Investigating Correlations of Automatically Extracted Multimodal Features and Lecture Video Quality

Ranking and recommendation of multimedia content such as videos is usually realized with respect to the relevance to a user query. However, for lecture videos and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) it is not only required to retrieve relevant videos, but particularly to find lecture videos of high quality that facilitate learning, for instance, independent of the video's or speaker's popularity. Thus, metadata about a lecture video's quality are crucial features for learning contexts, e.g., lecture video recommendation in search as learning scenarios. In this paper, we investigate whether automatically extracted features are correlated to quality aspects of a video. A set of scholarly videos from a Mass Open Online Course (MOOC) is analyzed regarding audio, linguistic, and visual features. Furthermore, a set of cross-modal features is proposed which are derived by combining transcripts, audio, video, and slide content. A user study is conducted to investigate the correlations between the automatically collected features and human ratings of quality aspects of a lecture video. Finally, the impact of our features on the knowledge gain of the participants is discussed

Communicating Synthetic Biology: from the lab via the media to the broader public

We present insights from a study on communicating Synthetic Biology conducted in 2008. Scientists were invited to write press releases on their work; the resulting texts were passed on to four journalists from major Austrian newspapers and magazines. The journalists in turn wrote articles that were used as stimulus material for eight group discussions with select members of the Austrian public. The results show that, from the lab via the media to the general public, communication is characterized by two important tendencies: first, communication becomes increasingly focused on concrete applications of Synthetic Biology; and second, biotechnology represents an important benchmark against which Synthetic Biology is being evaluated

Real-time imaging of activation and degradation of carbon supported octahedral Pt–Ni alloy fuel cell catalysts at the nanoscale using in situ electrochemical liquid cell STEM

Octahedrally shaped Pt–Ni alloy nanoparticles on carbon supports have demonstrated unprecedented electrocatalytic activity for the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), sparking interest as catalysts for low-temperature fuel cell cathodes. However, deterioration of the octahedral shape that gives the catalyst its superior activity currently prohibits the use of shaped catalysts in fuel cell devices, while the structural dynamics of the overall catalyst degradation are largely unknown. We investigate the time-resolved degradation pathways of such a Pt–Ni alloy catalyst supported on carbon during cycling and startup/shutdown conditions using an in situ STEM electrochemical liquid cell, which allows us to track changes happening over seconds. Thereby we can precisely correlate the applied electrochemical potential with the microstructural response of the catalyst. We observe changes of the nanocatalysts’ structure, monitor particle motion and coalescence at potentials that corrode carbon, and investigate the dissolution and redeposition processes of the nanocatalyst under working conditions. Carbon support motion, particle motion, and particle coalescence were observed as the main microstructural responses to potential cycling and holds in regimes where carbon corrosion happens. Catalyst motion happened more severely during high potential holds and sudden potential changes than during cyclic potential sweeps, despite carbon corrosion happening during both, as suggested by ex situ DEMS results. During an extremely high potential excursion, the shaped nanoparticles became mobile on the carbon support and agglomerated facet-to-facet within 10 seconds. These experiments suggest that startup/shutdown potential treatments may cause catalyst coarsening on a much shorter time scale than full collapse of the carbon support. Additionally, the varying degrees of attachment of particles on the carbon support indicates that there is a distribution of interaction strengths, which in the future should be optimized for shaped particles. We further track the dissolution of Ni nanoparticles and determine the dissolution rate as a function of time for an individual nanoparticle – which occurs over the course of a few potential cycles for each particle. This study provides new visual understanding of the fundamental structural dynamics of nanocatalysts during fuel cell operation and highlights the need for better catalyst-support anchoring and morphology for allowing these highly active shaped catalysts to become useful in PEM fuel cell applications.TU Berlin, Open-Access-Mittel - 201

Bostonia: v. 64, no. 1

Founded in 1900, Bostonia magazine is Boston University's main alumni publication, which covers alumni and student life, as well as university activities, events, and programs