Prototyping Virtual Data Technologies in ATLAS Data Challenge 1 Production

For efficiency of the large production tasks distributed worldwide, it is essential to provide shared production management tools comprised of integratable and interoperable services. To enhance the ATLAS DC1 production toolkit, we introduced and tested a Virtual Data services component. For each major data transformation step identified in the ATLAS data processing pipeline (event generation, detector simulation, background pile-up and digitization, etc) the Virtual Data Cookbook (VDC) catalogue encapsulates the specific data transformation knowledge and the validated parameters settings that must be provided before the data transformation invocation. To provide for local-remote transparency during DC1 production, the VDC database server delivered in a controlled way both the validated production parameters and the templated production recipes for thousands of the event generation and detector simulation jobs around the world, simplifying the production management solutions.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 5 pages, 3 figures, pdf. PSN TUCP01

Individual Differences in the Experience of Cognitive Workload

This study investigated the roles of four psychosocial variables – anxiety, conscientiousness, emotional intelligence, and Protestant work ethic – on subjective ratings of cognitive workload as measured by the Task Load Index (TLX) and the further connections between the four variables and TLX ratings of task performance. The four variables represented aspects of an underlying construct of elasticity versus rigidity in response to workload. Participants were 141 undergraduates who performed a vigilance task under different speeded conditions while working on a jigsaw puzzle for 90 minutes. Regression analysis showed that anxiety and emotional intelligence were the two variables most proximally related to TLX ratings. TLX ratings contributed to the prediction of performance on the puzzle, but not the vigilance task. Severity error bias was evident in some of the ratings. Although working in pairs improved performance, it also resulted in higher ratings of temporal demand and perceived performance pressure

Automatically Evaluating Opinion Prevalence in Opinion Summarization

When faced with a large number of product reviews, it is not clear that a human can remember all of them and weight opinions representatively to write a good reference summary. We propose an automatic metric to test the prevalence of the opinions that a summary expresses, based on counting the number of reviews that are consistent with each statement in the summary, while discrediting trivial or redundant statements. To formulate this opinion prevalence metric, we consider several existing methods to score the factual consistency of a summary statement with respect to each individual source review. On a corpus of Amazon product reviews, we gather multiple human judgments of the opinion consistency, to determine which automatic metric best expresses consistency in product reviews. Using the resulting opinion prevalence metric, we show that a human authored summary has only slightly better opinion prevalence than randomly selected extracts from the source reviews, and previous extractive and abstractive unsupervised opinion summarization methods perform worse than humans. We demonstrate room for improvement with a greedy construction of extractive summaries with twice the opinion prevalence achieved by humans. Finally, we show that preprocessing source reviews by simplification can raise the opinion prevalence achieved by existing abstractive opinion summarization systems to the level of human performance.Comment: The 6th Workshop on e-Commerce and NLP (KDD 2023

Comparisons of traditional and block schedules on the ACT mathematics test and algebra I state examinations

The purpose of this study was to determine if there were significant differences in mathematical academic achievement relative to scheduling practices of Tennessee public high schools located in the metropolitan cities of Chattanooga, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville. The public high schools identified would have consistently implemented a traditional schedule, an accelerated (4X4) block schedule, or an alternating (NB) block schedule for the academic years 1998-1999, 1999-2000, and 2000-2001. Results from the ACT Mathematics Test and the High School Subject Matter Test (HSSMT) in Algebra I were used as measures of mathematical academic achievement. Furthermore, the study was designed to seek insights on college students\u27 perceptions of their high school\u27s schedule relative to instruction received in their high school Algebra I class. These perceptions were gained through questionnaires. The questionnaires were administered to college students enrolled in state operated institutions of higher education in the cities identified for this study in the Spring Semester of 2002. These college students were registered for one of the following mathematics courses: Basic Mathematics, Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, Pre-calculus (Trigonometry), and Calculus with Analytic Geometry I

How pedophilic men think about adult-child sex: effects of child gender and physical maturity

To date, very little research has tackled whether pedophilic men''s attitude towards adult-child sex depends on characteristics of the adult or the child involved in such acts. This study examines the effect of the child''s gender (male vs. female) and physical maturity (pre-pubescent vs. early pubescent) on the moral evaluation of apparently noncoercive adult-child sex in a 2 x 2 factorial online vignette experiment. One hundred eighty-three English-speaking pedophilic men rated their agreement with moral arguments on the Immoral Sex Scale, as well as whether they believed this behavior to be typical for a child. The results revealed considerable inter-individual differences, with about one third showing restrictive moral attitudes. Contrary to our expectations, gender and physical maturity neither affected the perceived morality of the sexual act, nor beliefs about the representativeness of the child''s behavior. However, when controlling for confounds, pedophilic men believed that boys were more likely to willingly engage in adult-child sex. Furthermore, participants with stronger liberal attitudes were found to be more likely to defend the sexual act, as were participants with a preferential interest in pre-pubescents. There was no link between attitudes towards adult-child sex and sexual offending, replicating the non-associations reported in previous community surveys

POOL File Catalog, Collection and Metadata Components

The POOL project is the common persistency framework for the LHC experiments to store petabytes of experiment data and metadata in a distributed and grid enabled way. POOL is a hybrid event store consisting of a data streaming layer and a relational layer. This paper describes the design of file catalog, collection and metadata components which are not part of the data streaming layer of POOL and outlines how POOL aims to provide transparent and efficient data access for a wide range of environments and use cases - ranging from a large production site down to a single disconnected laptops. The file catalog is the central POOL component translating logical data references to physical data files in a grid environment. POOL collections with their associated metadata provide an abstract way of accessing experiment data via their logical grouping into sets of related data objects.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 4 pages, 1 eps figure, PSN MOKT00