Moral Disengagement in Legal Judgments

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists\u27 willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants\u27 existing attitudes and their judgmentsa theoretical bridge between attitudes and judgmentswas robustly supported. Moral disengagement was key to understanding how psychologists decide to engage in competence for execution evaluations. We describe in detail the moral disengagement measure we used, including exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across two separate samples. The four-factor measure accounted for a total of 52.18 percent of the variance in the sample of forensic psychologists, and the model adequately fit the data in the entirely different sample of jurors in a confirmatory factor analysis. Despite the psychometric strengths of this moral disengagement measure, we describe the pros and cons of existing measures of moral disengagement. We outline future directions for moral disengagement research, especially in legal contexts

DETERMINING THE GROUND REACTION FORCE EXPERIENCED IN BEACH RUNNING

INTRODUCTION: Running on a beach is a popular fitness activity, as well as a critical component in the professional sport of ironman. In this event, ironmen athletes run over terrain ranging from wet compacted sand to dry uncompacted sand, as their distance from the ocean surf line increases. The dynamic loading response of sand surfaces at the extremes of this range has been investigated recently by Barrett et al. using a force plate, and variables such as the peak impact force and the surface stiffness were calculated. In this study we demonstrate how the time response of the ground reaction force (GRF) experienced in beach running can be predicted from the measured plate reaction force, for either wet or dry sand surfaces. METHODS: The ground reaction force experienced in beach running can be measured directly using an accelerometer attached to the runner’s lower extremity. However it is often more convenient to sample the reaction force from a sandcovered force plate in a controlled environment. This idea motivated us to consider the resulting problem of determining the GRF indirectly using the measured plate force. In the measurement process, the instrument response of the force plate, which can be described in the linear regime by a transfer function, is convoluted with the GRF in the time domain. Thus in order to reconstruct the GRF we need to apply the reverse process: a deconvolution of the measured plate force using a known transfer function. The deconvolution is performed in the frequency domain. The transfer function corresponding to the force plate has to be determined a priori by „calibrating“ direct GRF measurements with plate force measurements. RESULTS: The reconstruction of the GRF allows us to estimate any physical quantity we are interested in, such as the time of delay between the moment of impact and the trigger of the plate force reaction, or the peak GRF. We have also determined that the frequency characteristics of the force plate transfer function depend on the impact mass, the impact energy and the effective depth of the sand, and have investigated the changes apparent in this parameter space. CONCLUSIONS: The transfer function approach presented in this study reconstructs the time response of the GRF experienced in beach running conditions, using plate force measurements. Thus, with the exception of calibration measurements, we can eliminate the need to attach an accelerometer to the runner when taking GRF measurements. REFERENCES: Barrett, R.S., Neal, R.J., Roberts, L.J. (1998). The Dynamic Loading Response of Surfaces Encountered in Beach Running. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport 1, 3-13, 1998

Consequences of small storage capacity in nannoplankton pertinent to measurement of primary production in tropical waters

A theory based on the performance of an electrical analogue circuit for balanced ecosystems relates respiration to the storage of labile organic matter during daytime photosynthesis. A very small storage capacitance and time constant may be introduced into the circuit to simulate a nannoplanktonic sygtem. It is found that respiration approaches photosynthesis during the day and almost ceases at night. Consequently, the usual carbon14 measurements of net production, and the conventional light-and-dark-bottle oxygen measurements of net production and nighttime respiration greatly underestimate gross photosy~thesis of tropical seas. An example of this phenomenon is shown in a planktonic brine microcosm

Comparison of traps and baits for censusing small mammals in Neotropical lowlands.

Snap-traps, live-traps, and baits affect the ability to capture small mammals, but few previous studies have involved sampling communities of small mammals in tropical environments. We tested differences in captures of small marsupials and rodents by Victor snap-traps versus Sherman live-traps and by two types of bait in lowland rainforest at Reserva Cuzco Amazónico, southeastern Peru. Snap-traps took ca. 3.5 times as many individuals as live-traps. Snap-traps also captured more species (and more rare species), but we attribute this to more numerous captures overall because the relative proportions of species captured by the two traps generally were the same. Type of bait had little impact on our trapping results

Fast Gibbs sampling for high-dimensional Bayesian inversion

Solving ill-posed inverse problems by Bayesian inference has recently attracted considerable attention. Compared to deterministic approaches, the probabilistic representation of the solution by the posterior distribution can be exploited to explore and quantify its uncertainties. In applications where the inverse solution is subject to further analysis procedures, this can be a significant advantage. Alongside theoretical progress, various new computational techniques allow to sample very high dimensional posterior distributions: In [Lucka2012], a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) posterior sampler was developed for linear inverse problems with $\ell_1$-type priors. In this article, we extend this single component Gibbs-type sampler to a wide range of priors used in Bayesian inversion, such as general $\ell_p^q$ priors with additional hard constraints. Besides a fast computation of the conditional, single component densities in an explicit, parameterized form, a fast, robust and exact sampling from these one-dimensional densities is key to obtain an efficient algorithm. We demonstrate that a generalization of slice sampling can utilize their specific structure for this task and illustrate the performance of the resulting slice-within-Gibbs samplers by different computed examples. These new samplers allow us to perform sample-based Bayesian inference in high-dimensional scenarios with certain priors for the first time, including the inversion of computed tomography (CT) data with the popular isotropic total variation (TV) prior.Comment: submitted to "Inverse Problems

Humoral Immunity to Stress Proteins and Periodontal Disease

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/141026/1/jper1185.pd