A Comparison of Scores on a Test Constructed to Measure Authoritarian Personality with Scores on the F-Scale and on Six Attitudinal Statements

It is the purpose of this study to investigate the possibilities of a new instrument designed to measure authoritarian personalities

Framing the past: How virtual experience affects bodily description of artefacts

This study uses a novel, interdisciplinary approach to investigate how people describe ancient artefacts. Here, we focus on gestures. Researchers have shown that gestures are important in communication, and those researchers often make a distinction between beat and iconic gestures. Iconic gestures convey meaning, specifically, visual-spatial information. Beat gestures do not convey meaning; they facilitate lexical access. In our study, we videotaped participants while they described artefacts presented through varied media: visual examination, physical interaction, and three-dimensional virtual and material replica (i.e., 3D prints) interaction. Video analysis revealed that media type affected gesture production. Participants who viewed actual objects displayed in a museum-style case produced few gestures in their descriptions. This finding suggests that traditional museum displays may diminish or limit museum users degree of engagement with ancient artefacts. This interdisciplinary work advances our knowledge of material culture by providing new insights into how people use and experience ancient artefacts in varied presentations. Implications for virtual reproduction in research, education, and communication in archaeology are discussed.This paper is part of a larger study on how people perceive ancient artefacts, which was partially funded by the University of California Humanities Network and the Center for the Humanities at the University of California, Merced.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2015.04.00

To dash or to dawdle: verb-associated speed of motion influences eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension

In describing motion events verbs of manner provide information about the speed of agents or objects in those events. We used eye tracking to investigate how inferences about this verb-associated speed of motion would influence the time course of attention to a visual scene that matched an event described in language. Eye movements were recorded as participants heard spoken sentences with verbs that implied a fast (“dash”) or slow (“dawdle”) movement of an agent towards a goal. These sentences were heard whilst participants concurrently looked at scenes depicting the agent and a path which led to the goal object. Our results indicate a mapping of events onto the visual scene consistent with participants mentally simulating the movement of the agent along the path towards the goal: when the verb implies a slow manner of motion, participants look more often and longer along the path to the goal; when the verb implies a fast manner of motion, participants tend to look earlier at the goal and less on the path. These results reveal that event comprehension in the presence of a visual world involves establishing and dynamically updating the locations of entities in response to linguistic descriptions of events

Illustrating potential efficiency gains from using cost-effectiveness evidence to reallocate Medicare expenditures

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the linke below. Copyright @ 2013, International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR).This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Objectives - The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services does not explicitly use cost-effectiveness information in national coverage determinations. The objective of this study was to illustrate potential efficiency gains from reallocating Medicare expenditures by using cost-effectiveness information, and the consequences for health gains among Medicare beneficiaries. Methods - We included national coverage determinations from 1999 through 2007. Estimates of cost-effectiveness were identified through a literature review. For coverage decisions with an associated cost-effectiveness estimate, we estimated utilization and size of the “unserved” eligible population by using a Medicare claims database (2007) and diagnostic and reimbursement codes. Technology costs originated from the cost-effectiveness literature or were estimated by using reimbursement codes. We illustrated potential aggregate health gains from increasing utilization of dominant interventions (i.e., cost saving and health increasing) and from reallocating expenditures by decreasing investment in cost-ineffective interventions and increasing investment in relatively cost-effective interventions. Results - Complete information was available for 36 interventions. Increasing investment in dominant interventions alone led to an increase of 270,000 quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and savings of $12.9 billion. Reallocation of a broader array of interventions yielded an additional 1.8 million QALYs, approximately 0.17 QALYs per affected Medicare beneficiary. Compared with the distribution of resources prior to reallocation, following reallocation a greater proportion was directed to oncology, diagnostic imaging/tests, and the most prevalent diseases. A smaller proportion of resources went to cardiology, treatments (including drugs, surgeries, and medical devices, as opposed to nontreatments such as preventive services), and the least prevalent diseases. Conclusions - Using cost-effectiveness information has the potential to increase the aggregate health of Medicare beneficiaries while maintaining existing spending levels.The Commonwealth Fun

Far Field Plume Distribution and Divergence for NEXT: DART Mission

In support of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, laboratory measurements were made on the NEXT ion engine, which will be used for the spacecraft's in-space propulsion [1]. This study revisits a small range of mission-specific 2.7A throttle levels to understand the effect of in-flight flow rate variability, investigate intermediate throttle conditions, and improve measurement methodology. This paper specifically examines the far-field plume divergence and backflow ion flux distribution of the NEXT, while a companion paper examines the charge state distributions

Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment

The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover, interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment; peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of the methods, and grounding of the hypothese