How group identification distorts beliefs

This paper investigates how group identification distorts people’s beliefs about the ability of their peers in social groups. We find that experimentally manipulated identification with a randomly composed group leads to overconfident beliefs about fellow group members’ performance on an intelligence test. This result cannot be explained by individual overconfidence, i.e., participants overconfident in their own skill believing that their group performed better because of them, as this was ruled out by experimental design. Moreover, we find that participants with stronger group identification put more weight on positive signals about their group when updating their beliefs. These in-group biases in beliefs can have important economic consequences when group membership is used to make inference about an individual’s characteristics as, for instance, in hiring decisions

The primary composition beyond 10 to the 5th power GeV as deduced from high energy hadrons and muons in air showers

Data obtained from a large set of air shower simulation calculations with use of highly refined hadronic interaction and shower simulation model are presented, in an attempt to solve the problem of primary chemical composition beyond 100,000 GeV total energy. It is rated that high energy hadrons in air showers offer a rather unique primary mass signature and show that the interpretation of high energy muon data is much more ambiguous. Predictions are compared with experimental data

The NESTOR neutrino telescope

We present a short overview and status report of the NESTOR deep sea high energy muon and neutrino telescope now under construction in Pylos, Greece

Move blocking strategies in receding horizon control

Abstract — In order to deal with the computational burden of optimal control, it is common practice to reduce the degrees of freedom by fixing the input or its derivatives to be constant over several time-steps. This policy is referred to as “move blocking”. This paper will address two issues. First, a survey of various move blocking strategies is presented and the shortcomings of these blocking policies, such as the lack of stability and constraint satisfaction guarantees, will be illustrated. Second, a novel move blocking scheme, “Moving Window Blocking” (MWB), will be presented. In MWB, the blocking strategy is time-dependent such that the scheme yields stability and feasibility guarantees for the closed-loop system. Finally, the results of a large case-study are presented that illustrate the advantages and drawbacks of the various control strategies discussed in this paper