Investigating illusion of control in experienced and non-experienced gamblers:replication and extension

The illusion of control is a phenomenon in which one erroneously believes he or she can exert control over the contingencies of chance events. To date, many of the studies investigating this phenomenon as it applies to gambling have used artificial gambling contexts and participants with no history of gambling beha-vior (i.e., undergraduates). This study replicated the procedures outlined in Di-xon, Hayes and Ebbs (1998) using experienced and inexperienced gamblers in a more natural gambling setting. Participants played 20 rounds of a game of rou-lette in which the default procedure was for the dealer to choose the bets. How-ever, players could choose their own bets by paying extra chips. Results indi-cated that most participants did not buy control of chip placement, indicating an absence of illusion of control. However, the two participants with the highest scores on the South Oaks Gambling Screen engaged in behaviors consistent with illusion of control across almost every trial

Investigating Illusion of Control In Experienced and Non-Experienced Gamblers: Replication and Extension

The illusion of control is a phenomenon in which one erroneously believes he or she can exert control over the contingencies of chance events. To date, many of the studies investigating this phenomenon as it applies to gambling have used artificial gambling contexts and participants with no history of gambling beha-vior (i.e., undergraduates). This study replicated the procedures outlined in Di-xon, Hayes and Ebbs (1998) using experienced and inexperienced gamblers in a more natural gambling setting. Participants played 20 rounds of a game of rou-lette in which the default procedure was for the dealer to choose the bets. How-ever, players could choose their own bets by paying extra chips. Results indi-cated that most participants did not buy control of chip placement, indicating an absence of illusion of control. However, the two participants with the highest scores on the South Oaks Gambling Screen engaged in behaviors consistent with illusion of control across almost every trial

Acceptor-like deep level defects in ion-implanted ZnO

N-type ZnO samples have been implanted with MeV Zn⁺ ions at room temperature to doses between 1×10⁸ and 2×10¹⁰cm⁻², and the defect evolution has been studied by capacitance-voltage and deep level transient spectroscopy measurements. The results show a dose dependent compensation by acceptor-like defects along the implantation depth profile, and at least four ion-induced deep-level defects arise, where two levels with energy positions of 1.06 and 1.2 eV below the conduction band increase linearly with ion dose and are attributed to intrinsic defects. Moreover, a re-distribution of defects as a function of depth is observed already at temperatures below 400 K.This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council through the Frienergi program and the Australian Research Council through the Discovery projects program

Elevated CO₂ and food ration affect growth but not the size-based hierarchy of a reef fish

Under projected levels of ocean acidification, shifts in energetic demands and food availability could interact to effect the growth and development of marine organisms. Changes to individual growth rates could then flow on to influence emergent properties of social groups, particularly in species that form size-based hierarchies. To test the potential interactive effects of (1) food availability, (2) elevated CO₂ during juvenile development, and (3) parental experience of elevated CO₂ on the growth, condition and size-based hierarchy of juvenile fish, we reared orange clownfish (Amphiprion percula) for 50 days post-hatching in a fully orthogonal design. Development in elevated CO₂ reduced standard length and weight of juveniles, by 9% and 11% respectively, compared to ambient. Development under low food availability reduced length and weight of juveniles by 7% and 15% respectively, compared to high food. Parental exposure to elevated CO₂ restored the length of juveniles to that of controls, but it did not restore weight, resulting in juveniles from elevated CO₂ parents exhibiting 33% lower body condition when reared in elevated CO₂. The body size ratios (relative size of a fish from the rank above) within juvenile groups were not affected by any treatment, suggesting relative robustness of group-level structure despite alterations in individual size and condition. This study demonstrates that both food availability and elevated CO₂ can influence the physical attributes of juvenile reef fish, but these changes may not disrupt the emergent group structure of this social species, at least amongst juveniles

Regional Medical Campuses: A New Classification System

There is burgeoning belief that regional medical campuses (RMCs) are a significant part of the narrative about medical education and the health care workforce in the United States and Canada. Although RMCs are not new, in the recent years of medical education enrollment expansion, they have seen their numbers increase. Class expansion explains the rapid growth of RMCs in the past 10 years, but it does not adequately describe their function. Often, RMCs have missions that differ from their main campus, especially in the areas of rural and community medicine. The absence of an easy-to-use classification system has led to a lack of current research about RMCs as evidenced by the small number of articles in the current literature. The authors describe the process of the Group on Regional Medical Campuses used to develop attributes of a campus separate from the main campus that constitute a “classification” of a campus as an RMC. The system is broken into four models—basic science, clinical, longitudinal, and combined—and is linked to Liaison Committee on Medical Education standards. It is applicable to all schools and can be applied by any medical school dean or medical education researcher. The classification system paves the way for stakeholders to agree on a denominator of RMCs and conduct future research about their impact on medical education

Coastal Ice-Core Record of Recent Northwest Greenland Temperature and Sea-Ice Concentration

Coastal ice cores provide an opportunity to investigate regional climate and sea-ice variability in the past to complement hemispheric-scale climate reconstructions from ice-sheet-interior ice cores. Here we describe robust proxies of Baffin Bay temperature and sea-ice concentration from the coastal 2Barrel ice core collected in the Thule region of northwest Greenland. Over the 1990–2010 record, 2Barrel annually averaged methanesulfonic acid (MSA) concentrations are significantly correlated with May–June Baffin Bay sea-ice concentrations and summer temperatures. Higher MSA is observed during warmer years with less sea ice, indicative of enhanced primary productivity in Baffin Bay. Similarly, 2Barrel annually averaged deuterium excess (d-excess) values are significantly correlated with annual Baffin Bay sea-ice concentrations and summer and annual temperatures. Warm (cool) years with anomalously low (high) sea-ice concentration are associated with proportionally more (less) low-d-excess Baffin Bay moisture at the ice-core site. Multilinear regression models incorporating 2Barrel MSA, d-excess and snow accumulation account for 38–51% of the Baffin Bay sea-ice and temperature variance. The annual temperature model is significantly correlated with temperatures throughout most of Greenland and eastern Arctic Canada due to the strong influence of the North Atlantic Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation

Neutralizing Antibody-Resistant Hepatitis C Virus Cell-to-Cell Transmission

Hepatitis C virus (HCV) can initiate infection by cell-free particle and cell-cell contact-dependent transmission. In this study we use a novel infectious coculture system to examine these alternative modes of infection. Cell-to-cell transmission is relatively resistant to anti-HCV glycoprotein monoclonal anti- bodies and polyclonal immunoglobulin isolated from infected individuals, providing an effective strategy for escaping host humoral immune responses. Chimeric viruses expressing the structural proteins rep- resenting the seven major HCV genotypes demonstrate neutralizing antibody-resistant cell-to-cell trans- mission. HCV entry is a multistep process involving numerous receptors. In this study we demonstrate that, in contrast to earlier reports, CD81 and the tight-junction components claudin-1 and occludin are all essential for both cell-free and cell-to-cell viral transmission. However, scavenger receptor BI (SR-BI) has a more prominent role in cell-to-cell transmission of the virus, with SR-BI-specific antibodies and small-molecule inhibitors showing preferential inhibition of this infection route. These observations highlight the importance of targeting host cell receptors, in particular SR-BI, to control viral infection and spread in the liver

Optimization-Intensive Watermarking Techniques for Decision Problems

Recently, a number of watermarking-based intellectual property protection techniques have been proposed. Although they have been applied to different stages in the design process and have a great variety of technical and theoretical features, all of them share two common properties: 1) they are applied solely to optimization problems and 2) do not involve any optimization during the watermarking process. In this paper, we propose the first set of optimization-intensive watermarking techniques for decision problems. In particular, we demonstrate, by example of the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, how one can select a subset of superimposed watermarking constraints so that the uniqueness of the signature and the likelihood of satisfying the satisfiability problem are simultaneously maximized. We have developed three SAT watermarking techniques: adding clauses, deleting literals, and push-out and pull-back. Each technique targets different types of signature-induced constraint superimposition on an instance of the SAT problem. In addition to comprehensive experimental validation, we theoretically analyze the potentials and limitations of the proposed watermarking techniques. Furthermore, we analyze the three proposed optimization-intensive watermarking SAT techniques in terms of their suitability for copy detection