Binary Scales Research Articles

But Is It really Art? The Classification of Images as "Art"/"Not Art" and Correlation with Appraisal and Viewer Interpersonal Differences.

When an individual participates in empirical studies involving the visual arts, they most often are presented with a stream of images, shown on a computer, depicting reproductions of artworks by respected artists but which are often not known to the viewer. While art can of course be shown in presentia actuale—e.g., in the museum—this laboratory paradigm has become our go-to basis for assessing interaction, and, often in conjunction with some means of rating, for assessing evaluative, emotional, cognitive, and even neurophysiological response. However, the question is rarely asked: Do participants actually believe that every image that they are viewing is indeed “Art”? Relatedly, how does this evaluation relate to aesthetic appreciation, and do the answers to these questions vary in accordance with different strategies and interpersonal differences? In this paper, we consider the spontaneous classification of digital reproductions as art or not art. Participants viewed a range of image types—, Hyperrealistic, Poorly Executed paintings, Readymade sculptures, as well as Renaissance and Baroque paintings. They classified these as “art” or “not art” using both binary and analog scales, and also assessed for liking. Almost universally, individuals did not find all items within a class to be “art,” nor did all participants agree on the arthood status for any one item. Art classification in turn showed a significant positive correlation with liking. Whether an object was classified as art moreover correlated with specific personality variables, tastes, and decision strategies. The impact of these findings is discussed for selection/assessment of participants and for better understanding the basis of findings in past and future empirical art research.

Which Social-Psychological Models Explain Rangers’ Participation in Rangeland Management Cooperatives? An Application of Path Analysis

The highly centralized management of rangelands in northwest Iran has caused their degradation. Rangeland Management Cooperatives (RMCs) have been taken into account by the Iranian researchers and practitioners as the best mode of managing and tackling these resources. In this regard, stakeholders’ participation (i.e., the rangers) in such institutions is a substantial issue because without their close collaboration, any management scheme is likely to fail or succeed partially. Therefore, this study investigates the rangers’ participation in RMCs using the theory-triangulation method. We developed the main research question: how the explanatory variables, extracted from the social-psychological models, influence rangers’ participation in RMCs. A sample of 200 rangers participated in the survey method, of which we received 179 completed self-reported questionnaires. The reliability of the questionnaire was calculated using the Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Kuder-Richardson 21, the metrics that measure the consistency of items in indicator variables with the interval and binary scales, respectively. The results of path analysis unveil that job satisfaction and progressivism have a direct effect on participation, and the improved economic conditions of industries developed by the RMCs, good intrarelation, fatalism, progressivism, optimism, and cost-benefit indirectly influence participation via job satisfaction. On the basis of these results, it is concluded that to increase rangers’ participation in RMCs, which is a key factor in preventing the degradation of rangelands, RMCs’ officials need to improve the local industries benefiting from the rangelands and upgrade intracommunication skills via training. It is also suggested that all rangers, even those with fatalistic beliefs, need to be included in RMCs’ participatory activities. Finally, it is needed to assess progressivist rangers’ needs, promote optimism, and visualize the economic, social, and conservation benefits of the participation in RMCs.

Prediction of whole-genome risk for selection and management of hyperketonemia in Holstein dairy cattle.

Hyperketonemia (HYK), a common early postpartum health disorder characterized by elevated blood concentrations of β-hydroxybutyrate (BHB), affects millions of dairy cows worldwide and leads to significant economic losses and animal welfare concerns. In this study, blood concentrations of BHB were assessed for 1,453 Holstein cows using electronic handheld meters at four time points between 5 and18days postpartum. Incidence rates of subclinical (1.2≤maximum BHB≤2.9mmol/L) and clinical ketosis (maximum BHB≥3.0mmol/L) were 24.0 and 2.4%, respectively. Variance components, estimated breeding values, and predicted HYK phenotypes were computed on the original, square-root, and binary scales. Heritability estimates for HYK ranged from 0.058 to 0.072 in pedigree-based analyses, as compared to estimates that ranged from 0.071 to 0.093 when pedigrees were augmented with 60,671 single nucleotide polymorphism genotypes of 959 cows and 801 male ancestors. On average, predicted HYK phenotypes from the genome-enhanced analysis ranged from 0.55mmol/L for first-parity cows in the best contemporary group to 1.40mmol/L for fourth-parity cows in the worst contemporary group. Genome-enhanced predictions of HYK phenotypes were more closely associated with actual phenotypes than pedigree-based predictions in five-fold cross-validation, and transforming phenotypes to reduce skewness and kurtosis also improved predictive ability. This study demonstrates the feasibility of using repeated cowside measurement of blood BHB concentration in early lactation to construct a reference population that can be used to estimate HYK breeding values for genomic selection programmes and predict HYK phenotypes for genome-guided management decisions.

Protostellar feedback in turbulent fragmentation: consequences for stellar clustering and multiplicity

Stars are strongly clustered on both large (~pc) and small (~binary) scales, but there are few analytic or even semi-analytic theories for the correlation function and multiplicity of stars. In this paper we present such a theory, based on our recently-developed semi-analytic framework called MISFIT, which models gravito-turbulent fragmentation, including the suppression of fragmentation by protostellar radiation feedback. We compare the results including feedback to a control model in which it is omitted. We show that both classes of models robustly reproduce the stellar correlation function at >0.01 pc scales, which is well approximated by a power-law that follows generally from scale-free physics (turbulence plus gravity) on large scales. On smaller scales protostellar disk fragmentation becomes dominant over common core fragmentation, leading to a steepening of the correlation function. Multiplicity is more sensitive to feedback: we found that a model with the protostellar heating reproduces the observed multiplicity fractions and mass ratio distributions for both Solar and sub-Solar mass stars (in particular the brown dwarf desert), while a model without feedback fails to do so. The model with feedback also produces an at-formation period distribution consistent with the one inferred from observations. However, it is unable to produce short-range binaries below the length scale of protostellar disks. We suggest that such close binaries are produced primarily by disk fragmentation and further decrease their separation through orbital decay.

Latent Growth Curve Modeling of Ordinal Scales: A Comparison of Three Strategies

Ordinal scales can be used in latent growth curve modeling in three ways: mean, weighted mean scores, and factors measured by scale items. Sum and mean scores are commonly used in growth curve modeling in spite of certain discouragement. It was unclear how much bias these practices could produce in terms of the change rates and patterns. This study compared three methods with Monte Carlo Simulations under different number of response categories of the items, in terms of five key parameters of growth curve modeling. The hypothetical population models were derived from real empirical data to generate datasets of binary, trichotomous, five- and seven-point scales with sample size of 300. Latent growth curve modeling of mean, weighted mean, and factors measured by the ordinal scales were respectively fit to these datasets. Results indicated that modeling the factors that are measured with ordinal scales yield the fewest biases. Biases of modeling the means and weighted of the scales were under one decimal point in the change rates, whereas biases in the variances and covariance of the intercept and slope factors were large. In conclusion, it is inadvisable to use means or weighted means of ordinal scales for latent growth curve modeling. It produces the best results modeling the factors that are measured with the ordinal scales.

Deriving gradient measures of child speech from crowdsourced ratings

Recent research has demonstrated that perceptual ratings aggregated across multiple non-expert listeners can reveal gradient degrees of contrast between sounds that listeners might transcribe identically. Aggregated ratings have been found to correlate strongly with acoustic gold standard measures both when individual raters use a continuous rating scale such as visual analog scaling (Munson et al., 2012) and when individual raters provide binary ratings (McAllister Byun, Halpin, & Szeredi, 2015). In light of evidence that inexperienced listeners use continuous scales less consistently than experienced listeners, this study investigated the relative merits of binary versus continuous rating scales when aggregating responses over large numbers of naive listeners recruited through online crowdsourcing. Stimuli were words produced by children in treatment for misarticulation of North American English /r/. Each listener rated the same 40 tokens two times: once using Visual Analog Scaling (VAS) and once using a binary rating scale. The gradient rhoticity of each item was then estimated using (a) VAS click location, averaged across raters; (b) the proportion of raters who assigned the “correct /r/” label to each item in the binary rating task (pˆ). First, we validate these two measures of rhoticity against each other and against an acoustic gold standard. Second, we explore the range of variability in individual response patterns that underlie these group-level data. Third, we integrate statistical, theoretical, and practical considerations to offer guidelines for determining which measure to use in a given situation.

The effects of the stellar wind and orbital motion on the jets of high-mass microquasars

High-mass microquasar jets propagate under the effect of the wind from the companion star, and the orbital motion of the binary system. The stellar wind and the orbit may be dominant factors determining the jet properties beyond the binary scales.} An analytical study is performed to characterize the effects of the stellar wind and the orbital motion on the jet properties. Accounting for the wind thrust transferred to the jet, we derive analytical estimates to characterize the jet evolution under the impact of the stellar wind. We include the Coriolis force effect, induced by orbital motion and enhanced by the wind presence. Large-scale evolution of the jet is sketched accounting for wind-to-jet thrust transfer, total energy conservation, and wind-jet flow mixing. If the angle of the wind-induced jet bending is larger than its half-opening angle, the following is expected: (i) a strong recollimation shock; (ii) bending against orbital motion, caused by Coriolis forces and enhanced by the wind presence; and (iii) non-ballistic helical propagation further away. Even if disrupted, the jet can reaccelerate due to ambient pressure gradients, but wind entrainment can weaken this acceleration. On large scales, the opening angle of the helical structure is determined by the wind-jet thrust relation, and the wind-loaded jet flow can be rather slow. The impact of stellar winds on high-mass microquasar jets can yield non-ballistic helical jet trajectories, jet partial disruption and wind mixing, shocks, and possibly non-thermal emission. Among several observational diagnostics at different bands, the radio morphology on milliarcsecond scales can be particularly insightful regarding the wind-jet interaction.

A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy

Recent years have seen an efflorescence of work focused on the definition and operationalization of democracy. One debate concerns whether democracy is best measured by binary or graded scales. Critics of binary indices point out at that they are overly reductionist, while defenders counter that the different levels of graded measures are not associated with a specific set of conditions. Against this backdrop, we propose to operationalize electoral democracy as a series of necessary and sufficient conditions arrayed in an ordinal scale. The resulting “lexical” index of electoral democracy, based partly on new data, covers all independent countries of the world from 1800 to 2013. It incorporates binary coding of its subcomponents, which are aggregated into an ordinal scale using a cumulative logic. In this fashion, we arrive at an index that performs a classificatory function—each level identifies a unique and theoretically meaningful regime-type—as well as a discriminating function.

Pediatric emergency medicine asynchronous e-learning: a multicenter randomized controlled Solomon four-group study.

Asynchronous e-learning allows for targeted teaching, particularly advantageous when bedside and didactic education is insufficient. An asynchronous e-learning curriculum has not been studied across multiple centers in the context of a clinical rotation. We hypothesize that an asynchronous e-learning curriculum during the pediatric emergency medicine (EM) rotation improves medical knowledge among residents and students across multiple participating centers. Trainees on pediatric EM rotations at four large pediatric centers from 2012 to 2013 were randomized in a Solomon four-group design. The experimental arms received an asynchronous e-learning curriculum consisting of nine Web-based, interactive, peer-reviewed Flash/HTML5 modules. Postrotation testing and in-training examination (ITE) scores quantified improvements in knowledge. A 2 × 2 analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) tested interaction and main effects, and Pearson's correlation tested associations between module usage, scores, and ITE scores. A total of 256 of 458 participants completed all study elements; 104 had access to asynchronous e-learning modules, and 152 were controls who used the current education standards. No pretest sensitization was found (p = 0.75). Use of asynchronous e-learning modules was associated with an improvement in posttest scores (p < 0.001), from a mean score of 18.45 (95% confidence interval [CI] = 17.92 to 18.98) to 21.30 (95% CI = 20.69 to 21.91), a large effect (partial η(2) = 0.19). Posttest scores correlated with ITE scores (r(2) = 0.14, p < 0.001) among pediatric residents. Asynchronous e-learning is an effective educational tool to improve knowledge in a clinical rotation. Web-based asynchronous e-learning is a promising modality to standardize education among multiple institutions with common curricula, particularly in clinical rotations where scheduling difficulties, seasonality, and variable experiences limit in-hospital learning.

Are paramedic students ready to be professional? An international comparison study

IntroductionThe last decade has seen rapid advancement in Australasian paramedic education, clinical practice, and research. Coupled with the movements towards national registration in Australia and New Zealand, these advancements contribute to the paramedic discipline gaining recognition as a health profession. AimThe aim of this paper was to explore paramedic students' views on paramedic professionalism in Australia and New Zealand. MethodsUsing a convenience sample of paramedic students from Whitireia New Zealand, Charles Sturt University and Monash University, attitudes towards paramedic professionalism were measured using the Professionalism at Work Questionnaire. The 77 item questionnaire uses a combination of binary and unipolar Likert scales (1 = Strongly disagree/5 = Strongly agree; Never = 1/Always = 5). ResultsThere were 479 students who participated in the study from Charles Sturt University n = 272 (56.8%), Monash University n = 145 (30.3%) and Whitireia New Zealand n = 62 (12.9%). A number of items produced statistically significant differences P < 0.05 between universities, year levels and course type. These included: ‘Allow my liking or dislike for patients to affect the way I approach them’ and ‘Discuss a bad job with family or friends outside work as a way of coping’. ConclusionsThese results suggest that paramedic students are strong advocates of paramedic professionalism and support the need for regulation. Data also suggest that the next generation of paramedics can be the agents of change for the paramedic discipline as it attempts to achieve full professional status.

ORIGIN OF MULTI-BAND EMISSION FROM THE MICROQUASAR CYGNUS X-1

We study the origin of non-thermal emissions from the Galactic black hole X-ray binary Cygnus X--1 which is a confirmed high mass microquasar. By analogy with those methods used in studies of active galactic nuclei, we propose a two-dimensional, time-dependent radiation model from the microquasar Cygnus X--1. In this model, the evolution equation for relativistic electrons in a conical jet are numerically solved by including escape, adiabatic and various radiative losses. The radiative processes involved are synchrotron emission, its self-Compton scattering, and inverse Compton scatterings of an accretion disk and its surrounding stellar companion. This model also includes an electromagnetic cascade process of an anisotropic $\gamma$-$\gamma$ interaction. We study the spectral properties of electron evolution and its emission spectral characteristic at different heights of the emission region located in the jet. We find that radio data from Cygnus X--1 are reproduced by the synchrotron emission, the \emph{Fermi} LAT measurements by the synchrotron emission and Comptonization of photons of the stellar companion, the TeV band emission fluxes by the Comptonization of the stellar photons. Our results show that: (1) Radio emission region extends from the binary system scales to the termination of the jet. (2) The GeV band emissions should originate from the distance close to the binary system scales. (3) The TeV band emissions could be inside the binary system, and these emissions could be probed by the upcoming CTA telescope. (4) The MeV tail emissions, which produces a strongly linearly polarized signal, are emitted inside the binary system. The location of the emissions is very close to the inner region of the jet.

Value-Added Modeling: Challenges for Measuring Special Education Teacher Quality

Teacher evaluation systems that rely upon subjective observations and are limited to binary rating scales have been criticized for their inability to distinguish highly effective from ineffective teachers. Largely in response to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition for federal funding, school districts are looking to value-added models as a means by which to improve their teacher evaluation systems and promote highly qualified and effective teachers. Value-added models purport to measure teacher quality by collecting longitudinal student achievement data in the form of standardized test scores. While value-added models could potentially improve teacher assessment, there are limitations to including students with disabilities in the models. This literature review examines the promises and criticisms of value-added models, and continues the discussion of measuring special education teacher equality using the standardized test scores of students with disabilities.

The hobbit — an unexpected deficiency

Vitamin D has been proposed to have beneficial effects in a wide range of contexts. We investigate the hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency, caused by both aversion to sunlight and unwholesome diet, could also be a significant contributor to the triumph of good over evil in fantasy literature. Data on the dietary habits, moral attributes and martial prowess of various inhabitants of Middle Earth were systematically extracted from J R R Tolkien's novel The hobbit. Goodness and victoriousness of characters were scored with binary scales, and dietary intake and habitual sun exposure were used to calculate a vitamin D score (range, 0-4). The vitamin D score was significantly higher among the good and victorious characters (mean, 3.4; SD, 0.5) than the evil and defeated ones (mean, 0.2; SD, 0.4; P < 0.001). Further work is needed to see if these pilot results can be extrapolated to other fantastic situations and whether randomised intervention trials need to be imagined.

Evaluation of the Patient Satisfaction Performance of Emergency Medicine Resident Physicians in a Large Urban Academic Emergency Department

Evaluation of the Patient Satisfaction Performance of Emergency Medicine Resident Physicians in a Large Urban Academic Emergency Department

Prospective-triggered sequential dual-source end-systolic coronary CT angiography for patients with atrial fibrillation: A feasibility study

BackgroundObtaining diagnostic coronary CT angiography with low radiation exposure in patients with irregular heart rhythms such as atrial fibrillation (AF) remains challenging. ObjectiveWe evaluated image quality and inter-reader variability with the use of prospective electrocardiographic (ECG)-triggered sequential dual-source acquisition at end systole for coronary artery disease (CAD) evaluation in patients with AF. MethodsThirty consecutive patients with AF who underwent prospective ECG-triggered sequential dual-source acquisition were evaluated. Images were reconstructed every 50 milliseconds from 250 to 400 milliseconds after the R wave. Two independent, blinded readers evaluated the coronaries for image quality on a 5-point scale (worst to best) and stenosis on 5-point semiquantitative (none to severe) and binary scales (>50% or <50%). Diagnostic image quality was graded for each reconstruction. ResultsEleven patients (37%) had significant (≥50% stenosis) CAD. Average heart rate was 82 ± 20 beats/min and variability range was 71 ± 22 beats/min. Mean effective radiation dose was 6.5 ± 2.4 mSv. Diagnostic image quality was noted in 97.9% of 304 coronary segments with median image quality of 3.0. The 300-millisecond reconstruction phase provided the highest image quality; 70% of patients showed diagnostic image quality. Combination of all phases (250–400 milliseconds) performed significantly better than single or other phase combinations (P < 0.0005 for all comparisons). Inter-reader variability for stenosis detection was excellent, with 98.4% concordance by using a binary scale (50% stenosis cutoff). ConclusionsProspective ECG-triggered sequential dual-source CT acquisition with the use of end-systolic acquisition provides diagnostic image quality with potentially low radiation doses for evaluation of CAD in patients with AF. Use of multiple end-systolic phases over a 150-millisecond window improves diagnostic image quality.

Ordinal quantities in clinical laboratory sciences

From an ontological point of view, the concept ‘property’ may be defined as “that which when possessed by an object contributes to it being as it is”. Ordinal quantity is one of the types into which properties may be divided. Ordinal quantity is understood internationally as a “quantity defined by a conventional measurement procedure, for which a total ordering relation can be established, according to magnitude, with other quantities of the same kind, but for which no algebraic operations among those quantities exist”. The term ordinal quantity may be preceded by an adjective (generic, subgeneric, specific, or individual) to clarify the relation object–property. Ordinal quantities may have values belonging to binary ordinal scales and polinay ordinal scales.

Comparative evaluation of web search engines in health information retrieval

PurposeThe intent of this work is to evaluate several generalist and health‐specific search engines for retrieval of health information by consumers: to compare the retrieval effectiveness of these engines for different types of clinical queries, medical specialties and condition severity; and to compare the use of evaluation metrics for binary relevance scales and for graded ones.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a study in which users evaluated the relevance of documents retrieved by four search engines for two different health information needs. Users could choose between generalist (Bing, Google, Sapo and Yahoo!) and health‐specific (MedlinePlus, SapoSaúde and WebMD) search engines. The authors then analysed the differences between search engines and groups of information needs with six different measures: graded average precision (gap), average precision (ap), gap@5, gap@10, ap@5 and ap@10.FindingsThe results show that generalist web search engines surpass the precision of health‐specific engines. Google has the best performance, mainly in the top ten results. It was found that information needs associated with severe conditions are associated with higher precision, as are overview and psychiatry questions.Originality/valueThe study is one of the first to use a recently proposed measure to evaluate the effectiveness of retrieval systems with graded relevance scales. It includes tasks from several medical specialties, types of clinical questions and different levels of severity which, to the best of the authors' knowledge, has not been done before. Moreover, users have considerable involvement in the experiment. The results help in understanding how search engines differ in their responses to health information needs, what types of online health information are more common on the web and how to improve this type of search.

Calculating transcription factor binding maps for chromatin

Current high-throughput experiments already generate enough data for retrieving the DNA sequence-dependent binding affinities of transcription factors (TF) and other chromosomal proteins throughout the complete genome. However, the reverse task of calculating binding maps in a chromatin context for a given set of concentrations and TF affinities appears to be even more challenging and computationally demanding. The problem can be addressed by considering the DNA sequence as a one-dimensional lattice with units of one or more base pairs. To calculate protein occupancies in chromatin, one needs to consider the competition of TF and histone octamers for binding sites as well as the partial unwrapping of nucleosomal DNA. Here, we consider five different classes of algorithms to compute binding maps that include the binary variable, combinatorial, sequence generating function, transfer matrix and dynamic programming approaches. The calculation time of the binary variable algorithm scales exponentially with DNA length, which limits its use to the analysis of very small genomic regions. For regulatory regions with many overlapping binding sites, potentially applicable algorithms reduce either to the transfer matrix or dynamic programming approach. In addition to the recently proposed transfer matrix formalism for TF access to the nucleosomal organized DNA, we develop here a dynamic programming algorithm that accounts for this feature. In the absence of nucleosomes, dynamic programming outperforms the transfer matrix approach, but the latter is faster when nucleosome unwrapping has to be considered. Strategies are discussed that could further facilitate calculations to allow computing genome-wide TF binding maps.

Limiting eccentricity of subparsec massive black hole binaries surrounded by self-gravitating gas discs

We study the dynamics of supermassive black hole binaries embedded in circumbinary gaseous discs, with the SPH code Gadget-2. The sub-parsec binary (of total mass M and mass ratio q=1/3) has excavated a gap and transfers its angular momentum to the self--gravitating disc (M_disc=0.2 M). We explore the changes of the binary eccentricity e, by simulating a sequence of binary models that differ in the initial eccentricity e_0, only. In initially low-eccentric binaries, the eccentricity increases with time, while in high-eccentric binaries e declines, indicating the existence of a limiting eccentricity e_crit that is found to fall in the interval [0.6,0.8]. We also present an analytical interpretation for this saturation limit. An important consequence of the existence of e_crit is the detectability of a significant residual eccentricity e_LISA} by the proposed gravitational wave detector LISA. It is found that at the moment of entering the LISA frequency domain e_LISA ~ 10^{-3}-10^{-2}; a signature of its earlier coupling with the massive circumbinary disc. We also observe large periodic inflows across the gap, occurring on the binary and disc dynamical time scales rather than on the viscous time. These periodic changes in the accretion rate (with amplitudes up to ~100%, depending on the binary eccentricity) can be considered a fingerprint of eccentric sub-parsec binaries migrating inside a circumbinary disc.

Quick, Simple and Reliable: Forced Binary Survey Questions

Consumers are increasingly saturated by market research, which leads to decreasing response rates and an increased danger of response bias. Market researchers thus face the challenge of recruiting respondents, increasing response rates and reducing respondent fatigue by making questionnaires as short and pleasant as possible. One way of achieving this is to replace traditionally used ordinal multi-category answer formats (such as Likert-type scales) with forced binary scales. This proposition is attractive only if it indeed shortens the survey time while not compromising the quality of managerial insights from the data. This study investigates these conditions. Results from a repeat-measurement design indicate that managerial interpretations do not differ substantially between the two answer formats, responses are equally reliable, and that the binary format is quicker and perceived as less complex.