Initial Judgment Research Articles

Old Guard → Avant-Garde → Kindergarde: The 2014 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry

Old Guard → Avant-Garde → Kindergarde:The 2014 Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry Lissa Paul (bio), Donelle Ruwe (bio), and Craig Svonkin (bio) Winners: Dana Teen Lomax, ed. Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children. Illus. Cliff Hengst. Lafayette: Black Radish, 2013. JonArno Lawson. Enjoy It While It Hurts. Illus. JonArno Lawson. Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak, 2013. Honor Books: Robert Priest. Rosa Rose and Other Poems. Illus. Joan Krygsman. Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak, 2013. Maurice Sendak. My Brother’s Book. Illus. Maurice Sendak. New York: HarperCollins, 2013. For the first time since its inception in 2005, the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry is being awarded jointly. Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Poems, Plays, Stories, and Songs for Children, edited by Dana Teen Lomax, and JonArno Lawson’s Enjoy It While It Hurts were both deemed unequivocally excellent by the judges.1 That part was easy enough. The painful, soul-searching part was that we feared losing our credibility if we awarded the prize to Lawson again. Lawson was the winner in 2007, 2009, and 2013, and his new book, Enjoy It While It Hurts, redolent with elegant gothic Art Nouveau, Wilde’s ironic aphorisms and Decadent aestheticism, was, as Craig said, “one of the best books of [End Page 381] children’s poetry not just this year, but in many generations.” In the end, we posed our problem to Bill Breichner, Johns Hopkins University Press Journals publisher, who confirmed our initial judgment: “penalizing Lawson for his continued excellence would lessen the award for everyone.” With that affirmation, we feel confident in our decision to designate Enjoy It While It Hurts and Kindergarde as our joint winners and laud their embrace of linguistic, thematic, and intellectual experimentation. The title Lomax chose for her anthology—Kindergarde, a portmanteau of “kindergarten” and “avant-garde”—in itself provides us with a useful new coinage. “Kindergarde” is exactly the right word to describe the verse found in Kindergarde, in our Honor books, Rosa Rose by Robert Priest, with its tip to Gertrude Stein, and My Brother’s Book, the late Maurice Sendak’s Blakean exploration of death, and in JonArno Lawson’s newest award-winning work, Enjoy It While It Hurts. Too often children’s poetry collections seem afraid to challenge children linguistically or intellectually, instead condescending to readers with overly simplified, obsessively on-topic verse. What we loved about the word kindergarde is that it defined for us a new genre of children’s verse, something that previous judges had recognized in Lawson’s work and in the work of many of the shortlisted children’s poets discussed in earlier award essays: namely, intelligent, uncompromising poetry with the shock of the new, poetry written by poets unafraid to address the continuum of human experience. Kindergarde—in addition to being the first winning anthology in the history of the award—breaks away from the infoverse of the “for school” market and escapes the stranglehold of “old guard” Romantic verse of innocence, nature, and naïve children cavorting through sunshiny summer days. Unlike the usual children’s anthologies of old favorites recycled into new groupings, Kindergarde includes new and reprinted works by accomplished, contemporary poets who typically haven’t designated their work as belonging to the “for children” market. Unlike the designations “crossover,” which Sandra Beckett associates with literature that “crosses from adult to child or child to adult,” and “cross-writing,” which Uli Knoepflmacher and Mitzi Myers define as addressing the two audiences simultaneously (Beckett 58–59), Kindergarde isn’t about reception. It’s about production. With kindergarde verse, we move beyond cross-writing; this new avant-garde children’s poetry assumes an audience willing and able to play poetic games and to engage with a variety of literary traditions. By taking its cues from avant-garde artists such as Picasso and Kandinsky—both inspired by real children who provided glimpses of the possibilities of discovering the world afresh—Kindergarde aligns itself in part with early twentieth-century avant-garde. With its portrait-sized, color-saturated, [End Page 382] school-bus yellow cover and asymmetrical title lettering, Kindergarde evokes Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine Blast...

SOFT COMPUTING AS A SOLUTION TO TIME/COST DISTRIBUTOR

In this paper we present a theoretical model based on soft computing to distribute the time/cost among the industry/machine sensors or effectors based on the type of the application. One of the most unstudied significant work is to recognize which sensor in an industry for example has higher priority than others. This is important to know which sensor to be checked first and within time limits of the system response. The problem of such systems is their variant environmental situations. Based on these varied situations, the priority of the importance of each sensor might change from time to another. Due to this uncertainty and lack of some information, soft computing is considered to be one of the plausible solutions. The presented idea is based on initially training of the system and continuously exploiting the system experience of the degree of importance of the sensors. The proposed system has three main stages, the first stage is concerned with training the system to obtain the necessary system time to respond, the necessary time allocated to recognize which sensors to check (or which has higher priority), and the initial importance value for each sensor, which indicates the initial judgment about the sensor importance. The second stage is to use the system experience about the importance of the sensor using fuzzy logic to decide the final values of each sensor 's importance. Based on the output of the second stage and the output of the first stage, the system distributes the time/cost among the sensors (some sensors with lower priority might be neglected). The main idea of the proposed work is based on neurofuzzy.

Language Defies Logic? Naming Practices Trump Logical Consistency for Indonesian Adults

In English, ‘animal’ applies to humans and non-human animals, but in Indonesian, the word (‘hewan’) does not apply to humans. Previous research has shown that English-speaking children were more likely than Indonesian-speaking children to agree that mammals are animals (age 6) and humans are mammals (age 9). As adults, Indonesian speakers accepted these statements, but denied that humans are animals. Thus, adults’ judgments were intransitive. In the present work, Indonesian-speaking children and adults were asked to revisit their judgments about biological categories following exposure to three-dimensional objects as an analog for class-inclusion relationships. The results were striking: While most of the children changed their judgments after the analogical prompt to agree that humans are mammals and humans are animals, the adults stayed with their initial judgments that were collectively illogical but consistent with their naming practice. These results suggest a complex interplay between naming, logical thinking and development.

A novel meta-heuristic based method for deriving priorities from fuzzy pairwise comparison judgments

This paper proposes a new method to derive the priority vector from fuzzy pairwise comparison matrices. Unlike several known methods, the proposed method derives crisp weights from consistent and inconsistent fuzzy comparison matrices. Therefore, the crisp weights obviate the need of additional aggregation and ranking procedures. To derive the priority vector, a Modified Fuzzy Logarithmic Least Square Model (MFLLSM) is proposed. In order to solve the MFLLSM, a framework based on genetic algorithm is proposed. In the proposed framework, a heuristic algorithm of population initialization, a heuristic algorithm for simulating fuzzy numbers and a heuristic algorithm of fitness evaluation are proposed.The solution of the prioritization problem requires finding priorities such that their ratio approximately satisfies the initial judgments. Computational results reveal the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with five well known methods of literature from the viewpoint of satisfaction of initial judgments by the obtained priority vector. It is shown by ten different examples that the deviation of the priorities ratio from initial judgments in the proposed method is less than five existing methods of literature. In addition, unlike several methods of literature, the proposed method considers fuzzy judgments represented by both triangular and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. Furthermore, the proposed method for the first time considers judgments represented by triangular shaped fuzzy numbers and trapezoidal shaped fuzzy numbers which are discussed in the paper.

Experienced psychotherapists’ reports of their assessments, predictions, and decision making in the early phase of psychotherapy.

Thirteen highly experienced psychotherapists' retrospective accounts of their initial assessments, predictions, and decision making in recently completed psychotherapies were analyzed by the qualitative method of Grounded Theory. Three main categories were identified, reflecting conceptual, attitudinal, and procedural aspects of initial clinical judgments. These were category 1-"contextualized, individualized conceptualizations"; category 2-"attitude of openness to the unique other," and category 3-"feeling one's way." These results are discussed with respect to the theory and research on decision-making processes involving scripts and implicit reasoning, psychotherapist expertise and experience, and the working alliance.

Conformity to the Opinions of Other People Lasts for No More Than 3 Days

When people are faced with opinions different from their own, they often revise their own opinions to match those held by other people. This is known as the social-conformity effect. Although the immediate impact of social influence on people’s decision making is well established, it is unclear whether this reflects a transient capitulation to public opinion or a more enduring change in privately held views. In an experiment using a facial-attractiveness rating task, we asked participants to rate each face; after providing their rating, they were informed of the rating given by a peer group. They then rerated the same faces after 1, 3, or 7 days or 3 months. Results show that individuals’ initial judgments are altered by the differing opinions of other people for no more than 3 days. Our findings suggest that because the social-conformity effect lasts several days, it reflects a short-term change in privately held views rather than a transient public compliance.

Are all data created equal?--Exploring some boundary conditions for a lazy intuitive statistician.

The study investigated potential effects of the presentation order of numeric information on retrospective subjective judgments of descriptive statistics of this information. The studies were theoretically motivated by the assumption in the naïve sampling model of independence between temporal encoding order of data in long-term memory and retrieval probability (i.e. as implied by a ”random sampling” from memory metaphor). In Experiment 1, participants experienced Arabic numbers that varied in distribution shape/variability between the first and the second half of the information sequence. Results showed no effects of order on judgments of mean, variability or distribution shape. To strengthen the interpretation of these results, Experiment 2 used a repeated judgment procedure, with an initial judgment occurring prior to the change in distribution shape of the information half-way through data presentation. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with those from Experiment 1, and in addition showed that the act of making explicit judgments did not impair accuracy of later judgments, as would be suggested by an anchoring and insufficient adjustment strategy. Overall, the results indicated that participants were very responsive to the properties of the data while at the same time being more or less immune to order effects. The results were interpreted as being in line with the naïve sampling models in which values are stored as exemplars and sampled randomly from long-term memory.

The malleable effect of name fluency on pharmaceutical drug perception

Based on the fluency theory, a recent study by Dohle and Siegrist revealed that complex pharmaceutical drug names are perceived as more hazardous than simple drug names and thus negatively influence patients' willingness to buy. This study explored the malleability of the name fluency effect on pharmaceutical drug perception by examining the fluency effect in the domain of risk versus advancedness judgment. The findings indicated that depending on how the fluency feeling is interpreted in the context of initial judgment task (e.g. advancedness vs risk), disfluent drug names can positively influence a patient's perception of the drug, reversing the typical fluency effect.

All God's Chillun Got Wings

All God's Chillun Got Wings

An exploratory study of secondary students' judgments of the relevance and reliability of information

This qualitative investigation is situated in the field of information seeking and use, and decision‐making theory provided a framework for the study. In a naturalistic setting and across a range of curriculum areas, it investigated the behavior of secondary school students undertaking information search tasks. Research questions focused on students' criteria for assessing the relevance and reliability of information. Thirty‐seven students between 14 and 17 years of age from a southeastern Australian school participated. The study collected data from journals; interviews, including video‐stimulated recall interviews; think‐aloud reports; video screen captures; and questionnaires. Data analysis culminated in grounded theory. Initial judgments of an item's relevance were based on comprehensibility, completeness of source, whether the item needed to be purchased, whether video sources were suitable, and whether factual or opinionative material met students' needs. Participants preferred information that provided topic overviews, information that linked to prior knowledge, and sources that treated topics in acceptable depth and were structured to facilitate accessibility. Students derived clues about reliability from URLs and considered the reputation of sources. The ability of an item to corroborate prior knowledge, its graphic design, its style of writing, and the perceived authority of its creators influenced participants' decisions about reliability.

Fairness and Persuasion. How Stakeholder Communication Affects Impartial Decision Making

We study experimentally whether and to what extent impartial decision makers are influenced by stakeholders’ fairness opinions in an allocation decision. The setting allows for different focal fairness rules to be considered. We compare communication treatments, in which one of the stakeholders states his or her opinion prior to the allocation decision, to a baseline without communication opportunities. We find that stakeholders who state their opinion in the communication treatments are allocated significantly less money than their counterparts in the baseline. Asymmetric reactions to the statements appear to be the driving force behind this result: impartial decision makers deviate from their initial fairness judgment and follow stakeholders’ opinions only if the requests are moderate; they largely ignore high monetary claims. Our results contribute to understanding the underlying processes that may affect the decisions of judges, juries, arbitrators, referees, or other impartial decision makers in interaction with stakeholders.

The Development and Scaling of the Teaching Outdoor Education Self-Efficacy Scale

Outdoor educator teaching self-efficacy beliefs are an important, yet unexamined, aspect of teaching in the outdoors. Teaching self-efficacy beliefs are self-perceptions of ability to successfully perform necessary teaching tasks. These beliefs may influence the approach or avoidance of instructional strategies, the likelihood to experiment with new teaching strategies (Allinder, 1994), and persistence amidst set-backs while teaching (Tschannen-Moran, Hoy, & Hoy, 1998). In some cases, self-efficacy beliefs can be overinflated and result in inappropriate selection of behaviors, acceptance of risk, and decreased performance (Woolfolk Hoy & Burke- Spero, 2005). Thus, in the context of outdoor education, errors in an educator's teaching selfefficacy beliefs carry consequences for student learning and student safety (cf. Martin & Priest, 1986). It is critically important to attend to the accuracy of outdoor educator teacher self-efficacy beliefs during initial training phases because unrealistically positive or negative self-efficacy beliefs are commonly found to develop in teachers when they first begin their teaching careers (Cakir &Alici, 2009). Initial judgments of teaching self-efficacy are some of the most powerful influences on long-term beliefs and future behaviors (Shaughnessy, 2004). Despite the importance of attending to the accuracy of outdoor educator teaching self-efficacy beliefs, no context specific scale exists to measure these beliefs or their accuracy. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present two studies, which develop a teaching outdoor education self-efficacy scale (TOE-SES).

Initial judgment task and delay of the final validity-rating task moderate the truth effect

Repeatedly seen or heard statements are typically judged to be more valid than statements one has never encountered before. This phenomenon has been referred to as the truth effect. We conducted two experiments to assess the plasticity of the truth effect under different contextual conditions. Surprisingly, we did not find a truth effect in the typical judgment design when using a ten minutes interval between statement repetitions. However, we replicated the truth effect when changing the judgment task at initial statement exposure or when using an interval of one week rather than ten minutes. Because none of the current truth effect theories can fully account for these context effects, we conclude that the cognitive processes underlying truth judgments are more complex than has hitherto been assumed. To close the theoretical gap, we propose a revised fluency attribution hypothesis as a possible explanation of our findings.

Social influence and the collective dynamics of opinion formation.

Social influence is the process by which individuals adapt their opinion, revise their beliefs, or change their behavior as a result of social interactions with other people. In our strongly interconnected society, social influence plays a prominent role in many self-organized phenomena such as herding in cultural markets, the spread of ideas and innovations, and the amplification of fears during epidemics. Yet, the mechanisms of opinion formation remain poorly understood, and existing physics-based models lack systematic empirical validation. Here, we report two controlled experiments showing how participants answering factual questions revise their initial judgments after being exposed to the opinion and confidence level of others. Based on the observation of 59 experimental subjects exposed to peer-opinion for 15 different items, we draw an influence map that describes the strength of peer influence during interactions. A simple process model derived from our observations demonstrates how opinions in a group of interacting people can converge or split over repeated interactions. In particular, we identify two major attractors of opinion: (i) the expert effect, induced by the presence of a highly confident individual in the group, and (ii) the majority effect, caused by the presence of a critical mass of laypeople sharing similar opinions. Additional simulations reveal the existence of a tipping point at which one attractor will dominate over the other, driving collective opinion in a given direction. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms of public opinion formation and managing conflicting situations in which self-confident and better informed minorities challenge the views of a large uninformed majority.

Acute Cough Illness in General Practice – Predictive Value of Clinical Judgement and Accuracy of Requesting Chest X-Rays

The aim of the study was to evaluate the accuracy of GPs' initial clinical judgement regarding presence or absence of pneumonia and to assess GPs' strategy for requesting chest X-rays in patients presenting with acute cough. GPs were asked to rate their suspicion of pneumonia based on clinical assessment alone and to protocol their decision to perform chest X-rays in 212 consecutive patients. These judgements were compared to the final diagnosis as determined by chest X-ray or uneventful recovery (four weeks). After history taking and physical examination, GPs are highly accurate in judging which patients presenting with acute cough may have pneumonia (PPV 80% [95% CI 0,66-0,89]) or not (NPV 100% [95% CI 0,97-1,0]), and in which patients chest X-rays are required or not (spearman's rho 0,54, p<0,0001).

Editorial

Editorial

How do we make sense of significance? Indications and reflections on an experiment

Determination of significance is widely recognised as an important step in environmental assessment (EA) processes. The prescriptive literature and guidance on significance determination is comprehensive within the field of EA, whereas descriptive and explorative studies of how we go about making sense, or construct meaning, of actions to determine significance are few. This article makes use of sense-making theory to explore how sense-making among EA researchers and practitioners influences significance determination. Focus is on the situation when persons have their first look at information about a strategic choice and as part of this make their initial judgement of significance. An experiment is designed and conducted to investigate how persons make sense of a specific case and determine significance in a screening and scoping context. The experiment indicates patterns in the test persons' sense-making, including important differences in the way individuals screen and scope. These patterns concern what we notice, how fast we frame the choice, and when we are critical about the provided information. The indications provide a basis for reflections on practice and on how to organise EA processes.

The development and scaling of the Teaching Outdoor Education Self-Efficacy Scale

Outdoor educator teaching self-efficacy beliefs are an important, yet unexamined, aspect of teaching in the outdoors. Teaching self-efficacy beliefs are self-perceptions of ability to successfully perform necessary teaching tasks. These beliefs may influence the approach or avoidance of instructional strategies, the likelihood to experiment with new teaching strategies (Allinder, 1994), and persistence amidst set-backs while teaching (Tschannen-Moran, Hoy, & Hoy, 1998). In some cases, self-efficacy beliefs can be overinflated and result in inappropriate selection of behaviors, acceptance of risk, and decreased performance (Woolfolk Hoy & Burke- Spero, 2005). Thus, in the context of outdoor education, errors in an educator's teaching selfefficacy beliefs carry consequences for student learning and student safety (cf. Martin & Priest, 1986). It is critically important to attend to the accuracy of outdoor educator teacher self-efficacy beliefs during initial training phases because unrealistically positive or negative self-efficacy beliefs are commonly found to develop in teachers when they first begin their teaching careers (Cakir &Alici, 2009). Initial judgments of teaching self-efficacy are some of the most powerful influences on long-term beliefs and future behaviors (Shaughnessy, 2004). Despite the importance of attending to the accuracy of outdoor educator teaching self-efficacy beliefs, no context specific scale exists to measure these beliefs or their accuracy. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present two studies, which develop a teaching outdoor education self-efficacy scale (TOE-SES).

Real or perceived impediments to minimum pricing of alcohol in Australia: Public opinion, the industry and the law

A burgeoning body of empirical evidence demonstrates that increases in the price of alcohol can reduce per capita alcohol consumption and harmful drinking. Taxes on alcohol can be raised to increase prices, but this strategy can be undermined if the industry absorbs the tax increase and cross-subsidises the price of one alcoholic beverage with other products. Such loss-leading strategies are not possible with minimum pricing. We argue that a minimum (or floor) price for alcohol should be used as a complement to alcohol taxation. Several jurisdictions have already introduced minimum pricing (e.g., Canada, Ukraine) and others are currently investigating pathways to introduce a floor price (e.g., Scotland). Tasked by the Australian government to examine the public interest case for a minimum price, Australia's peak preventative health agency recommended against setting one at the present time. The agency was concerned that there was insufficient Australian specific modelling evidence to make robust estimates of the net benefits. Nonetheless, its initial judgement was that it would be difficult for a minimum price to produce benefits for Australia at the national level. Whilst modelling evidence is certainly warranted to support the introduction of the policy, the development and uptake of policy is influenced by more than just empirical evidence. This article considers three potential impediments to minimum pricing: public opinion and misunderstandings or misgivings about the operation of a minimum price; the strength of alcohol industry objections and measures to undercut the minimum price through discounts and promotions; and legal obstacles including competition and trade law. The analysis of these factors is situated in an Australian context, but has salience internationally.

Perceiving affordances for different motor skills.

We examined several factors that affect people's ability to perceive possibilities for action. In Experiment 1, 24 participants crossed expanses of various sizes in three conditions: leaping, a familiar, launching action system; arm-swinging on monkey bars, an unpracticed skill that uses the arms rather than the legs; and crawling on hands and knees, a disused skill that involves all four limbs. Before and after performing each action, participants gave verbal judgments about the largest gap they could cross. Participants scaled initial judgments to their actual abilities in all three conditions. But they considerably underestimated their abilities for leaping, a launching action, and for arm-swinging when it was performed as a launching action; judgments about crawling, a non-launching action, and arm-swinging when it was performed as a non-launching action were more accurate. Thus, launching actions appear to produce a deficit in perceiving affordances that is not ameliorated by familiarity with the action. However, after performing the actions, participants partially corrected for the deficiency and more accurately judged their abilities for launching actions-suggesting that even brief action experience facilitates the perception of affordances. In Experiment 2, we confirmed that the deficit was due to the launching nature of the leaping and arm-swinging actions in Experiment 1. We asked an additional 12 participants to cross expanses using two non-launching actions using the legs (stepping across an expanse) and the arms (reaching across an expanse). Participants were highly accurate when judging affordances for these actions, supporting launching as the cause of the underestimation reported in Experiment 1.