Original Choice Research Articles

Impacts of automated trucks on U.S. freight movements: application and enhancement of the random-utility-based multiregional input-output model

ABSTRACT Fully automated trucks (ATrucks) will impact the US freight flow patterns, due to time and cost savings compared to human-driven trucks (HTrucks). This paper advances the random-utility-multiregional input-output (RUBMRIO) model to have explicit mode’s commodity-pricing impacts and predicts impacts of ATrucks on freight mode and origin choices across 20 commodity sectors across US. Assuming ATrucks’ operating cost to be 60% of that for HTrucks, results suggest that time and cost savings from the use of ATrucks not only accommodate the need to acquire high-value goods from more closer locations but also facilitates the transportation of goods with the same value from farther away. HTrucks’ shares diminish as distance rises, with ATrucks’ mode share in transported value fairly stable (at 50% across all distances). Rail’s share is minimal for shorter distances but rises to approximately 20% for trips longer than 250 miles. Overnight-travel time savings raise the total value and ton-miles of goods transported by ATrucks, peaking at an increase of 11% for trips between 500 and 750 miles. ATrucks transport three times the ton-miles of HTrucks with an 80% cost reduction and still double the ton-mileswith a 40% increased cost, thanks to time savings.

Archiving the Ephemeral in Digital Public Space: Using Speculative Design to Consider Collaborative Fan Play in the Metaverse

Looking at fan activity through the lens of play, this paper considers the archiving opportunities and challenges posed by new technology for playful ephemeral fan co-creation in multiplatform digital contexts. These include technical concerns such as platform fragility and how to capture inherent liveness and temporality, but also ethical concerns such as sustainability, consent and content moderation. To examine this, the paper takes fan-created alternate reality games (ARGs) as a particular example of such archiving challenges. It first describes a real example of such a game, ‘Blow the Man Down’ before introducing speculative design as a method to consider a potential future where emerging technologies such as the metaverse and artificial intelligence form part of online collaborative play and how it is archived. A speculative design scenario is presented where players can choose to recreate the experience of initial interactive play either as a dream-like replaying of the original player choices, or as a branching experience where a new story and experience is created each time; an ever evolving and updating archontic text. In such a context we can then consider, is archiving possible, or even desirable?

A short note on the use of irreducible representations for tilted octahedra in perovskites.

It is pointed out that many authors are unaware that the particular choice of unit-cell origin determines the irreducible representations to which octahedral tilts in perovskites belong. Furthermore, a recommendation is made that the preferred option is with the origin at the B-cation site rather than that of the A site.

The Philologist at the Service of the Poet (and Vice Versa): Giovanni Pascoli Reader of Catull. 95

The contribution examines Giovanni Pascoli’s careful analysis of Catullus’ c. 95 in the anthology Lyra. Going beyond the horizon of the young students for whom the work is intended, the commentary is an all-round philological operation, aiming as much at a global exegesis as at focusing on minute details inherent in the meaning and textual reconstruction in the strict sense, non infrequently making learned and original choices.

Writing the Other: The Ethics of Out-Group Representation in Art

Abstract Recently, there have been cases in which out-group representation in art has faced severe criticism. Out-group representation occurs when an artist in her work engages with people, characters, or subject matters that do not fall within her own identity group. This is exemplified by the case of finding a translator for Amanda Gorman’s The Hill We Climb in the Netherlands, where the original choice was criticized because, unlike Gorman, the translator was not Black, and by the case of Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till in his casket at the Whitney Museum in New York, which was criticized for being painted by a White person who could not understand the suffering Emmett Till and his mother had gone through. A number of objections to out-group representation are identified in the debate, namely, an objection from authenticity, an objection from equality of opportunity, and the suggestion that out-group representation is disrespectful and/or harmful. It is argued that none of these objections establishes that it is morally problematic to engage in out-group representation in art per se, although, importantly, there are a number of moral concerns that those who thus engage should be sensitive to.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) recognize that their guesses could be wrong and can pass a two-cup disjunctive syllogism task.

When chimpanzees search for hidden food, do they realize that their guesses may not be correct? We applied a post-decision wagering paradigm to a simple two-cup search task, varying whether we gave participants visual access to the baiting and then asking after they had chosen one of the cups whether they would prefer a smaller but certain reward instead of their original choice (experiment 1). Results showed that chimpanzees were more likely to accept the smaller reward in occluded than visible conditions. Experiment 2 found the same effect when we blocked visual access but manipulated the number of hiding locations for the food piece, showing that the effect is not owing to representation type. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that when given information about the contents of the unchosen cup, chimpanzees were able to flexibly update their choice behaviour accordingly. These results suggest that language is not a pre-requisite to solving the disjunctive syllogism and provides a valuable contribution to the debate on logical reasoning in non-human animals.

Relaxed minds for healthier food choice at school: A field experiment in southern Mexico

Stress leads to unhealthy food choices since the school-age stage. Yet, there is limited evidence particularly in low- and middle-income countries regarding the impact of stress-reduction strategies on school-age children's food choices. Such aspects were crucial during the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated psychological distress and unhealthier food choices among children. Two years after the pandemic began, we conducted a field experiment in southern Mexico to assess the impact of stress-reduction strategies on the food choices of over 1400 children aged 9–12. Half of the school-classes in the sample were randomly assigned to a stress reduction strategy namely meditation, which comprised six audios with basic relaxation techniques and intuitive messages to guide food choices. Additionally, all participants received information signalling that an amaranth snack was nutritious (i.e., the healthy snack), which was paired with a chocolate bar (i.e., the unhealthy snack) as part of a snack choice experiment. Students that practiced meditation were slightly more likely to choose the healthy snack than those in the control group, but the effect was not statistically significant. Upon collecting their snack, students had the chance to exchange their original choice for the other snack. Students that meditated were more likely to exchange their originally chosen “unhealthy snack” towards the healthy snack than students in the control group. The meditation program effectively reduced chronic stress among treated children. The effect was larger among students attending schools in lower-income areas. Our study sheds some light on the challenges to translate an improved psychological well-being into healthier food choices at school.

Instant interaction driven adaptive gaze control interface

Gaze estimation is long been recognised as having potential as the basis for human-computer interaction (HCI) systems, but usability and robustness of performance remain challenging . This work focuses on systems in which there is a live video stream showing enough of the subjects face to track eye movements and some means to infer gaze location from detected eye features. Currently, systems generally require some form of calibration or set-up procedure at the start of each user session. Here we explore some simple strategies for enabling gaze based HCI to operate immediately and robustly without any explicit set-up tasks. We explore different choices of coordinate origin for combining extracted features from multiple subjects and the replacement of subject specific calibration by system initiation based on prior models. Results show that referencing all extracted features to local coordinate origins determined by subject start position enables robust immediate operation. Combining this approach with an adaptive gaze estimation model using an interactive user interface enables continuous operation with the 75th percentile gaze errors of 0.7∘\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^\\circ $$\\end{document}, and maximum gaze errors of 1.7∘\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$^\\circ $$\\end{document} during prospective testing. There constitute state-of-the-art results and have the potential to enable a new generation of reliable gaze based HCI systems.

Origin coordinate influence on performance of temporally extended signal space separation in magnetoencephalography

ObjectiveTemporally extended signal space separation (tSSS) is a powerful method for artifact suppression in magnetoencephalography (MEG). Because tSSS first separates MEG signals coming from inside and outside a certain sphere, definition of the sphere origin is important. For this study, we explored the influence of origin choice on tSSS performance in spontaneous and evoked activity from epilepsy patients. MethodsInterictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) and somatosensory evoked fields (SEFs) were processed with two tSSSs: one with the default origin of (0, 0, 40 mm) in the head coordinate, and the other with an individual origin estimated using each patient’s anatomical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Equivalent current dipoles (ECDs) were calculated for the data. The ECD location and quality of estimation were compared across conditions. ResultsMEG data from 21 patients revealed marginal differences in ECD location, but the estimation quality inferred from goodness of fit (GOF) and confidence volume (CV) was better for the tSSS with individual origins. This choice affected IEDs more than it affected SEFs. ConclusionsIndividual sphere model resulted in better GOF and CV. SignificanceApplication of tSSS using an individual origin would be more desirable when available. This parameter might influence spontaneous activity more strongly.

Abortion as the Gateway to Recognizing Lived Female Experience

For 49 years, the right to abortion was taken for granted—inhaled by every girl, every woman—by all people assigned female at birth in the United States. This right no longer exists. In 2022, with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, the Supreme Court removed federal protection for the legal right to abortion and therefore women’s agency over their bodies. This paper will contextualize abortion as part of a continuum that encompasses gender, motherhood and the meaning of reproduction and reproductive rights as sociocultural and intrapsychic phenomena. The expectation that mature female-bodied people are child-desiring women persists and is not conceptualized as optional. It is the original choice women do not have. The next choice women no longer have, if they become pregnant, is whether or not to continue a pregnancy. The Dobbs decision means the cultural reinstatement of female de-sexualization, along with the suffocating and silencing of agency—a negation of women’s voices, desire, power and subjectivity—a recipe for psychological destabilization. Personal and clinical material will illustrate these points.

DETERMINANTS AND CLASSIFICATIONS OF ONLINE SHOPPING CONSUMERS’ PURCHASE INTENTION IN INDONESIA

Online shopping is still growing significantly, which is an upward trend for e-commerce platforms. It has grown in popularity among consumers for a number of reasons, driving Indonesian consumer behavior. This study aims to identify determinants and classifications of Indonesian online shopping consumers’ purchase intention using the decision tree methodology. The notion underpinning this study is the phenomena of online shopping as a consumer behavior transition in Indonesia which has increased gradually over the last decades. The data was collected using a structured questionnaire and 820 respondents participated in this study. Then, the data was analyzed using C5.0 and CART 5.0 algorithms. The results show that the most influential determinants of the frequency of online shopping include the consumers’ occupation, choice of e-commerce platforms, product origin, and product quality. The influence of several factors on customers' intentions to engage in shopping online can be determined, including job status, e-commerce platform, product sources, and product quality.JEL: L81, L86, Q5.

The Application of Vinay and Darbelnet Model to English and Urdu Translations of Surah Ad- Duha: A Comparative Study

This study aims to analyze the linguistic features of three translated versions of Surah Ad Duha with the help of Vinay and Darbelnet's translation theory.The analysis is based on the seven translation procedures proposed by Vinay and Darbelnet, which include transposition, modulation, equivalence, adaptation, borrowing, literal translation, and oblique translation.The study examines the translators approach which reveals the original linguistic and cultural choices made by the translators to convey the intended message. The study provides tactics of understanding and translating religious texts keeping in consideration the differences in linguistic and cultural features, the use of rhetorical devices, sentence structures, and word choices, and how they contribute to the overall meaning and message of religious textsfor distinct audience. The findings of this research can be used to enhance the understanding of the linguistic and literary aspects of the Qur'an, as well as provide insights into the translation of religious texts. Keywords: Surah Ad Duhaa; VinayDarnelnet model; Direct and Oblique method

Investing in the Teacher Workforce: Experimental Evidence on Teachers’ Preferences

Inadequate compensation is often viewed as the root of teacher workforce challenges despite teacher reports that working conditions matter more. Using an original discrete choice experiment with a national sample of 1,030 U.S. teachers, we found that support staff—special education specialists, counselors, and nurses—play an essential role in shaping teachers’ employment preferences. Teachers value access to these support staff more than they value a 10% increase to their own salary. We also assessed teachers’ preferences regarding childcare subsidies and find that teachers treat a 10% salary increase and a childcare benefit of similar value as near perfect substitutes. To test the durability of these findings, we replicated our study 2 years later and found nearly identical results.

From Latin QUO(D) VELLES to Romagnol Cvël: A Case of Degrammaticalisation from a Free‐choice Indefinite to the Noun ‘Thing’1

AbstractDegrammaticalisation is an oft‐dismissed category of language change. In this paper evidence is provided for its existence, its triggers, and its conditions. This case study details the development of an understudied Old Italo‐Romance indefinite, covelle, a polarity‐sensitive item roughly translating as ‘anything’ which originated from a Latin free relative with Free‐Choice interpretation. It is shown that in Old Italo‐Romance the original Free Choice use was expanded to further nonveridical contexts. Subsequently, a curious development of covelle in Old Romagnol, a 16th‐century Gallo‐Italic variety, is examined whereby polar neutralisation (loss of sensitivity to polarity) of the indefinite was taking place. Contextually, a process of degrammaticalisation had begun through which the indefinite pronoun developed into the classifier ‘thing’. In Modern and Contemporary Romagnol cvël is almost exclusively employed as a noun/classifier. It is argued that two parallel processes have initiated a cycle that led cvël to complete degrammaticalisation: (i) the grammaticalization of the old noun for ‘thing’, co(n)sa, into a wh‐word, calling for lexical replacement, and (ii) competition from the Negative Concord Item gnit. The development of covelle in Romagnol represents a well‐documented case of degrammaticalisation, whose causes and conditions can be thoroughly described and motivated within an interaction with cyclical change.

Cell-based therapies for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

Autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis that is the most prevalent rheumatic autoimmune disorder, affect autologous connective tissues caused by the breakdown of the self-tolerance mechanisms of the immune system. During the last two decades, cell-based therapy, including stem cells and none-stem cells has been increasingly considered as a therapeutic option in various diseases. This is partly due to the unique properties of stem cells that divide and differentiate from the specialized cells in the damaged tissue. Moreover, stem cells and none-stem cells, impose immunomodulatory properties affecting the diseases caused by immunological abnormalities such as rheumatic autoimmune disorders. In the present review, the efficacy of cell-based therapy with four main types of stem cells, including mesenchymal stem cells, hematopoietic stem cells, embryonic stem cells, and human amniotic membrane cells, as well as none-stem cells, including regulatory T cells, chimeric antigen receptorT cells, and tolerogenic dendritic cells will be evaluated. Moreover, other related issues, including safety, changes in immunological parameters, suitable choice of stem cell and none-stem cell origin, conditioning regimen, limitations, and complications will be discussed.

Research on the tripartite evolutionary game promoting the transformation of traditional buildings to prefabricated buildings.

The practices of prefabricated buildings illustrate the incentives in prefabricated markets as well as the decision-making behavior of stakeholders, which can influence the transformation, upgrading, and sustainability of the buildings sector. The game between the stakeholders in the prefabricated buildings market becomes complicated by the fact that they dynamically adjust their strategies in response to changing market conditions. With the aim of quantitatively studying the implications of the dynamic decision behavior of prefabricated construction stakeholders on the prefabricated construction market, this study introduces component suppliers as participating agents and government subsidies and penalties as the main measures. And a three-way model of the evolutionary game involving government subsidies and punitive schemes is constructed by this study. The essay examines the evolutionary equilibrium strategies of each game subject as well as the effect of original strategies and different parameter choices on the decision-making of each subject using MATLAB. The findings reveal that (1) decision-making behaviors among the government, component suppliers, and developers are both interrelated and constrained, but governments are the dominant agents in the evolution of prefabricated buildings. (2) Parameters such as subsidies, penalties, costs, and benefits affect the stability of the tripartite evolutionary model, which remains consistent with the previous research. (3) Component suppliers have an equally important position in the development of prefabricated buildings as recognized entities such as developers and contractors. (4) When subsidies are kept at 40% of the incremental cost and penalties at 80% of the incremental cost, the model combines a fast evolutionary rate with stable model evolution. In conclusion, the article's research findings not only validate the rationality and feasibility of component suppliers as research subjects and confirm the importance of component suppliers but also propose a more reasonable boundary value for penalties and subsidies, which provides a reference for the government to improve the incentive and punishment measures as well as the dynamic adjustment strategy of stakeholders and also provides a new perspective to achieve the goal of sustainable development of construction.

Efficient sequential PLIC interface positioning for enhanced performance of the three-phase VoF method

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for the sequential positioning, also called nested dissection, of two planes in an arbitrary polyhedron. Two planar interfaces are positioned such that the first plane truncates a given volume from this arbitrary polyhedron and the next plane truncates a second given volume from the residual polyhedron. This is a relevant task in the numerical simulation of three-phase flows when resorting to the geometric Volume-of-Fluid (VoF) method (Hirt and Nichols, 1981) with a Piecewise Linear Interface Calculation (PLIC) (Youngs, 1982). An efficient algorithm for this task significantly speeds up the three-phase PLIC algorithm. The present study describes a method based on a recursive application of the Gaussian divergence theorem, where the fact that the truncated polyhedron shares multiple faces with the original polyhedron can be exploited to reduce the computational effort. A careful choice of the coordinate system origin for the volume computation allows for successive positioning of two planes without reestablishing polyhedron connectivity. Combined with a highly efficient root finding, this results in a significant performance gain in the reconstruction of the three-phase interface configurations.The performance of the new method is assessed in a series of carefully designed numerical experiments. Compared to a conventional decomposition-based approach, the number of iterations and, thus, of the required truncations was reduced by up to an order of magnitude. The PLIC positioning run-time was reduced by about 90% in our reference implementation. Integrated into the multi-phase flow solver Free Surface 3D (FS3D), an overall performance gain of about 20% was achieved. The reference implementation of the efficient sequential PLIC positioning is available as a Fortran module at https://doi.org/10.18419/darus-2488. Allowing for simple integration into existing numerical schemes, the proposed algorithm is self-contained, requiring no external decomposition libraries.

Stem cell-based therapy for systemic sclerosis

Abstract Autoimmune diseases, including SSc, are prevalent, affecting autologous connective tissues and caused by the breakdown of self-tolerance mechanisms of the immune system. During the last 2 decades, stem cell therapy has been increasingly considered as a therapeutic option in various diseases, including Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, spinal cord injury, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, liver disease, diabetes, heart disease, bone disease, renal disease, respiratory disease and haematological abnormalities such as anaemia. This is due to the unique properties of stem cells that both divide and differentiate to the specialized cells in the damaged tissue. Moreover, they impose immunomodulatory properties affecting the diseases caused by immunological abnormalities such as SSc. In the present review, the efficacy of stem cell therapy with two main types of stem cells, including mesenchymal stem cells and hematopoietic stem cells, will be reviewed. Moreover, other related issues, including safety, changes in immunological parameters, suitable choice of stem cell origin, conditioning regimen and complications of stem cell treatment will be discussed.

Liberal Dependency Care Versus Subject-Centered Liberal Justice

AbstractJohn Rawls and Asha Bhandary use David Hume's conditions of justice to frame the original position choice from which principles of justice are selected. To use Hume's conditions in this way excludes from representation those who are not full cooperators, including people who need lifelong dependency care. This implies that their claim to dependent care is not a fundamental claim of justice, but must have significantly lower priority. This article argues that an appropriate theory of liberal dependency care will abandon this Humean framing assumption, and will treat the claim to dependency care as a fundamental requirement of justice.

Computational concept for human food choice and eating behaviour

An inadequate diet can cause a number of illnesses with some of them posing major threats for humanity. Poor diet largely originates from behavioral and social issues rather than environmental factors. With simulation being a grand tool to analyze and address behavior issues, relatively few studies focus on computational modeling of nutrition at behavioural level. Furthermore, we have overviewed several popular approaches to computational modeling and simulating dietary decision-making and found no clear favorite. Further still, modelers rarely pay attention to one of the key behavioural factors – motivation. In the vast majority of models, either motivation is assumed to be exogenously given and, hence, is left out of the model, or motivation is not taken into account in any form, even though ignoring incentives significantly reduces adaptive capabilities of any human-like goal-directed model entity. We aimed to outline a modelling approach that would fit into the food choice topic and would improve on the available models. This implies offering an intelligible algorithm that would be easily applied to statistical data yet offering a depth of analysis despite its seeming simplicity. Thus, we present our view of the food choice simulation problem which employs eating incentives and an original choice mechanism that is different both from traditional maximizing approaches common to economics and artificial intelligence research and from the dominant psychological computational approaches. We outlined the programming conceptual algorithm that involves sequential incentive (which can result from the biological necessities, social, intellectual or spiritual needs alike) selection, incentive-foodstuff coupling (a relation can be either fixed or dynamic) and elimination of undesirable food options based on incentives ranking (qualitative ranking seems to be preferable over quantitative ranking, forasmuch as it resembles the way of thinking of a regular person more closely) supplemented by pseudocode segments. The algorithm suits agent-based simulation paradigm, yet it is not tied to it and can be fitted with other simulation approaches as well. The algorithm is supposed to be implemented in Java. Since the offered algorithm is conceptual it requires an implementation to bring about robust conclusions which is our goal to reach next.