Salient Part Research Articles

Do Recommender Systems Manipulate Consumer Preferences? A Study of Anchoring Effects

Recommender systems are becoming a salient part of many e-commerce websites. Much research has focused on advancing recommendation technologies to improve accuracy of predictions, while behavioral aspects of using recommender systems are often overlooked. In our studies, we explore how consumer preferences at the time of consumption are impacted by predictions generated by recommender systems. We conducted three controlled laboratory experiments to explore the effects of system recommendations on preferences. Studies 1 and 2 investigated user preferences for television programs across a variety of conditions, which were surveyed immediately following program viewing. Study 3 investigated the granularity of the observed effects within individual participants. Results provide strong evidence that the rating presented by a recommender system serves as an anchor for the consumer’s constructed preference. Viewers’ preference ratings are malleable and can be significantly influenced by the recommendation received. The effect is sensitive to the perceived reliability of a recommender system and, thus, not a purely numerical or priming-based effect. Finally, the effect of anchoring is continuous and linear, operating over a range of perturbations of the system. These general findings have a number of important implications (e.g., on recommender systems performance metrics and design, preference bias, potential strategic behavior, and trust), which are discussed.

Factors Affecting Juvenile Care Workers’ Intent to Continue Working in Juvenile Corrections

Employee turnover in social service organizations such as juvenile corrections poses a major problem for both administrators and frontline juvenile care workers (JCWs). Prior to turnover, many employees contemplate such an action; this is referred to as turnover intent. Several factors can affect JCWs’ decisions about whether to work in a facility or leave. The current study examined some of these factors using an integrated theory of person–environment fit and social identity. Findings indicate that perceived attitudes congruence (AC) between the juvenile detention staff and the climate of the facility was a significant predictor of intent to continue working as a juvenile staff. Results also revealed that juvenile staff strongly identified with their professional role as a salient part of their self-concept and individuals’ perceptions of shared attitudes with coworkers contributed to their professional identity. Perceived AC then predicted intent to continue working as a JCW. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.

Environmentally coupled repairs and remedies in the airline cockpit: Repair practices of talk and action in interaction

Our article explores the repair practices pilots use to correct various troubles during flights. The intersubjective understanding of action is a salient part of the time-critical activities of aviation. Repairs solve troubles before any accident risk emerges, thus contributing to flight safety. In repair practices, the social and technical environment is interwoven. If remedies concern faulty lines of action, they target the techno-material condition of the aircraft. Such repair practices are not repairs of talk, but remedies of action in a socio-material interaction. We discuss remedies of action as a particular type of repair practice, and outline their role in socio-material interactions. The aim is to continue building a holistic analysis of social action, not just to add a multimodal layer over an analysis of talk. The rethinking of social action contributes to the exploration of social actions anchored to their socio-material environment.

Adapting CBT for traumatized refugees and ethnic minority patients: Examples from culturally adapted CBT (CA-CBT)

In this article, we illustrate how cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be adapted for the treatment of PTSD among traumatized refugees and ethnic minority populations, providing examples from our treatment, culturally adapted CBT, or CA-CBT. CA-CBT has a unique approach to exposure (typical exposure is poorly tolerated in these groups), emphasizes the treatment of somatic sensations (a particularly salient part of the presentation of PTSD in these groups), and addresses comorbid anxiety disorders and anger. To accomplish these treatment goals, CA-CBT emphasizes emotion exposure and emotion regulation techniques such as meditation and aims to promote emotional and psychological flexibility. We describe 12 key aspects of adapting CA-CBT that make it a culturally sensitive treatment of traumatized refugee and ethnic minority populations. We discuss three models that guide our treatment and that can be used to design culturally sensitive treatments: (a) the panic attack-PTSD model to illustrate the many processes that generate PTSD in these populations, highlighting the role of arousal and somatic symptoms; (b) the arousal triad to demonstrate how somatic symptoms are produced and the importance of targeting comorbid anxiety conditions and psychopathological processes; and (c) the multisystem network (MSN) model of emotional state to reveal how some of our therapeutic techniques (e.g., body-focused techniques: bodily stretching paired with self-statements) bring about psychological flexibility and improvement.

Same‐Sex Marriage: A New Social Phenomenon

Same-sex marriage (SSM) is a new social phenomenon. In modern times SSM did not exist until the 21st century when an increasing number of countries began permitting same-sex couples to marry legally. This study presents statistical and related evidence concerning SSM worldwide, with special attention to the United States, where SSM has evolved into a major political and legal issue. In addition to examining data on levels and trends, differentials between men and women are investigated. The study also considers common arguments for and against SSM and likely changes in laws and policies that may occur. Although same-sex marriage now exists in a small number of countries and US states, its consequences and implications are being felt far beyond the borders of those countries and areas. In coming years same-sex marriage will remain a controversial and salient part of the legal, political, and cultural landscape, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Measuring Racial Profiling

What if racial profiling were useful? Even, perhaps, very useful? Are the costs of racial profiling so significant that racial profiling should be banned? Courts and commentators do not ask these questions; indeed, they rarely, if ever, acknowledge that racial profiling may be useful. This paper explores what costs police would have to justify, and how they might do so in order to use racial profiling legally. Using race as a part of a profile of criminal has some efficiency value; it is not solely (or even at all) about racial animus. Race is a marker of criminal behavior; it would be miraculous if it where not. Height, weight, gender, hair style, ear piercings, all of these characteristics almost surely delineate some difference in the commission rate of at least one crime. This is, essentially, a mathematical truism: race and crime are not independent. Because race is “useful” when “useful” is defined as “information worth more than zero,” it is important to move beyond the initial question - is it useful - to the more important question - how useful is it? What do we give up in allowing or banning racial profiling? What are courts missing when they discuss racial profiling? This paper is an attempt to get at least some of the empirics correct regarding the direct costs and benefits of racial profiling; it leaves the important research of mapping the collateral consequences of racial profiling to others. But even when one puts aside the collateral consequences of focusing the might of the criminal justice system on one specific race, there are many complicating factors in measuring how useful racial profiling. First, how do you measure the gap in crime rates (that is, the different crime rates for different racial groups and different crimes)? Without this, no one could calibrate their behavior: police would not know how much to profile, and the courts would not know how much reliance on race in police decision-making is too much. This is also important as a policy matter, to determine what society loses if racial profiling were not allowed. To be more concrete, what if whites were twice as likely to sell cocaine as Blacks were? Does this justify profiling them? Perhaps the answer to this depends on the base rate: how much more cocaine do white people sell? Is this a difference between one and two percent, or fifteen and thirty percent of individuals who could be targeted. One needs to know more than just a single statistic. A second complicating factor, beyond the initial measurement question, is whether race is too easy to over-use. People see race quickly, and believe it is a highly salient part of a persons physical description; police might over-rely on this characteristic because it is easy to determine (or at least perceived to be so). A third complication is that race is rarely the only available information about a potential suspect, and a better question than whether race is correlated with crime rates is whether information about a suspects race adds any useful information to a profile. But, again, the chance that these two probabilities are always equal, for every type of crime and any other possible set of information is zero. Race matters. This bears emphasis not because it isn't obvious, but because many opposed to racial profiling deem it inefficient automatically; that is, they argue that racial profiling does not work because race is not a predictor of criminality. Answering these questions is a difficult, but not insurmountable task. But these questions also suggest that a simple focus on whether race is a predictor of criminality is misplaced; the answer to that first question is yes. The more important question, which legislatures, courts, legal and economic researchers alike have generally ignored, is when and how useful racial profiling is in different situations. To answer this question, one needs to investigate the costs and benefits of racial profiling, which the above complicating factors suggest can be done, but needs more attention to the detail of the reality of the relationship of race and crime to answer. This paper seeks to quantify the costs and benefits of racial profiling, and in doing so creates new methods to control for the problem of selection bias in the data that are generally available to evaluate this question.

Why the Arpanet Was Built

The who, what, when, and how of the Arpanet is usually told in heroic terms—Licklider's vision, the fervor of his disciples, the dedication of computer scientists and engineers, the work of graduate students, and so forth. Told by one of the key actors in this salient part of US and Internet history, this article addresses why the Arpanet was built.

Lessons Learned: Teaching the Race Concept in the College Classroom

For a faculty member of East Asian ancestry, raised in Latin America, race became a salient part of my identity during adulthood while living and working in the southern United States. Thus, unders...

‘We've been through it all together’: supports for parents with children with rare trisomy conditions

Parenting a child with a developmental disability can be a positive experience. A salient part of this outcome is support at the time of diagnosis and in an ongoing manner from immediate and extended family members. Studies are sparse on this topic for parents with a child with a rare trisomy condition. The present study examined the support needs of parents with a child or adult with a rare trisomy condition (n = 20). Participants were recruited from the Tracking Rare Incidence Syndromes (TRIS) project. The TRIS Family, Friends and Finances Protocol was the data collection instrument. The protocol included primarily open-ended items. Qualitative analyses were conducted to identify themes from the protocol and follow-up phone contacts. Support from immediate and extended family members varied from very positive to participants-describing very negative interactions with specific individuals. Many in the sample reported affirming experiences with spouses and difficulties with grandparents and other extended family members. Results both confirmed the literature and reflected the unique circumstances of the participants. It is critical to raise awareness of the similar and disparate support needs of this unique population, as the affected children are living longer and their families require continuing support to meet their and their children's needs.

Spike-timing-dependent plasticity and subcortical waves enhance alpha oscillations in a computer model of neocortex

Event Abstract Back to Event Spike-timing-dependent plasticity and subcortical waves enhance alpha oscillations in a computer model of neocortex Samuel Neymotin1*, Cliff Kerr2, George Chadderdon3, Christopher Fietkiewicz3 and William Lytton4 1 NYU-Poly, United States 2 U Sydney, Australia 3 SUNY Downstate, United States 4 Kings County Hospital, United States A prominent alpha oscillation is a salient part of neocortical activity that emerges over the first several years of life. In retina and other tissues slow oscillations are generated during development. We hypothesized that such waves in lower centers could train the cortex to produce alpha. We here show that frequencies of this range could emerge in the network via a process of spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). We used a previously published model consisting of 470 event-based integrate-and-fire cells (Neymotin et al., 2011). Excitatory and inhibitory cells were arranged in 13 types to reflect the laminar structure of sensory cortex. Each cell received external driving Poisson inputs, as well as inputs from other cells in the model, via AMPA, NMDA, and GABAA synapses. STDP was implemented at AMPA synapses, with a maximal spike-time difference of 40 ms and a decay time constant of 10 ms. After learning, we evaluated the spectral power in the network with application of white noise, to see if it had learned to produce activity in the trained bands, effectively retaining a memory of the training. The waves from lower centers were simulated by rhythmic inputs to layer 4 excitatory cells to simulate inputs via thalamus. At baseline, prior to STDP, the excitatory cell multiunit activity vector (MUA) power spectrum had a low-amplitude peak near 7 Hz and gradual attenuation towards higher frequencies (Fig. 1, orange). When STDP was implemented only at synapses on excitatory cells, the network was prone to epileptic activity, including high-frequency oscillations and pathologically high firing rates. To provide balanced inhibition in the network, we subsequently implemented STDP for excitatory synapses on inhibitory cells. STDP caused a shift in the distribution of synaptic weights, with the strength of AMPA synapses on inhibitory cells increasing more than those on excitatory cells, preventing epileptic activity from emerging. After applying STDP with no training signal, the spectral peak was reduced (Fig. 1, black) due to the added inhibition in the network. In order to train the network, we provided a subcortical training input consisting of shocks applied at several different frequencies. When a training signal of 7 Hz was applied, the activity of layer 4 excitatory cells increased, causing an increase in the spectral power. The post-training spectral peak in response to white noise was broad (7 - 22 Hz) and changed little from baseline (Fig. 1, red). A small increase in training signal rate to 8 Hz (Fig. 1, blue) produced a large increase in resultant overall spectral power. In this case, a sharp spectral peak emerged near 12.5 Hz, considerably higher than the training frequency. A smaller peak was produced at 8 Hz. Applying a 10 Hz training signal enhanced the amplitude of the spectral peak further and pushed the resultant peak upwards to form a broad profile that peaked at approximately 15 Hz (Fig. 1, green). The greater response to 8 and 10 Hz appeared to be associated with far greater spread of excitation throughout the initial, untrained network, suggesting that a resonant response can occur at these higher frequencies due to the continuation of activations for these time periods. Our model suggests that learning rates should be properly balanced between excitatory to excitatory and excitatory to inhibitory synapses in order to avoid a transition to epileptic dynamics. Alterations in excitatory weights are necessary for learned dynamics, but learning must be modulated by interneurons. Finally, we predict that alpha/beta oscillations could emerge via STDP learning of training signals projected from subcortical areas. Supported by: DARPA grant N66001-10-C-2008

Feature selection using singular value decomposition and QR factorization with column pivoting for text-independent speaker identification

Selection of features is one of the important tasks in the application like Speaker Identification (SI) and other pattern recognition problems. When multiple features are extracted from the same frame of speech, it is expected that a feature vector would contain redundant features. Redundant features confuse the speaker model in multidimensional space resulting in degraded performance by the system. Careful selection of potential features can remove this redundancy while helping to achieve the higher rate of accuracy at lower computational cost. Although the selection of features is difficult without having exhaustive search, this paper proposes an alternative and straight forward technique for feature selection using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) followed by QR Decomposition with Column Pivoting (QRcp). The idea is to capture the most salient part of the information from the speakers’ data by choosing those features that can explain different dimensions showing minimal similarities (or maximum acoustic variability) among them in orthogonal sense. The performances after selection of features using proposed criterion have been compared with using Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Linear Frequency (LF) Cepstral Coefficients (LFCC) and a new feature proposed in this paper that is based on Gaussian shaped filters on mel-scale. It is shown that proposed SVD-QRcp based feature selection outperforms F-Ratio based method and the proposed feature extraction tool is superior to baseline MFCC & LFCC.

DeLone & McLean IS Success Model in Evaluating Knowledge Transfer in a Virtual Learning Environment

DeLone & McLean’s success model has been actively used since its first introduction in 1992. In this article, the authors extend this model to describe the success of knowledge sharing in an information system that included a part of the knowledge base of a private educational institute. As the supply of private education is increased, it is vital to be aware if the offered educational services support the use of the knowledge base and if the service is perceived satisfactory by the customers. In this descriptive qualitative case study, the authors discuss how the DeLone & McLean’s information system success model can be used to assess educational services when apprenticeships form a salient part of teaching. This paper focuses on issues that interested the target organization.

Being Examples to the Flock: The Role of Church Leaders and African American Families Seeking Mental Health Care Services

Within the context of Black churches, African American clergy have a significant role in the delivery of mental health care services for parishioners and their families. Working toward better linkages between faith-based communities and more formal mental health care could help to provide more culturally sensitive and timely mental health care for African American families. Using a salient part of an integrative model (Davey and Watson in Contemp Fam Ther 30:31–47, 2008), the roles Black church leaders have historically played for African American families seeking outside mental health care services are considered. We additionally provide an example of a recent collaborative partnership with a Black church that points toward some promising directions for future research and clinical collaborations between the field of couple and family therapy and the Black church community.

Chief Pointing-Eye: Multiarticulatory Metaphorical Gestures Expressing High

This paper rests upon the simple assumption that people move in various ways when speaking and that some of these movements are intended and meaningful - they are gestures. As the hands’ possibility to perform gesture is widely accepted and comparably well represented in the literature, other articulators will be focused upon in this study. In a conversation, several articulators can be in motion at the same time. In these synchronous movements, articulators group according to the meaning they convey. In these articulator units there can be articulators which are hardly noticed while one or more parts of the unit are salient. In a gesture with a strong directionality, for example, the eye can be the most salient part in a group of articulators - you may then call it “Chief Pointing-Eye”. The work’s main substance lies in the manner how the articulators create meaning together. This paper focuses on their capability to produce three different conceptual metaphors in 1.2 seconds. Further, the message they convey not only includes personal expression, appeals to the interlocutor and describes things in the world, but also shows the relations between these three parties. Finally, the question whether the bodily re-enactment of these relations is a miniature of attitude or even emotion will be raised.

Discourses of Dislike: Responses to Ethics Education Policies by Life Scientists in the U.K., Italy, and the U.S.

RECENTLY ESTABLISHED POLICIES FOR ethical conduct of researchers have resulted in efforts to implement those policies through educational practices. While these policies and training efforts have good intentions, how do researchers respond? Little research has been conducted to understand how researchers react to ethics policies, and to ethics education requirements as a particularly salient part of the policies. This research explores variations in the responses of life scientists to policies originating in the U.K., E.U. and U.S., between 2000 and 2003. Semi-structured interviews with 30 life scientists in the U.K., Italy and the U.S. provide the basis for the findings. Across the interviews, scientists consistently reported dislike of the ways the ethics policies and ethics programs are implemented, but with variation by country. U.K. life scientists regarded the policies tied to Research Council (RC) funding with a skeptical attitude, expecting that policies would change with RC leadership. Italian life scientists often noted the lack of funding (and policies) at the national level, and appeared frustrated by what they viewed as overly complex policy requirements at the European level, where successful grantees employed outside consultants to complete the ethics sections of their applications. U.S. life scientists expressed distaste for the implementation of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) policy in web-based ethics training modules. This research suggests that introducing new shallow routines that are separate from daily research and educational practices in science may be worse than no ethics training at all, if it turns off young researchers to the discussion of ethical issues. Observing variation in scientists' discourse on ethics policies allows us to see how education following ethics policies might be more effective, and indicates that ethics policy formation more informed by empirical research is a desirable goal.

The clash between legal and business logic: business groups in the new Israeli corporate law

Planned institutional change presents an uncommon opportunity for institutional entrepreneurs to advance their innovations. The dispute of why the new Israeli corporate law, enacted at the end of 1990s, does not refer to business groups, which form a salient part of Israeli big business, opens a window through which the conflict between two different and competing types of logic may be viewed. The carriers of legal-professional logic were legal academics and state officials, who opposed the inclusion of a special chapter or any other reference to business groups within the new corporate law based on US legal ideas, and especially on the ‘Law and Economics’ perspective. In contrast, the carriers of business logic were interest groups and professional associations that sought to appropriate the legal and economic advantages resulting from organizing business in the form of business groups within the new law, without protecting the rights of minority shareholders and, more importantly, without enabling state agencies to intervene in the governance of their businesses.

Violent Landscape: Global Explosions and Lao Life-Worlds

Abstract Laos, a small country tucked into the heart of Southeast Asia, seems an unlikely target for the world’s most intensive bombing campaign. But from the 1950s to the 1970s, the U.S. intervened in Laos to combat the local communist forces and to attempt to stop the flow of North Vietnamese supplies through Lao territory, an intervention prompted by a particularly “global” outlook. The U.S. military intervention was characterised by tactics that pitted science and technology against the local terrain, weather, and vegetation. The Lao landscape was a violent landscape during this era, as it was entangled as both agent and object in the conflict. The U.S. war on nature in Laos remains a salient part of contemporary Laos, as the country grapples with perhaps the world’s most serious unexploded ordnance problem. Thus today, the Lao landscape is violent in yet another sense: past violence is incorporated into today’s land. This is reflected in local retellings of the violence and devastation of the era, stories that stress images of the loss of natural wilderness.

Young children associate novel words with complex objects rather than salient parts.

How do children learn associations between novel words and complex perceptual displays? Using a visual preference procedure, the authors tested 12- and 19-month-olds to see whether the infants would associate a novel word with a complex 2-part object or with either of that object's parts, both of which were potentially objects in their own right and 1 of which was highly salient to infants. At both ages, children's visual fixation times during test were greater to the entire complex object than to the salient part (Experiment 1) or to the less salient part (Experiment 2)--when the original label was requested. Looking times to the objects were equal if a new label was requested or if neutral audio was used during training (Experiment 3). Thus, from 12 months of age, infants associate words with whole objects, even those that could potentially be construed as 2 separate objects and even if 1 of the parts is salient.

Some Probabilistic Attributes of Inspection Policies in Alien Species Management

Inspections are a salient part of alien species management and, therefore, in contemporary times, there has been great interest in analyzing the role of inspections as an apposite regulatory tool. In this paper, we continue the study of inspections in a probabilistic environment and we shed light on three specific issues concerning inspection policies in the context of alien species management. First, given a particular seaport, we determine the likelihood that n ships will need to be inspected in a relevant time period. Second, we compute the probability distribution function of the amount of time it takes to inspect an arbitrary ship. Finally, we show how the probability distribution function of the total cost of inspections in the above time period can be calculated.

Horizontal Hostility: Multiple Minority Groups and Differentiation from the Mainstream

Three studies examined minority group members' attitudes toward other, similar minority groups. We predicted that minority group members would differentiate between multiple outgroups with asymmetric horizontal hostility(White & Langer, 1999), a pattern of expressing relatively unfavorable attitudes toward an outgroup that is similar to and more mainstream than the minority ingroup. We replicated White and Langer's pattern of horizontal hostility among members of minority political parties in Greece (Study 1). When the mainstream majority was made a salient part of the intergroup context, vegetarians' attitudes toward vegans became more positive, and vegans' attitudes toward vegetarians more negative (Study 2). In Study 3, mainstream salience made Dartmouth College students' relative evaluations of a similar, more mainstream college more negative, whereas priming a superordinate minority identity made them more positive. Results suggest that asymmetric horizontal hostility results from the motivation to differentiate one's minority ingroup from a similar, more mainstream group in comparative contexts anchored by the mainstream majority outgroup.