Salient Set Research Articles

Luck in High-Stakes Firm Lottery Allocation: A Natural Experimental Test of Coasean Efficiency and Invariance in a Prominent Sport Finance Setting

The NBA Player-Draft is a prominent sport-finance setting, with large rents allocated to teams. Several properties make this setting ideal to study the Coase Theorem in a cartelized-firm setting, where the Theorem’s empirical credence and overall relevance to real-world financial settings continue to be questioned. Identification of a high-stakes, salient setting featuring exogenously-assigned property rights has proven elusive. While several studies examine the Coasean implications of professional sports league drafts, we find draft rights are endogenously-assigned. We cultivate, verify, specify, and examine an exogenously-assigned draft right—draft lottery luck—for the 2000-2015 NBA Drafts. Given its revealed exogeneity, we utilize variation in annual lottery luck as a natural experiment to study the Coase Theorem and find robust evidence for “instantaneous” Coasean efficiency (as in efficiency of the efficient market hypothesis) but also evidence that Coasean invariance, with respect to firm profits, fails. Secondary analysis reveals respective mechanisms and sport-financial implications.

The Refugee (Tale) Paradox: Narratives of Vulnerability and Aspirationality

The global refugee regime can be characterized by central paradoxes, similarly to how our societal narratives around displacement and refuge are fundamentally contradictory, yet immanent to the system they help to maintain. Following Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘aporia of human rights’, I discuss one particular salient set of contradictions as the ‘refugee paradox’. It describes a set of policy expectations and narratives around the figure of the refugee as vulnerable and hence deserving of protection, yet self-sufficient and self-reliant; one who must be happy to have survived and not aspire to much more, but, once the asylum status is approved, must display agency and aspirations for upward mobility; a victim of their circumstances, yet a role model of integration and economic success in the host society. I analyse the discursive charging and real-life consequences of the refugee paradox with a particular view to discourses of ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’, or ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ refugees in the present geopolitical landscape. Existing interventions, be they local aid, humanitarian intervention or political activism, necessarily move within the narrow confines of this paradox and therefore seldom accomplish more than symptom control. Thus, at its core, the refugee paradox is naturalized and serves to legitimate the status quo.

Enhancing motor screening efficiency: Toward an empirically derived abridged version of the Alberta Infant Motor Scale

Use of machine learning (ML) in the early detection of developmental delay is possible through the analysis of infant motor skills, though the large number of potential indicators limits the speed at which the system can be trained. Body joint obstructions, the inability to infer aspects of movement such as muscle tone and volition, and the complexities of the home environment – confound machine learning's ability to distinguish between some motor items. To train the system efficiently requires using an excerpted list of validated items, a salient set, which uses only those motor items that are the ‘easiest’ to see and identify, while being the most highly correlated to a low/qualifying score. This work describes the examination of motor items, selection of 15 items that comprise the salient set, and the ability of the set to reliably screen for motor delay in the first-year infant.

Engaging with Family Literacy Scholarship: Bearing Witness to Scholars and Families of Color

AbstractAcross research, policy, and practice, the experiences, knowledge, and collective experiences of Families of Color have been routinely erased, disregarded, and ignored, despite their potential for engaging and motivating students, creating inclusive classrooms, and addressing educational inequities. In this metasynthesis, we explicitly focus on what can be learned from Scholars of Color who have strong affinities to research communities and study the language and literacy practices of families. We attend to research findings that are relevant to children and families. We focus on four particularly salient sets of findings related to: 1. Family strengths and resources; 2. In‐betweenness, 3. Past, present, future and intergenerational connections; and 4. Advocacy and agency.

Redesign of a First-Year Theory Course Sequence in Biostatistics

This communication describes the process and results of a curriculum review of a first-year sequence of courses in statistical inference within a Master of Biostatistics program. Our primary aim was to develop an innovative course in statistical theory that meets the needs of a diverse student audience, the majority of whom are seeking a terminal master’s degree while a minority will pursue PhD training in biostatistics. The main results were (1) different course paths for job-bound and PhD-bound students; and (2) the development of an innovative first course in statistical inference, which is a computationally-aided self-discovery of a salient (albeit not comprehensive) set of key concepts and techniques pertaining to statistical inference. The redesign process addressed a key conceptual barrier: namely, the unexamined assumption that deductive proofs are a necessary condition for rigorous presentation. Consistent with the principles of constructivism, we navigated this barrier by redefining the task to which pedagogic rigor should be applied: namely, to help students to develop a sound mental map of statistical inference. We believe that the approach we used to accomplish this redefined task could be generalized to additional aspects of statistical education, among others.

Green with Envy? Heterogeneous Voter and Parent Preferences for Public School Expenditures and Teacher Salaries

In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, education policy debates have thrust a heightened focus on the provision of adequate school resources and on educator well-being and turnover, concerns particularly critical for school districts that serve large shares of economically disadvantaged students. In this article, we investigate voter and parent support for school spending initiatives in Missouri by analyzing data from two representative statewide surveys, one of the state’s voters and one of the state’s parents, focusing on total school spending and spending on teacher salaries. Missouri presents an especially salient setting in which to examine issues of equity in school spending, with below-average school spending and bottom-decile average teacher salaries. In this context, we investigate longstanding predictors of school spending support, including political ideology, alongside new hypotheses, including those pertaining to regional spending inequality and differences between voter and parent constituencies. While political ideology predicted school spending and teacher salary preferences, it did so more strongly for voters than for parents, an important consideration amid heightened political tensions in policy debates. Parent preferences, on the other hand, were more likely to be predicted by opinions of local and statewide school quality. Both voters and parents indicated sensitivity to regional spending inequality with respect to total school spending but not with respect to teacher salaries. Collectively, these findings may inform policymaking efforts in Missouri and similar prevailingly conservative contexts to use constituent preferences to guide legislative efforts.

Skeletal-based microstructure representation and featurization through descriptors

Modeling process–structure–property relationships using machine learning methods has become a valuable enabler for materials design and discovery. However, the machine learning models rely heavily on the featurization of the materials’ structure. This paper introduces a microstructure featurization framework to compute generic topological and morphological descriptors. The framework relies on our skeletal microstructure representation. The representation allows for the seamless calculation of topological descriptors, which is the main focus of this paper.To demonstrate the efficacy of our featurization framework, we couple it with a feature selection method to establish the structure–property model for organic photovoltaics (OPV). For this goal, we identify a salient set of descriptors and construct the structure–property map with high accuracy.

Infant Motor Screening via Parent-Led Video: Using a Machine Learning Regression-Derived AIMS Salient Set

Abstract Date Presented 03/31/2022 In development of a population-level smartphone app that analyzes the motor skills of first-year infants, an pilot funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development indicates the need for an abridged assessment of motor items from currently available tools. The poster describes the development of a regressor and the first view of subjects assessed using the full 58-item AIMS versus the regressor’s salient set. Use as a screening tool during parent-led floor play could have a significant impact on early identification and the early identification pipeline. Primary Author and Speaker: Bharath Modayur Additional Authors and Speakers: Teresa Fair-Field

TV shows, authenticity, and language learning

AbstractOne of the many resources teachers seek for authentic materials, particularly for spoken English, is TV. However, the concept of authenticity is relative, and it is sometimes hard to determine how authentic materials are. The present study uses a corpus-based analysis to assess to what extent a soap opera, compared to a sitcom, represent natural conversation on a salient set of linguistic features associated with the situational characteristics of conversation. Results showed that the soap opera seems to be closer to natural conversation, and hence more authentic, in the use of features associated with two situational characteristics out of three, namelyreal time production and interactiveness, andexpressing feelings and stance. Results could help inform the practitioners’ decisions when looking for authentic spoken materials.

Understanding and Synergy: A Single Concept at Different Levels of Analysis?

Biological systems differ from the inanimate world in their behaviors ranging from simple movements to coordinated purposeful actions by large groups of muscles, to perception of the world based on signals of different modalities, to cognitive acts, and to the role of self-imposed constraints such as laws of ethics. Respectively, depending on the behavior of interest, studies of biological objects based on laws of nature (physics) have to deal with different salient sets of variables and parameters. Understanding is a high-level concept, and its analysis has been linked to other high-level concepts such as “mental model” and “meaning”. Attempts to analyze understanding based on laws of nature are an example of the top-down approach. Studies of the neural control of movements represent an opposite, bottom-up approach, which starts at the interface with classical physics of the inanimate world and operates with traditional concepts such as forces, coordinates, etc. There are common features shared by the two approaches. In particular, both assume organizations of large groups of elements into task-specific groups, which can be described with only a handful of salient variables. Both assume optimality criteria that allow the emergence of families of solutions to typical tasks. Both assume predictive processes reflected in anticipatory adjustments to actions (motor and non-motor). Both recognize the importance of generating dynamically stable solutions. The recent progress in studies of the neural control of movements has led to a theory of hierarchical control with spatial referent coordinates for the effectors. This theory, in combination with the uncontrolled manifold hypothesis, allows quantifying the stability of actions with respect to salient variables. This approach has been used in the analysis of motor learning, changes in movements with typical and atypical development and with aging, and impaired actions by patients with various neurological disorders. It has been developed to address issues of kinesthetic perception. There seems to be hope that the two counter-directional approaches will meet and result in a single theoretical scheme encompassing biological phenomena from figuring out the best next move in a chess position to activating motor units appropriate for implementing that move on the chessboard.

Rethinking attentional reset: Task sets determine the boundaries of adaptive control.

Adaptive control processes that minimise distraction often operate in a context-specific manner. For example, they may minimise distraction from irrelevant conversations during a lecture but not in the hallway afterwards. It remains unclear, however, whether (a) salient perceptual features or (b) task sets based on such features serve as contextual boundaries for adaptive control in standard distractor-interference tasks. To distinguish between these possibilities, we manipulated whether the structure of a standard, visual distractor-interference task allowed (Experiment 1) or did not allow (Experiment 2) participants to associate salient visual features (i.e., colour patches and colour words) with different task sets. We found that changing salient visual features across consecutive trials reduced a popular measure of adaptive control in distractor-interference tasks-the congruency sequence effect (CSE)-only when the task structure allowed participants to associate these visual features with different task sets. These findings extend prior support for the task set hypothesis from somewhat atypical cross-modal tasks to a standard unimodal task. In contrast, they pose a challenge to an alternative "attentional reset" hypothesis, and related views, wherein changing salient perceptual features always results in a contextual boundary for the CSE.

HRM practices that boost successful integration of migrants

Building on strategic HRM literature and the concept of well-being-oriented HRM, we analyze how firms can contribute to the successful integration of international migrants into the workplace. We identify HRM practices and sets of HRM practices that collectively form what we call a migrant-supporting HRM system. Based on data from self-initiated international migrants in Germany, we analyze the associations between this HRM system and cross-cultural adjustment, affective commitment and job performance. Our findings confirm the predictive validity and relevance of our migrant-supporting HRM system. Moreover, our results point to three salient sets of HRM practices, namely the provision of engaging work, organizational support and a positive organizational environment. Within these sets, we identify best practices that contribute most to the successful integration of international migrants.

Proxy control

The control dependency in grammar is conventionally distinguished into two classes: exhaustive (i→i) and non-exhaustive (i→i + (j)). Here, we show that, in languages like German and Italian, some speakers allow a new kind of “proxy control” which differs from both, such that, for a controller i, and a controllee j, j = proxy(i). The proxy function picks out a set of individuals that is discourse-pragmatically related to i. For such speakers, the German/Italian proxy control equivalent of the sentence: “Mariai asked Billj (for permission) [pro_{proxy(i)} to leave work early]” would thus mean that Maria asked Bill for permission for some salient set of individuals related to herself to leave early. We examine the theoretical and empirical properties of this new control relation in detail, showing that it is irreducible to other, more familiar referential dependencies. Using standard empirical diagnostics, we then illustrate that proxy control can be instantiated both as a species of obligatory control (oc) and non-obligatory control (noc) in German and Italian and develop a syntactic and semantic model that derives each and details the factors conditioning the choice between the two. We also investigate the factors that condition different degrees of exhaustiveness (exhaustive vs. partial vs. proxy) in control, which then sheds light on why proxy control obtains in some languages, but not others and, within a language, is possible for some speakers but not others.

PROTOCOL: The effects of cannabis liberalization laws on health, safety, and socioeconomic outcomes: An evidence and gap map.

PROTOCOL: The effects of cannabis liberalization laws on health, safety, and socioeconomic outcomes: An evidence and gap map.

The semantics and pragmatics of nouns in concealed questions

Concealed questions (CQs) are determiner phrases that are naturally paraphrased as embedded questions: I know your age reads as I know what your age is. The availability of CQ readings of determiner phrases has recently been taken to depend on whether the DP head noun is relational (i.e., two-place, like age or capital) or sortal (one-place, like brick or city) (Barker 2016). This generalization is based on the observation that many definite DPs lack salient concealed question-readings when their head noun is an unmodified sortal. Relatedly, Frana (2013, 2017) argues that, while quantified DPs have multiple concealed question-readings when the head noun is relational, they have only one when the head noun is sortal. This remark brings together noted counterexamples to both generalizations, and argues on their basis for a pragmatic account of the availability of concealed question readings of determiner phrases. The proposed account refines the analysis of concealed questions developed by Aloni & Roelofsen (2011) through integrating it with (i) a standard analysis of the semantic distinction between relational and sortal nouns, and (ii) Barker's (2016) ideas about the role of salient sets of alternatives in licensing CQ interpretation. The resulting account is shown to deliver correct predictions for the counterexamples to both semantic generalizations, while simultaneously offering an explanation of the strong, yet imperfect, correlation of CQ readings of determiner phrases with a relational head noun. BibTeX info

Good Decisions or Bad Outcomes? A Model for Group Deliberation on Value-Laden Topics

ABSTRACT Agent-based models present an ideal tool for interrogating the dynamics of communication and exchange. Such models allow individual aspects of human interaction to be isolated and controlled in a way that sheds new insight into complex behavioral phenomena. This approach is particularly valuable in settings beset by confounding factors and mixed empirical evidence. The political communication setting of deliberation is one such salient setting: in business, politics, and everyday life, individuals with varying opinions, experience, and information attempt to collaborate and make decisions. Empirical evidence suggests that such collaborative reasoning can lead to good decisions, yet there are numerous deliberative failures which may frequently cause groups to reach bad outcomes. Using the substantive setting of deliberation, this paper presents an agent-based model aimed at disambiguating the individual factors which influence decision-making conversations. We model this communicative process as a deliberative game of “giving and asking for reasons.” Agents share beliefs around possible policy initiatives and attempt to enact “good” policies through a process of mutual exchange and consideration. The model considers an interconnected policy landscape in which implementing or not implementing a policy mediates the value of other policies. Within this framework, the paper considers the impacts of three canonical failures of deliberation: limited cognitive capacity, group factions, and tendencies to make poor judgments when accepting or rejecting others’ views. We find that cognitive capacity can significantly decrease the ability of a group to reach a good decision. However, this effect appears to be mitigated for groups of opposing factions. Indeed, polarized groups do surprisingly well at identifying optimal policy solutions, suggesting that heterogeneous agents can achieve good outcomes if they are willing to talk and learn from each other.

An Optimum Feature Selection Technique using Jaya Algorithm for Histopathology Tissue Image Classification

As a consequence of presence of complicated environment and composite architecture, analysis of histopathological tissue images is a challenging task. Relevant features are selected in the classification stage. Irrelevant and redundant features in results in elevated computational cost and poor performance. To achieve the salient set of features against the features that are extracted, in this paper, an advanced optimum method for selection of the features for classification of histopathology tissue image using Jaya algorithm has been exhibited. To do likewise, a previously instructed AlexNet has been utilized because of the differentiating performance in image classification. Additionally, execution of four distinct classifier have been tested for the features selected in reference of segregating the histopathological tissue images within four classifications especially; connective tissue, nervous tissue, muscular tissue and epithelium tissue. Exploratory outcomes approve that the proposed optimum feature selection method for classification of histopathology tissue image by applying jaya algorithm accomplishes better optimal values on CEC2015 functions along with accomplishing high classification performance when contrasted with the other feature selection methods.

Exploring volunteering in a food bank and psychological wellbeing

In the context of UK austerity policies, asset-based approaches to health offer an attractive proposition to policy makers, promising to reduce demand while improving psychological wellbeing. However, critics suggest that they may inadvertently contribute to increasing health inequalities by implicitly endorsing neoliberal discourses, extolling independence and ascribing individual blame for poverty, while denigrating state welfare support. Food banks, as voluntary sector welfare providers, as places of ambiguous and contested meanings, present a salient setting in which to explore how experiences of volunteering may affect psychological wellbeing. This article provides deep insight into the experiences of four women with direct experience of the welfare system, highlighting the value of social justice-oriented narratives, as well as shared purpose and social connection, in relation to their psychological wellbeing. It highlights the significance of the ethos of such settings, with implications for public health policy, voluntary organisations and those resisting neoliberal policies and discourses.

Gene expression profiling of the olfactory tissues of sex-separated and sex-combined female and male mice

Olfactory experience can alter the molecular and cellular composition of chemosensory neurons within the olfactory sensory epithelia of mice. We sought to investigate the scope of cellular and molecular changes within a mouse’s olfactory system as a function of its exposure to complex and salient sets of odors: those emitted from members of the opposite sex. We housed mice either separated from members of the opposite sex (sex-separated) or together with members of the opposite sex (sex-combined) until six months of age, resulting in the generation of four cohorts of mice. From each mouse, the main olfactory epithelium (MOE), vomeronasal organ (VNO), and olfactory bulb (OB) were removed and RNA-extracted. A total of 36 RNA samples, representing three biological replicates per sex/condition/tissue combination, were analyzed for integrity and used to prepare RNA-seq libraries, which were subsequently analyzed via qPCR for the presence of tissue- or sex-specific markers. Libraries were paired-end sequenced to a depth of ~20 million fragments per replicate and the data were analyzed using the Tuxedo suite.

Acoustic Predictors of Gender Attribution, Masculinity–Femininity, and Vocal Naturalness Ratings Amongst Transgender and Cisgender Speakers

PurposeThis study aimed to identify the most salient set of acoustic predictors of (1) gender attribution; (2) perceived masculinity–femininity; and (3) perceived vocal naturalness amongst a group of transgender and cisgender speakers to inform voice and communication feminization training programs. This study used a unique set of acoustic variables and included a third, androgynous, choice for gender attribution ratings. MethodData were collected across two phases and involved two separate groups of participants: communicators and raters. In the first phase, audio recordings were captured of communicators (n = 40) during cartoon retell, sustained vowel, and carrier phrase tasks. Acoustic measures were obtained from these recordings. In the second phase, raters (n = 20) provided ratings of gender attribution, perceived masculinity–femininity, and vocal naturalness based on a sample of the cartoon description recording. ResultsResults of a multinomial logistic regression analysis identified mean fundamental frequency (fo) as the sole acoustic measure that changed the odds of being attributed as a woman or ambiguous in gender rather than as a man. Multiple linear regression analyses identified mean fo, average formant frequency of /i/, and mean sound pressure level as predictors of masculinity–femininity ratings and mean fo, average formant frequency, and rate of speech as predictors of vocal naturalness ratings. ConclusionThe results of this study support the continued targeting of fo and vocal tract resonance in voice and communication feminization/masculinization training programs and provide preliminary evidence for more emphasis being placed on vocal intensity and rate of speech. Modification of these voice parameters may help clients to achieve a natural-sounding voice that satisfactorily represents their affirmed gender.