Surprising Effect Research Articles

Effects of Surprises During Quality Improvement Projects: A Longitudinal Study on Method-Driven Learning in Behavioral Healthcare

Quality improvement teams engage in multiple learning opportunities during an improvement project. These learning opportunities consist of both induced opportunities, such as formal training efforts, and incidental opportunities due to surprises (i.e., events that violate expectations) encountered during problem solving activities. In this paper, we propose that these two types of team learning opportunities can result in method-driven learning (MDL) at the team level. Our data are collected using a unique longitudinal survey design spanning 31 weeks that involved 33 participants in five design for Six Sigma projects conducted in different behavioral healthcare organizations, yielding a total of 562 weekly survey responses. We examine two modes of surprises. Those occurring spontaneously (measured based on self-rated and coder-rated variables) and reflective surprises (measured as externally-induced treatments). Our results show that: 1) the proportion of surprises occurring spontaneously during problem solving activities is positively correlated with team learning (i.e., MDL); and 2) collective reflections on surprises also facilitate team learning. Furthermore, we find evidence that surprises occurring spontaneously can negatively moderate the effect of induced learning opportunities (measured as efforts expended on training) on team learning. However, we find no evidence of such a negative moderation effect for surprises from reflection. Overall, our paper develops a nuanced understanding about the direct and moderating effects of surprises on team learning in the behavioral healthcare context, thereby contributing not only to the quality management literature but also quality improvement practices in behavioral healthcare.

Entry Tear Dominance at CT Angiography Predicts Long-term Clinical Outcomes in Aortic Dissection: Another Piece of the Puzzle.

Entry Tear Dominance at CT Angiography Predicts Long-term Clinical Outcomes in Aortic Dissection: Another Piece of the Puzzle.

Paradoxical anxiolytic effect of the ‘bath salt’ synthetic cathinone MDPV during early abstinence is inhibited by a chemokine CXCR4 or CCR5 receptor antagonist

Chemokine CXCR4 and CCR5 receptors are best known as HIV co-entry receptors, but evidence that CXCR4 or CCR5 blockade reduces rewarding and locomotor-stimulant effects of psychostimulants in rats suggests a role in psychostimulant use disorders. We investigated the impact of CXCR4 or CCR5 receptor antagonism on anxiety-related effects of the synthetic cathinone 3,4-methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV) in the elevated zero-maze (EZM) assay. Rats exposed to a 4-day MDPV binge dosing paradigm and tested 24 or 72 h post-treatment spent more time in the open compartment at the 24-h time point but less time at the 72-h post-binge time point. Daily administration of AMD 3100, a CXCR4 antagonist (10 mg/kg), or maraviroc, a CCR5 antagonist (2.5 mg/kg), during MDPV treatment inhibited the MDPV-induced increase in time spent in the open compartment. Neither antagonist affected the MDPV-induced reduction in time spent in the open compartment at the 72-h post-binge time point. Cocaine, administered in the same paradigm as MDPV, did not increase time spent in the open compartment 24-h post-binge, suggesting specificity to MDPV. The present results identify a surprising anxiolytic-like effect of MDPV 24 h after cessation of repeated exposure that is sensitive to chemokine CXCR4 and CCR5 receptor activity.

Price effects of unconventional monetary policy announcements on European securities markets

This paper assesses the effects of the unconventional monetary policies taken by the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve on European securities markets. Using the event study methodology, we evaluate the price reaction of market indices around the announcement dates from 2008 to 2018. Our results show that the impact is mixed on European government bonds, but positive and significant on stocks, with some evidence of international spillovers. We also find that coordinated policy actions exert a stronger influence than individual measures. Furthermore, the announcements generate surprise effects, albeit with a different magnitude and direction.

Postawy uczniów wobec czytania po polsku i po angielsku – studium przypadku uczniów uczących się języka angielskiego jako drugiego języka w szkole podstawowej. Badanie pilotażowe

The aim of this article was to investigate students’ attitudes towards reading in Polish and English. Two self-constructed questionnaires were administered to 48 ESL (English as a second language) pupils (26 boys, 22 girls) of primary school. The first questionnaire consisted of 15 questions about various attitudes, problems and opinions on reading books. The content of the survey’s questions also raised issues related to reading in Polish and English, and emotions connected to reading. The second questionnaire consisted of 5 follow-up questions. The results indicate that pupils simply like reading for pleasure and reading makes them feel good. However, they do not fancy long and difficult words. They enjoy adventure books and stories about animals. Pupils like adults reading books to them. However, there is a significant diffrence between boys and girls – boys like when adults read to them, girls – do not. They prefer reading by themselves. Reading to children evokes in a classroom a nice and friendly atmosphere, combined with an effect of surprise. The children react positively to a teacher, listen to them with interest and get involved in a lesson by repeating the text that has been read to them. When it comes to reading in English students confirmed that they read books in that language. The pupils enjoyed the lessons where the teacher read English books to them.

Surprising neutral effect of shorter staple cartridges in laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy.

Consensus agreements regarding laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy (LSG) advise against using staple loads less than 1.5mm in closed staple height. However, few data exist to support this recommendation. We hypothesized that using staples with a shorter closed height would actually decrease incidence of intraoperative and postoperative bleeding during LSG, while not increasing the incidence of leak. All LSG cases for a single institution from 1/1/2014 to 12/31/2019 were exported for analysis. Two cohorts were established: 1. 'Green/Blue' group was cases in which no white cartridges were used and 2. 'White' group was cases in which any white cartridges were used. Demographic variables, procedural characteristics, hospital length of stay, and postoperative outcomes were compared between groups. The study populations included 1710 patients, 974 in the green/blue group and 736 in the white cartridge group. There were no significant differences in postoperative leak, bleed, stricture, readmission, or death while using white staple loads as compared with the standard combination of blue and green loads. Using staples with a shorter closed height during LSG did not impact the postoperative bleeding or leak rate. The impact from selection of shorter staples to achieve more tissue compression may be limited.

Market-Based Monetary Policy Uncertainty

Abstract Uncertainty about future policy rates plays a crucial role for the transmission of monetary policy to financial markets. We demonstrate this using event studies of FOMC announcements and a new model-free uncertainty measure based on derivatives. Over the ‘FOMC uncertainty cycle’ announcements systematically resolve uncertainty, which then gradually ramps up again. Changes in monetary policy uncertainty around FOMC announcements—often due to forward guidance—have pronounced effects on asset prices that are distinct from the effects of conventional policy surprises. The level of uncertainty determines the magnitude of financial market reactions to surprises about the path of policy rates.

3D Printed Models for Teaching Orbital Anatomy, Anomalies and Fractures.

PurposeThe aim of this study was to determine the efficacy of using 3D printing models in the learning process of orbital anatomy and pathology by ophthalmology residents.MethodsA quasi-experimental study was performed with 24 residents of ophthalmology at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. Each stratum was randomized into two groups. The educational booklets were distributed, and various forms of orbital 3D models were printed from orbital computed tomography (CT) scans. Knowledge enhancement on the topics was measured by comparing pretest and posttest scores.Results Thirteen residents who were trained using traditional methods were deemed the control group; while 11 residents who were trained using the 3D printed models were classed as the intervention group. The control group was younger than the intervention group (P = 0.047). The results showed that there was a statistically significant difference in the total posttest scores between the two groups. Based on the repeated measures of the analysis of variance (ANOVA), score variables were significant between the two groups (P = 0.008). Interestingly, the use of the 3D educational model was more effective and statistically significant with the year one residents as compared to the year two residents (P = 0.002).ConclusionThis study is the first one in Iran quantifying the effects of learning using 3D printed models in medical education. In fact, 3D modeling training is seemingly effective in teaching ophthalmic residents. As residents have never encountered such technology before, their experience using 3D models proved to be satisfactory and had a surprising positive effect on the learning process through visual training.

Florence Nightingale’s long COVID

One surprising side effect of the global pandemic in the English-speaking world is the amount of publicity now given to bodily suffering for which no clear biomedical framework yet exists.1 The sud...

A Rational Model of Incremental Argument Interpretation: The Comprehension of Swedish Transitive Clauses.

A central component of sentence understanding is verb-argument interpretation, determining how the referents in the sentence are related to the events or states expressed by the verb. Previous work has found that comprehenders change their argument interpretations incrementally as the sentence unfolds, based on morphosyntactic (e.g., case, agreement), lexico-semantic (e.g., animacy, verb-argument fit), and discourse cues (e.g., givenness). However, it is still unknown whether these cues have a privileged role in language processing, or whether their effects on argument interpretation originate in implicit expectations based on the joint distribution of these cues with argument assignments experienced in previous language input. We compare the former, linguistic account against the latter, expectation-based account, using data from production and comprehension of transitive clauses in Swedish. Based on a large corpus of Swedish, we develop a rational (Bayesian) model of incremental argument interpretation. This model predicts the processing difficulty experienced at different points in the sentence as a function of the Bayesian surprise associated with changes in expectations over possible argument interpretations. We then test the model against reading times from a self-paced reading experiment on Swedish. We find Bayesian surprise to be a significant predictor of reading times, complementing effects of word surprisal. Bayesian surprise also captures the qualitative effects of morpho-syntactic and lexico-semantic cues. Additional model comparisons find that it—with a single degree of freedom—captures much, if not all, of the effects associated with these cues. This suggests that the effects of form- and meaning-based cues to argument interpretation are mediated through expectation-based processing.

Dynamical Jahn-Teller effects on the generation of electronic ring currents by circularly polarized light

The generation of electronic ring currents in ring-shaped molecules by photo-excitation with circularly polarized laser light is considered in the presence of vibronic coupling effects. $(E\times e)$ Jahn-Teller distortions, unavoidable by symmetry in the $(E)$ subset of electronic states supporting the ring current, mix the clockwise and anti-clockwise circulation directions of the electrons and can suppress the maximum achievable current by at least one order of magnitude, already for moderate vibronic coupling strengths, as compared to the Born-Oppenheimer limit of fixed atomic positions. The circulation direction of the electrons is found to depend on the spectral region of the $(E\times e)$ Hamiltonian. This fact results in the surprising effect that the same polarization direction of the laser pulse can trigger either clockwise or anti-clockwise electronic dynamics depending on the wavelength of the photons. These findings are illustrated in a model of the triazine molecule.

Broken pencils and moving rulers: After an unpublished book by Mitchell Feigenbaum

Mitchell Feigenbaum discovered an intriguing property of viewing images through cylindrical mirrors or looking into water. Because the eye is a lens with an opening of about 5 mm, many different rays of reflected images reach the eye and need to be interpreted by the visual system. This has the surprising effect that what one perceives depends on the orientation of the head, whether it is tilted or not. I explain and illustrate this phenomenon on the example of a human eye looking at a ruler immersed in water.

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2019. 552 pp. ISBN 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Spenserian MomentsGordonTeskey Cambridge, <scp>MA</scp>: Harvard <scp>UP</scp>, 2019. 552 pp. <scp>ISBN</scp> 13: 9780674988446. $47.00 (cloth).

Research progress on individual effect of graphene oxide in cement-based materials and its synergistic effect with other nanomaterials

Abstract Poor crack resistance, high brittleness, and poor toughness are inherent limitations of traditional cement-based materials. Besides, cement-based materials have certain shortcomings in energy consumption and environmental protection. Therefore, improving the performance of cement-based materials becomes a hot topic in related research. At the same time, the development of nanomaterials and technologies provides researchers with a new research idea: to enhance the performance of cement-based materials at the nanoscale level. Graphene oxide (GO) is one of the most representative nano-reinforcements. Due to its high surface area and excellent physical properties, GO has a surprising effect on improving the performance of cement-based materials. In addition, nanosilica (NS) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have excellent improvement on cement-based materials, and people also hope to further improve the performance of cement-based materials through the interaction of various nanomaterials. In this paper, the influence of GO on cement-based materials is reviewed by consulting a lot of correlative literature, mainly focusing on the following aspects: (i) The dispersion of GO in cement paste. (ii) The influence of GO on the properties of cement-based materials, including working performance, mechanical strength, microstructural characteristics, and durability. (iii) The effect of nanohybrid materials of GO, NS, and CNTs on cement-based materials, and the synergistic effects of various nanomaterials are reviewed for the first time. (iv) Evaluation of current progress. This paper aims to provide guidance for the study and application of GO-modified cement-based materials and nanohybrid materials.

Amphibious Transport of Fluids and Solids by Soft Magnetic Carpets.

One of the major challenges in modern robotics is controlling micromanipulation by active and adaptive materials. In the respiratory system, such actuation enables pathogen clearance by means of motile cilia. While various types of artificial cilia have been engineered recently, they often involve complex manufacturing protocols and focus on transporting liquids only. Here, soft magnetic carpets are created via an easy self‐assembly route based on the Rosensweig instability. These carpets can transport not only liquids but also solid objects that are larger and heavier than the artificial cilia, using a crowd‐surfing effect.This amphibious transportation is locally and reconfigurably tunable by simple micromagnets or advanced programmable magnetic fields with a high degree of spatial resolution. Two surprising cargo reversal effects are identified and modeled due to collective ciliary motion and nontrivial elastohydrodynamics. While the active carpets are generally applicable to integrated control systems for transport, mixing, and sorting, these effects can also be exploited for microfluidic viscosimetry and elastometry.

Needs and opportunities for seismic early warning prior to aftershocks for search and rescue teams: An in-depth analysis of practitioners’ perceptions

During their postseismic interventions, Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams are particularly exposed to the risk of collapse of buildings due to aftershocks. Risk reduction requires the capacity building of rescuers to anticipate incoming ground motions and to quickly protect themselves, which makes the concept of earthquake early warning (EEW) particularly interesting. In parallel to the recent scientific advances in EEW, it is crucial to understand what are the real expectations and needs of USAR teams in terms of protection against this risk, and to what extent EEW solutions could meet them. In this study, we conduct a survey to collect insights from 104 USAR rescuers (32 teams represented from 11 countries). Results highlight that aftershocks are a major concern for rescuers, and that the current tools and procedures do not allow an effective protection. In this context, we find that the concept of EEW is very favorably received by the respondents, who consider different types of possible actions upon receipt of an early warning. Depending on the time available, the perceive benefits range from simply reducing the surprise effect to moving teams into safe areas and stopping dangerous operations. Combined with the opportunities offered by the miniaturization of seismic monitoring means and by the high level of interoperability of USAR teams on an international scale, this study also provides a basis for the functional specifications of future solutions of EEW useful to all USAR teams, as well as for the definition of their modalities of engagement on the field.

Paradoxical facilitation alongside interhemispheric inhibition

Neurophysiological experiments using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have sought to probe the function of the motor division of the corpus callosum. Primary motor cortex sends projections via the corpus callosum with a net inhibitory influence on the homologous region of the opposite hemisphere. Interhemispheric inhibition (IHI) experiments probe this inhibitory pathway. A test stimulus (TS) delivered to the motor cortex in one hemisphere elicits motor evoked potentials (MEPs) in a target muscle, while a conditioning stimulus (CS) applied to the homologous region of the opposite hemisphere modulates the effect of the TS. We predicted that large CS MEPs would be associated with increased IHI since they should be a reliable index of how effectively contralateral motor cortex was stimulated and therefore of the magnitude of interhemispheric inhibition. However, we observed a strong tendency for larger CS MEPs to be associated with reduced interhemispheric inhibition which in the extreme lead to a net effect of facilitation. This surprising effect was large, systematic, and observed in nearly all participants. We outline several hypotheses for mechanisms which may underlie this phenomenon to guide future research.

Change biases identify the features that drive time perception.

Time perception is malleable, and the perceived duration of stimuli can be strongly affected by the sensory response they evoke. Such "temporal illusions" provide a window on how different sensory systems contribute to our sense of time. Evidence suggests that the sensory response to different features affects time perception to different extents, mediated by the level of arousal or surprise that they evoke. This, however, makes it difficult to disentangle effects of the sensory response itself from the derived arousal or surprise effects. Here, we demonstrate that time perception is differentially affected by different stimulus features when arousal and surprise are kept constant. In four temporal discrimination experiments, participants were presented with empty intervals (1.25 s-2.25 s) marked by two briefly presented visual marker stimuli, and judged whether the duration was longer or shorter than a 1.75 s reference. Markers either repeated or changed along one of six feature dimensions, in a manner fully predictable to participants. Repetitions and changes would modulate sensory response magnitudes due to neural repetition suppression. Results showed that intervals were perceived as longer when markers changed in location, size, or numerosity. Conversely, changes in face identity, orientation or luminance did not affect time perception. These results point to neural and functional selectivity in the way different stimulus features affect time perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Visual tracking with multilevel feature, similarity attention, color constraint, and global redetection

Visual tracking is fundamental in computer vision tasks. The Siamese-based trackers have shown surprising effectiveness in recent years. However, two points have been neglected: firstly, few of them focus on fusing the image level and semantic level features in neural networks, which usually resulting in tracking failure when differentiating the target from other distractors of the same class. Secondly, the robustness of the previous redetection scheme is limited by simply expanding the search region. To address these two issues, we propose a novel multilevel feature-weighted Siamese region proposal network tracker, which employs a feature fusion module to construct discriminative feature embedding and a similarity-based attention module to suppress the distractors in the search region. Furthermore, a color-based constraint module is presented to further suppress the distractors with the same class to the target. Finally, a well-designed global redetection scheme is built to handle long-term tracking tasks. The proposed tracker achieves state-of-art performance on a series of popular benchmarks, including object tracking benchmark 2013 (0.699 in success score), object tracking benchmark 2015 (0.700 in success score), visual object tracking 2017 (0.470 in expected average overlap score), and visual object tracking (0.485 in expected average overlap score).

A Computational Dual-Process Model of Fixation-Duration Control in Natural Scene Viewing

Research on eye-movement control during natural scene viewing has investigated the degree to which the duration of individual fixations can be immediately adjusted to ongoing visual-cognitive processing demands. Results from several studies using the fixation-contingent scene quality paradigm suggest that the timing of fixations adapts to stimulus changes that occur on a fixation-to-fixation basis. Analysis of fixation-duration distributions has revealed that saccade-contingent degradations and enhancements of the scene stimulus have two qualitatively distinct types of influence. The surprise effect begins early in a fixation and is tied to surprising visual events such as unexpected stimulus changes. The encoding effect is tied to difficulties in visual-cognitive processing and occurs relatively late within a fixation. Here, we formalize an existing descriptive account of these two effects (referred to as the dual-process account) by using stochastic simulations. In the computational model, surprise and encoding related influences are implemented as time-dependent changes in the rate at which saccade timing and programming are completed during critical fixations. The model was tested on data from two experiments in which the luminance of the scene image was either decreased or increased during selected critical fixations (Walshe & Nuthmann, Vision Research, 100, 38–46, 2014). A counterfactual method was used to remove model components and to identify their specific influence on the fixation-duration distributions. The results suggest that the computational dual-process model provides a good account for the data from the luminance-change studies. We describe how the simulations can be generalized to explain a diverse set of experimental results.