Surprising Effect Research Articles

Educational Inclusiveness: Addressing Society’s Failure to Accommodate Left-Handedness

Although left-handers are approximately 10% of any indiscriminate general population, they are remarkably over-represented globally in positions of leadership, administration and governance. This has been explained as being due to their right-brain dominance which appears to have made it easier for left-handers to be more elastic in cognitive activities, allowing them to easily cope with challenges, perceive the bigger idea and be self-sustaining. Cross-sectional studies also show meaningfully enhanced left-hander incidences among top athletes exclusively in interactive sports and boxing occasioned by the surprise effect. Despite this, left-handers experience difficulties using everyday tools. Pre-school left-handers experience hitches primarily in writing left-to-right, expressing and responding to spatial discernments, which has contributed to them being the majority in remedial classes. Mismatches in the teaching/learning environment causes older children to fail to complete timed tasks which negatively affects their academic achievements. In sports, left-handers benefit more from long and intense training because of using training manuals meant for right-handers. The adjustments left-handers have to make in school and at the workplace in order to function comfortably usually causes hand, back, neck and shoulder pains which not only decreases their effectiveness but also compromises their physical and emotional wellbeing. An amalgamation of all these has made left-handedness appear as an obstruction to daily life generally and specifically in school. This review paper that sought to establish that the society’s failure to accommodate left-handedness needs addressing, recommended creating societal left-handedness awareness programs, paradigm shifting in initial and continuing teacher training programs and classroom pedagogical approaches, establishment of inclusive teaching/learning resources, and the provision of evenhanded daily use tools by manufacturers at no extra cost.

A massive experiment in Taiwan aims to reveal landslides’ surprising effect on the climate

A massive experiment in Taiwan aims to reveal landslides’ surprising effect on the climate

Low-energy optical phonons induce glassy-like vibrational and thermal anomalies in ordered crystals

It is widely accepted that structural glasses and disordered crystals exhibit anomalies in their thermal, mechanical and acoustic properties as manifestations of the breakdown of the long-wavelength approximation in a disordered dissipative environment. However, the same type of glassy-like anomalies (i.e. boson peak in the vibrational density of states (VDOS) above the Debye level, peak in the normalized specific heat at T ≃ 10 K etc) have been recently observed also in perfectly ordered crystals, including thermoelectric compounds. Here we present a theory that predicts these surprising effects in perfectly ordered crystals as a result of low-lying (soft) optical phonons. In particular, it is seen that a strong boson peak anomaly (low-energy excess of modes) in the VDOS can be due almost entirely to the presence of low-energy optical phonons, provided that their energy is comparable to that of the acoustic modes at the Brillouin zone boundary. The boson peak is predicted also to occur in the heat capacity at low T. In presence of strong damping (which might be due to anharmonicities in the ordered crystals), these optical phonons contribute to the low-T deviation from Debye’s T3 law, producing a linear-in-T behavior which is typical of glasses, even though no assumptions of disorder whatsoever are made in the model. These findings are relevant for understanding and tuning thermal transport properties of thermoelectric compounds, and possibly for the enhancement of electron–phonon superconductivity.

The Effects of Macro News on Exchange Rates Volatilities: Evidence from BRICS Countries

ABSTRACTWe analyze the influence of US and Chinese macro news surprises on the exchange rates volatilities of BRICS countries considering total, cyclical and trend components from 2000 to 2019. A comprehensive “actual-survey” surprises set is constructed by 31 US and 15 Chinese macro news. We further divide the sample period into three sub-samples according to the Quantitative Easing (QE) policy conducted by the US, i.e., pre-QE, QE and post-QE. Our findings suggest that the US plays a more important role on the volatilities of BRICS exchange rates in a number of macro news than China; while China has more influence power from the aspect of average magnitudes of macro news effects. In general, the impact of US macro news shows a downtrend from numbers, but China presents an opposite tendency. Meanwhile, a rising trend in magnitudes is detected in either country. The study also indicates that both US and Chinese macro news have the highest explanation power on the cyclical volatility but may hardly explain the trend volatilities. In addition, the explanation power has become more significant since the initiation of QE. Moreover, our results reveal the existence of asymmetric sign effects of macro news surprises.

ESG Controversies and Their Impact on Performance

This article introduces an aggregated controversy metric—derived from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data—that targets specific issues companies face in the environmental, social, or governance fields. By building portfolios based on this controversy measure, the study shows that in Europe and the US, stocks that undergo severe controversies significantly underperform both their benchmarks and other portfolios consisting of stocks with low controversy or no controversy at all. The main reason for this result is that, in both cases, markets tend to react strongly to changes in controversy levels, penalizing stocks that experience ESG downgrades. These results make a clear case for the potential benefits of excluding stocks with high-controversy levels from investment universes. However, these findings are not confirmed for the Asia-Pacific region, where the portfolios consisting of highly controversial stocks outperform their benchmarks, although the number of such portfolios is lower compared to the number in Europe and the US. TOPICS:Portfolio theory, portfolio construction, ESG investing Key Findings • High levels of ESG controversies have a significant impact on stock returns for US and European stocks. • Europe displays a clear surprise effect, where unexpected severe downgrades in the controversy levels are usually associated with persistent negative excess returns up to 12 months after the downgrading. For the US, we do not notice a surprise effect, but progressive downgrades are penalized by the market (a deteriorating effect). • For Asia-Pacific stocks, there is little evidence so far that stock markets react negatively to ESG controversies and rating downgrades.

Ultrafast dynamics in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides: Interplay of dark excitons, phonons, and intervalley exchange

Understanding the ultrafast coupling and relaxation mechanisms between valleys in transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors is of crucial interest for future valleytronic devices. Recent ultrafast pump-probe experiments showed an unintuitive significant bleaching at the excitonic $B$ transition after optical excitation of the energetically lower excitonic $A$ transition. Here, we present a possible microscopic explanation for this surprising effect. It is based on the joint action of exchange coupling and phonon-mediated thermalization into dark exciton states and does not involve a population of the B exciton. Our work demonstrates how intra- and intervalley coupling on a femtosecond timescale governs the optical valley response of 2D semiconductors.

Evaluating information-theoretic measures of word prediction in naturalistic sentence reading

We review information-theoretic measures of cognitive load during sentence processing that have been used to quantify word prediction effort. Two such measures, surprisal and next-word entropy, suffer from shortcomings when employed for a predictive processing view. We propose a novel metric, lookahead information gain, that can overcome these short-comings. We estimate the different measures using probabilistic language models. Subsequently, we put them to the test by analysing how well the estimated measures predict human processing effort in three data sets of naturalistic sentence reading. Our results replicate the well known effect of surprisal on word reading effort, but do not indicate a role of next-word entropy or lookahead information gain. Our computational results suggest that, in a predictive processing system, the costs of predicting may outweigh the gains. This idea poses a potential limit to the value of a predictive mechanism for the processing of language. The result illustrates the unresolved problem of finding estimations of word-by-word prediction that, first, are truly independent of perceptual processing of the to-be-predicted words, second, are statistically reliable predictors of experimental data, and third, can be derived from more general assumptions about the cognitive processes involved.

Gamble evaluation and evoked reference sets: Why adding a small loss to a gamble increases its attractiveness

When presented with a gamble involving a chance of winning $9, participants rate it as only moderately attractive. However, when other participants are presented with a gamble that adds a chance of losing 5 cents – resulting in gamble that is strictly worse – they rate it as much more attractive. This surprising effect has previously been explained in terms of the small loss increasing the affective evaluability of $9. This paper argues for an alternative model, in which the baseline and small-loss gambles evoke different reference sets for comparison. In inferring a relevant reference set, people are sensitive to both the objective content and the framing of a gamble. The model distinguishes between two effects of evoked reference sets on behavior – an obligatory (and rational) effect on scale interpretation, and an optional (but not rational) effect on the internal representation of value. Five experiments provide strong evidence for the evoked reference set model. Data from attractiveness ratings suggest large and consistent reference set effects on scale interpretation, while data from willingness-to-pay and choice tasks suggest that effects on the internal representation of value are less robust.

Ni(NHC) Catalyzed Rearrangement of 1‐Acyl‐2‐vinylcyclopropanes: Tackling a Mechanistic Puzzle by Combined Experimental and Computational Studies

The Ni(NHC) catalyzed rearrangement of 1‐acyl‐2‐vinylcyclopropanes to the corresponding 4‐acyl‐cyclopent‐1‐enes is highly promising for the synthesis of keto‐functionalized annelated bi‐ and tricyclic subunits of natural products. Therefore, we investigated the catalytic activity of Ni(NHC) complexes in the rearrangement of 1‐acyl‐2‐vinylcyclopropanes with different ring sizes and substitution patterns. Surprising effects regarding substrate scope and stereoselectivity of the Ni(NHC) catalyzed vinylcyclopropane‐cyclopentene rearrangement were observed. Only vinylcyclopropanes with 1‐methyl, 1‐phenyl, 1,2‐dialkyl or 2‐phenyl‐substitution at the vinyl moiety could be rearranged successfully. Moreover, an endo‐configuration on the cyclopropane ring was required for successful rearrangement. By treatment of the vinylcyclopropanes with Rh catalysts or Lewis acids, the involvement of Lewis acid catalysis could be ruled out. In order to understand these experimental results and to rationalize the reactivity of the Ni(NHC) complexes computational studies were performed, which provided insights into mechanistic details.

(Invited) Electron Beam Induced Current Microscopy of Interfacial Barrier Effects in Al2O3/TiOx Resistive Switches

Resistive switching devices (ReRAM) represent a broad class of two-terminal continuously tunable resistors including memristors, phase change memory (PCM), valence change memory (VCM), and electrochemical metallization cells (ECM). Though these devices, especially PCM, are increasingly being commercialized by industry for use in next generation memories, they are also all actively studied for use as synaptic weights in next generation hardware-accelerated neuromorphic networks. We have previously investigated Electron Beam Induced Current Microscopy as a means of reliably characterizing resistive switches. In that investigation, we observed surprising electronic effects, such as internal secondary electron emission, in addition to more traditional electron-hole pair separation, and we broke those up into constituent currents based on their origin through Monte-Carlo modeling of the electron beam-matter interaction. Now, armed with a new understanding of the physics of EBIC imaging, we study the impact of manufacturing variations on resistive switches by continuously tuning the thickness of an Al2O3 interfacial barrier. Shifts in the apparent ratios of internal secondary electron emission from the top electrode to the bottom electrode and vice versa appear to indicate a continuous tuning of the apparent filament diameter as both a function of the injected current and the interfacial barrier thickness. This yields an apparent reduction in the current density, the primary effect of which is a reduction in the device damage from forming and a suppression of parasitic leakage currents imaged in devices without interfacial barriers. Figure 1

What Makes People Imagine Themselves in Contact with Outgroup Members: Exploring the Relationship between Vicarious Media Contact Experiences and Imagined Contact

We explored whether mediated intergroup contact might stimulate other forms of intergroup contact. Our study compared two forms of mediated contact: vicarious intergroup contact (exposure to an intergroup relationship) and parasocial contact (exposure to just outgroup members) in terms of their potential to stimulate spontaneous imagined intergroup contact. We also examined whether that spontaneous imagined contact would increase desire for face-to-face contact. Results showed that vicarious contact elicited more imagined contact when the media stimulus was low in richness. A path model from vicarious contact to face-to-face contact via imagined contact was supported, however the direction of effects was the opposite of our hypothesis. The more participants engaged in imagined contact with outgroup members in which group memberships were salient, the less they wanted to meet outgroup members in person. We speculate that the surprising effects are a result of the potential for our experimental stimuli to encourage group salient, and therefore negative imagined contact. However, our work demonstrates the ability for mediated contact to trigger spontaneous imagined contact, and some positive links between (non-outgroup-specific) imagined contact and increased desire for intergroup contact.

Strategic surprise, nuclear proliferation and US foreign policy

What are the effects of strategic surprise on foreign policy? We apply mechanisms from cognitive psychology and foreign policy analysis — the hindsight bias and policy engagement — to theorize about how political leaders attribute blame for strategic surprises and the consequences for their foreign policies. We argue that leaders who are hardly engaged with policy matters related to a surprise will tend to believe that it should have been foreseen, attribute blame to domestic culprits and favour significant changes in foreign policy. Conversely, those more involved with policy planning will blame an adversary’s deception and resist policy change. We illustrate these hypotheses empirically by examining the cases of the Truman administration’s reaction to the 1949 Soviet nuclear test and the Johnson administration’s reaction to the 1967 Chinese thermonuclear explosion. Despite their similar international and domestic political environments, the two presidents reacted quite differently to the two surprises. Truman, who was weakly engaged with nuclear matters prior to 1949, authorized major policy changes and reorganized the Central Intelligence Agency. Conversely, Johnson’s deeper involvement in nuclear matters led him to attribute blame for the surprise to Chinese deception. He sought to use the 1967 test to advance his ongoing efforts to secure the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The findings suggest that the variables of policy engagement and the hindsight bias can predict how leaders’ foreign policies will respond to surprises regarding nuclear weapons proliferation and potentially other shifts in the balance of power.

Princess Bee Effect: The Reverse Queen Bee Phenomenon

Accumulated research has found a surprising but consistent effect of gender bias in masculine organizational cultures: female leaders in male dominated environments often disassociate from their ge...

When is object-based attention not based on objects?

Some studies using methods introduced by Egly, Driver, and Rafal (1994) to measure object-based attention have shown surprising effects of object orientation. Rectangles oriented horizontally produce evidence for object-based attention, whereas vertical rectangles do not. We explore these differences using a two-letter comparison task. Across all the experiments, responses are faster when the targets are arranged horizontally rather than vertically. The horizontal advantage persists when the rectangles are removed, demonstrating its independence from object-based attention. Furthermore, responses are faster for vertically configured targets when they are within the same rectangle. This effect only arises when the rectangle orientation is informative about the target configuration orientation. This same-object advantage would normally be attributed to object-based attention, but the same pattern of data emerged when the rectangles were replaced with a salient orientation cue. The rectangles can apparently serve as a cue, making the cuing effect appear to be an object-based attention effect. However, the cuing effect can also be triggered by a horizontal bar in the center of the display. Thus participants can adopt an attentional set for a horizontal orientation independently of stimulus location. Results from comparison tasks that might have been attributed to object-based attention could instead be due to a combination of a horizontal advantage and an orientation set cost. Although these results lead to a diminished role for object-based attention, they also call for a better understanding of how an attentional set can be adopted without selecting either locations or objects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Breather arrest, localization, and acoustic non-reciprocity in dissipative nonlinear lattices.

The effect of on-site damping on breather arrest, localization, and non-reciprocity in strongly nonlinear lattices is analytically and numerically studied. Breathers are localized oscillatory wavepackets formed by nonlinearity and dispersion. Breather arrest refers to breather disintegration over a finite "penetration depth" in a dissipative lattice. First, a simplified system of two nonlinearly coupled oscillators under impulsive excitation is considered. The exact relation between the number of beats (energy exchanges between oscillators), the excitation magnitude, and the on-site damping is derived. Then, these analytical results are correlated to those of the semi-infinite extension of the simplified system, where breather penetration depth is governed by a similar law to that of the finite beats in the simplified system. Finally, motivated by the experimental results of Bunyan, Moore, Mojahed, Fronk, Leamy, Tawfick, and Vakakis [Phys. Rev. E 97, 052211 (2018)], breather arrest, localization, and acoustic non-reciprocity in a non-symmetric, dissipative, strongly nonlinear lattice are studied. The lattice consists of repetitive cells of linearly grounded large-scale particles nonlinearly coupled to small-scale ones, and linear intra-cell coupling. Non-reciprocity in this lattice yields either energy localization or breather arrest depending on the position of excitation. The nonlinear acoustics governing non-reciprocity, and the surprising effects of existence of linear components in the coupling nonlinear stiffnesses, in the acoustics, are investigated.

Building resilience and managing post-disruption supply chain recovery: Lessons from the information and communication technology industry

In recent years, major local and global disruptions have had significant adverse effects on corporate performance, particularly for businesses with long, global supply chains. Managing disruption and its effects has therefore become a key focus for firms. While the process of disruption management has attracted considerable research attention, much of it has been directed at the pre-disruption stage. This study investigates the post-disruption stage, and its management. The unpredictability of disruption magnitude and nature suggests that the post-disruption management process may be as important, if not more so, than pre-determined pre-disruption strategies. An effective post-disruption management process would directly affect actual ability to recover from sudden and serious disruptions. This study analyzes six companies, variously positioned upstream and downstream in the supply chain of the information and communications technology (ICT) industry in Taiwan. Specific factors and strategies relating to the post-disruption management process were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with the managers and executives of the firms. The information was categorized into distinct disruption management process stages: discovery, recovery, and supply chain redesign. The study findings are interesting and at times, new and counter-intuitive, including the surprising positive effects of clustering in disruptions, and the role of back-up supplier and material verification in disruption recovery. The study emerges with an integrated framework that can be utilized to establish an effective post-disruption management process. The framework is used to develop research propositions for future research.

THE DECOMPOSITION OF CHANGES OF THE EXCESS RETURN OF THE PFTS INDEX: THE DEFINITION CHANNELS OF INFLUENCE OF ECONOMIC INFORMATION SIGNALS

Purpose. The work is devoted to determining the characteristic features of the impact of USA economic information signals through transmission channels to the components of the decomposition of excess returns of the Ukrainian stock market (using the example of the PFTS index). Methodology. To identify the parameters of changes in the excess yield of the Ukrainian stock market in reactions to economic information signals, vector autoregression modeling was applied. The selection of the VAR (3) model was justified according to the AIC and SIC information criteria. Results. It was found that only the variable excess return (with a lag of 3) allows us to predict a certain proportion of future changes in the yield of the PFTS index. However, the R² coefficient shows that the variables involved can explain only about 7% of the change in the excess returns of the PFTS index, which confirms the rather low predictability of the Ukrainian stock market. Based on the decomposition of excess returns on the PFTS index from 2000 to 2017 (trading day format) it was revealed that the Ukrainian stock market is sensitive to information signals for future excess returns, since more than 89% of its total change can be explained by the influence directly through the risk premium channel. The influence of the USA consumer confidence index on the excess yield of the Ukrainian PFTS index via the risk premium channel has also been established, which confirms the assumption that the «surprise effect» of USA macroeconomic signals may be a risk factor for the Ukrainian stock market. Scientific novelty. A methodical approach was developed to determine the response parameters of the components of the excess return of the PFTS index on the «surprise effect» informational content of USA macroeconomic signals. Practical significance. Using this methodical approach will improve the accuracy of financial forecasting of the reaction parameters of the price quotations of the domestic stock market to the publication of USA macroeconomic information signals, which will enable investors (private and institutional) to increase the profitability of their own investment strategies.

‘Beside myself’: touch, maternity and the question of embodiment

This article uses the surprising bodily effects of a period following birth to unsettle the reproductive narrative that circumscribes the maternal relation. Drawing on scholarship on skin and touch within philosophy and feminist and queer theory, ‘Beside myself’ demonstrates how an intensely intimate relationship can throw into relief modes of embodiment that trouble the temporality and space presumed of reproduction. Doing so, it calls attention to the limits of materialist discourses of embodiment. With reference to Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body, it describes an embodied subjectivity that exceeds the material contours of the body. A sense of being ‘beside’ oneself and ‘beside’ another stretches the time and space of the body, not only creating fractures within the reproductive frame, but also putting pressure on matter and possession as conditions for subjectivity.

THE MACROECONOMIC SURPRISE EFFECTS ON LQ45 STOCK RETURN VOLATILITY

Surprise macroeconomic news causes high volatility in stock market return to the stock market becomes riskier. This study aims to analyze the effects of surprise from the announcement of the United States (US) and domestic macroeconomic news on the LQ45 stock returns volatility. There are 25 stocks chosen because consistently in LQ45 during the 2013 - 2018 research period. The Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model is used to analyze the volatility of returns for each stock. The analysis shows that negative surprise from the Bank Indonesia benchmark interest rate, positive surprise from Indonesia’s trade balance, positive surprise from Consumer Price Index US, and positive surprise from ISM Manufacturing US have a significant effect in reducing volatility return and making most LQ45 Stocks return more stable and less risky. Other macroeconomic surprises show different directions of influence. Finally, this study also provides recommendations for the investor to choose stocks according to their respective risk profiles. The risk averse investor can invest in PT Astra International Tbk (ASII), PT Lippo Karawaci Tbk (LPKR) and PT AKR Corporindo Tbk (AKRA) which have low volatility during the release of surprise macroeconomic, while the risk taker investor can invest to PT Astra Agro Lestari Tbk (AALI), PT Vale Indonesia Tbk (INCO), and PT. Media Nusantara Citra Tbk (MNCN) which respond to many surprises of macroeconomic news.

(Invited) A New Perspective for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting: Black TiO2 Nanotubes

In the past decade, anodically formed self-organized TiO2 nanotube layers attracted considerable scientific interest (see e.g. reviews [1,2]). This is mainly due to the fact that these layers combine the defined nanotubular geometry with a broad range of functional features inherent to TiO2. Particularly in photoelectrochemical water splitting nanotubular layers have shown remarkable results. The presentation will first give an overview of the most promising features of classic nanotube layers for photocatalysis and then focus on TiO2 nanotube (NT) arrays, converted by a high pressure H2 treatment to anatase-like "black titania"[3,4]. This modification shows a remarkable high open-circuit photocatalytic hydrogen production rate without the presence of any cocatalyst. Other attempts to form black titania, namely using classic reduction treatments (e.g., atmospheric pressure H2/Ar annealing) do not show this surprising effect. We will discuss the main difference caused by the high H2 pressure annealing and the origin of this outstanding activity of black titania. REFERENCES Roy, S. Berger, P. Schmuki, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. (2011), 2904Lee, A. Mazare, P. Schmuki, CHEMICAL REVIEWS, 114 (2014) 9385Liu, P. Schmuki et.al. Nano Letters, 14 (2014) 3309Liu, P. Schmuki et.al. 53 (2014) 14201