The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

_Published by Taylor & Francis Group for the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education_ This _Handbook_ addresses the concept and implementation of technological pedagogical content knowledge -- the knowledge and skills that teachers need in order to integrate technology meaningfully into instruction in specific content areas. Recognizing, for example, that effective uses of technology in mathematics are quite different from effective uses of technology in social studies, teachers need specific preparation in using technology in each content area they will (...) be teaching. Offering a series of chapters by scholars in different content areas who apply the technological pedagogical content knowledge framework to their individual content areas, the volume is structured around three themes: What is Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge? Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Specific Subject Areas Integrating Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge into Teacher Education and Professional Development The _Handbook of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge for Educators_ is simultaneously a mandate and a manifesto on the engagement of technology in classrooms based on consensus standards and rubrics for effectiveness. As the title of the concluding chapter declares, "It’s about time!" The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is a national, voluntary association of higher education institutions and related organizations. Our mission is to promote the learning of all PK-12 students through high-quality, evidence-based preparation and continuing education for all school personnel. For more information on our publications, visit our website at: www.aacte.org. (shrink)

Commentators agree that simple conclusions about a general base rate fallacy are not appropriate. It is more constructive to identify conditions under which base rates are differentially weighted. Commentators also agree that improving the ecological validity of the research is desirable, although this is less important to those interested exclusively in psychological processes. The philosophers and ecologists among the commentators offer a kinder perspective on base rate reasoning than the psychologists. My own perspective is that the interesting questions (both psychological (...) and normative/prescriptive) are best answered through empirical studies that use real-world performance standards. (shrink)

We have been oversold on the base rate fallacy in probabilistic judgment from an empirical, normative, and methodological standpoint. At the empirical level, a thorough examination of the base rate literature (including the famous lawyer–engineer problem) does not support the conventional wisdom that people routinely ignore base rates. Quite the contrary, the literature shows that base rates are almost always used and that their degree of use depends on task structure and representation. Specifically, base rates play a relatively larger role (...) in tasks where base rates are implicitly learned or can be represented in frequentist terms. Base rates are also used more when they are reliable and relatively more diagnostic than available individuating information. At the normative level, the base rate fallacy should be rejected because few tasks map unambiguously into the narrow framework that is held up as the standard of good decision making. Mechanical applications of Bayes's theorem to identify performance errors are inappropriate when (1) key assumptions of the model are either unchecked or grossly violated, and (2) no attempt is made to identify the decision maker's goals, values, and task assumptions. Methodologically, the current approach is criticized for its failure to consider how the ambiguous, unreliable, and unstable base rates of the real world are and should be used. Where decision makers' assumptions and goals vary, and where performance criteria are complex, the traditional Bayesian standard is insufficient. Even where predictive accuracy is the goal in commonly defined problems, there may be situations (e.g., informationally redundant environments) in which base rates can be ignored with impunity. A more ecologically valid research program is called for. This program should emphasize the development of prescriptive theory in rich, realistic decision environments. (shrink)

A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities—for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving—are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts of others. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we use a new technique for (...) deriving partial orders to analyze subjects' decisions about whether one mental activity is a kind or part of another. The resulting taxonomies and partonomies differ from those of common object categories in exhibiting a converse relation in this domain: One mental activity is a part of another if the second is a kind of the first. The derived taxonomies and partonomies also allow us to predict results from further experiments that examine subjects' memory for these activities, their ratings of the activities' importance, and their judgments about whether there could be "possible minds" that possess some of the activities but not others. (shrink)

Manipulations that draw attention to extensional or set-based considerations are neither sufficient nor necessary for enhanced use of base rates in intuitive judgments. Frequency formats are only one part of the puzzle of base-rate use and neglect. The conditions under which these and other manipulations promote base-rate use may be more parsimoniously organized under the broader notion of case-based judgment.

Volunteering, or taking part in unpaid work for the benefit of others, can be a powerful positive experience with returns to both individual well-being and community projects. Volunteering is positively associated with mental health in observational studies with community samples but has not been systematically examined as a potential part of treatment interventions with clinical adolescent samples. In this manuscript, we review the empirical evidence base connecting volunteerism to mental health and well-being, outline potential mechanisms based in the theoretical literature (...) from developmental science, and discuss the existing clinical approaches that support community volunteering as a part of treatment. Drawing on this review, we propose that including volunteering as a component of clinical treatment approaches for adolescent depression can be a powerful intervention for adolescents. (shrink)

I agree with Gibbs that the message of the base rate literature reads differently depending on which null hypothesis is used to frame the issue. But I argue that the normative null hypothesis, H0: “People use base rates in a Bayesian manner,” is no longer appropriate. I also challenge Adler's distinction between unused and ignored base rates, and criticize Goodie's reluctance to shift research attention to the field. Macchi's arguments about textual ambiguities in traditional base rate problems suggest that empirical (...) testing is needed to tease apart the effects of problem clarification and problem framing. Macdonald's, Fletcher's and Snow's skepticism about the value of Bayesian methods in real world judgment tasks is treated as a challenge for the next generation of empirical base rate studies. (shrink)

We accept Sunstein's claim that people often use moral heuristics to make judgments and decisions. However, in situations that include a risk of betrayal, we disagree with Sunstein about when the relevant moral heuristic may be said to “misfire.” We suggest that the moral heuristic people apply to avoid the possibility of safety-product betrayal may be reasonable.

During the mid-18th century, when electricity was coming into its own, natural philosophers began to entertain the possibility that electricity is the mysterious nerve force. Their attention was first drawn to several species of strongly electric fish, namely torpedoes, a type of African catfish, and a South American "eels." This was because their effects felt like those of discharging Leyden jars and could be transmitted along known conductors of electricity. Moreover, their actions could not be adequately explained by popular mechanical (...) theories. Many of the early documents supportive of the hypothesis of animal electricity were associated with the Dutch colonies in South America. This article presents and examines those documents, and shows how Dutch scientists on both sides of the Atlantic conducted experiments and communicated with each other in the 1750s and 1760s. It reveals the important roles played by inquisitive physicians and lovers of nature in South America, and by natural philosophers and collectors of exotic specimens in the Netherlands—learned men who began to make a credible case for animal electricity in some exciting places at a pivotal moment in time. (shrink)

If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. C. Fellbaum and G. A. Miller's (see record 1991-03356-001) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, (...) however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. First, it fails to account for parallel effects with nouns (e.g., a contest is a kind of an activity, and an activity is a part of a contest). Second, it contains a flaw that incorrectly predicts many activities to be parts of each other (e.g., coming is part of going and going part of coming). However, a hypothesis L. J. Rips and F. G. Conrad (see record 1989-24843-001) originally proposed for the kind–part reciprocal effect avoids both of these difficulties. (shrink)

Community volunteering is an under-utilized, at least under-researched, strategy to supplement existing treatment for affective disorders. We present findings from a feasibility study incorporating community volunteering into clinical treatment for depression and anxiety among adolescents and young adults. This exploratory pilot study had four aims: to investigate recruitment feasibility; to describe participants’ experiences with volunteering; to explore psychosocial assets by which volunteering might decrease depressive and anxiety symptoms; and to document preliminary changes in mental health outcomes before and after the (...) volunteering intervention. Interviews and surveys were employed with participants newly diagnosed with: mild to moderate depression, mild to moderate anxiety, or adjustment disorder. Recruitment was feasible overall, successes and challenges are discussed. Experiences with volunteering were very positive. Qualitative findings revealed perceived positive effects of volunteering on mood and well-being such as helping with social anxiety and being a positive distraction. Qualitative findings revealed several psychosocial assets that improved related to volunteering. On average, participants reported a 19% decrease in depressive symptoms from the pre-survey to the post-survey. Although more research is warranted, the implication of this study for practicing psychologists treating adolescents and young adults for mild to moderate depression and/or anxiety is that they may wish to consider incorporating community volunteer activities into treatment. Volunteering was a desirable activity for interested participants in treatment for affective disorders. (shrink)

Here we can find out about irony and the meaning of life, the politics of the nuclear family, Marxism in Springfield, the elusiveness of happiness, popular parody as a form of tribute, and why we need animated TV shows. As if all that weren't enough, this book actually contains the worst philosophy essay ever.

Individual differences in the mere willingness to think analytically has been shown to predict religious disbelief. Recently, however, it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect). In light of this possibility, we report four studies in which a negative correlation between religious belief and performance on analytic thinking measures is found when religious belief is measured in a (...) separate session. We also performed a meta-analysis on all previously published studies on the topic along with our four new studies (N = 15,078, k = 31), focusing specifically on the association between performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test (the most widely used individual difference measure of analytic thinking) and religious belief. This meta-analysis revealed an overall negative correlation (r) of -.18, 95% CI [-.21, -.16]. Although this correlation is modest, self-identified atheists (N = 133) scored 18.7% higher than religiously affiliated individuals (N = 597) on a composite measure of analytic thinking administered across our four new studies (d = .72). Our results indicate that the association between analytic thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers. (shrink)

An analytic cognitive style denotes a propensity to set aside highly salient intuitions when engaging in problem solving. We assess the hypothesis that an analytic cognitive style is associated with a history of questioning, altering, and rejecting supernatural claims, both religious and paranormal. In two studies, we examined associations of God beliefs, religious engagement, conventional religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs with performance measures of cognitive ability and analytic cognitive style. An analytic cognitive style negatively predicted both religious and paranormal beliefs (...) when controlling for cognitive ability as well as religious engagement, sex, age, political ideology, and education. Participants more willing to engage in analytic reasoning were less likely to endorse supernatural beliefs. Further, an association between analytic cognitive style and religious engagement was mediated by religious beliefs, suggesting that an analytic cognitive style negatively affects religious engagement via lower acceptance of conventional religious beliefs. Results for types of God belief indicate that the association between an analytic cognitive style and God beliefs is more nuanced than mere acceptance and rejection, but also includes adopting less conventional God beliefs, such as Pantheism or Deism. Our data are consistent with the idea that two people who share the same cognitive ability, education, political ideology, sex, age and level of religious engagement can acquire very different sets of beliefs about the world if they differ in their propensity to think analytically. (shrink)

During the mid-18th century, when electricity was coming into its own, natural philosophers began to entertain the possibility that electricity is the mysterious nerve force. Their attention was first drawn to several species of strongly electric fish, namely torpedoes, a type of African catfish, and a South American "eels." This was because their effects felt like those of discharging Leyden jars and could be transmitted along known conductors of electricity. Moreover, their actions could not be adequately explained by popular mechanical (...) theories. Many of the early documents supportive of the hypothesis of animal electricity were associated with the Dutch colonies in South America. This article presents and examines those documents, and shows how Dutch scientists on both sides of the Atlantic conducted experiments and communicated with each other in the 1750s and 1760s. It reveals the important roles played by inquisitive physicians and lovers of nature in South America, and by natural philosophers and collectors of exotic specimens in the Netherlands—learned men who began to make a credible case for animal electricity in some exciting places at a pivotal moment in time. (shrink)

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability (...) and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values. (shrink)

Recent evidence suggests that people are highly efficient at detecting conflicting outputs produced by competing intuitive and analytic reasoning processes. Specifically, De Neys and Glumicic demonstrated that participants reason longer about problems that are characterized by conflict between stereotypical personality descriptions and base-rate probabilities of group membership. However, this finding comes from problems involving probabilities much more extreme than those used in traditional studies of base-rate neglect. To test the degree to which these findings depend on such extreme probabilities, we (...) varied base-rate probabilities over five experiments and compared participants’ response time for conflict problems with non-conflict problems. Longer response times for stereotypical responses to conflict versus non-conflict problems were found only in the presence of extreme probabilities. Our results suggest that humans may not be consistently efficient at detecting conflicts during reasoning. (shrink)

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. and their critics :977–981, 2006; Weitzman in J Econ Lit XLV:703–724, 2007; Nordhaus in J Econ Lit XLV:686–702, 2007). The article examines the role of values in this debate. Firstly, it is shown that time discounting is a case in which values are key because (...) it is at heart an ethical problem. Secondly, it is argued that time discounting in climate economics is a case of economists making frequent and routine references to ethical values and indeed conduct ethical debates with each other. Thirdly, it is argued that there is evidence for deep and pervasive entanglement between facts and values in the prevalent methodologies for time discounting. Finally, it is argued that this means that economists have given up the ‘value-free ideal’ concerning time discounting, and discussed how the current methodology of time discounting in economics can be improved. (shrink)

Friedrich Engels: Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft. (Anti-Dühring) Lesefreundlicher Großdruck in 16-pt-Schrift Großformat, 210 x 297 mm Berliner Ausgabe, 2019 Durchgesehener Neusatz mit einer Biographie des Autors bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Theodor Borken Erstdruck in: Vorwärts (Leipzig), 3.1.1877 - 7.7.1878. Erste Buchausgabe, Leipzig 1878. Der Text folgt der letzten von Engels durchgesehenen und vermehrten Ausgabe, Stuttgart (J.H.W. Dietz) 1894. Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke. Herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, 43 Bände, Band (...) 20, Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1962. Umschlaggestaltung von Thomas Schultz-Overhage. Gesetzt aus der Minion Pro, 16 pt. Henricus Edition Deutsche Klassik UG (haftungsbeschränkt). (shrink)