scholarly journals Time for Change: Implementation of Aksentijevic-Gibson Complexity in Psychology

Symmetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 948 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Aksentijevic ◽  
Anja Mihailovic ◽  
Dragutin T. Mihailovic

Given that complexity is critical for psychological processing, it is somewhat surprising that the field was dominated for a long time by probabilistic methods that focus on the quantitative aspects of the source/output. Although the more recent approaches based on the Minimum Description Length principle have produced interesting and useful models of psychological complexity, they have not directly defined the meaning and quantitative unit of complexity measurement. Contrasted to these mathematical approaches are various ad hoc measures based on different aspects of structure, which can work well but suffer from the same problem. The present manuscript is composed of two self-sufficient, yet related sections. In Section 1, we describe a complexity measure for binary strings which satisfies both these conditions (Aksentijevic–Gibson complexity; AG). We test the measure on a number of classic studies employing both short and long strings and draw attention to an important feature—a complexity profile—that could be of interest in modelling the psychological processing of structure as well as analysis of strings of any length. In Section 2 we discuss different factors affecting the complexity of visual form and showcase a 2D generalization of AG complexity. In addition, we provide algorithms in R that compute the AG complexity for binary strings and matrices and demonstrate their effectiveness on examples involving complexity judgments, symmetry perception, perceptual grouping, entropy, and elementary cellular automata. Finally, we enclose a repository of codes, data and stimuli for our example in order to facilitate experimentation and application of the measure in sciences outside psychology.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Yin ◽  
Yurong Yu

BACKGROUND Currently, changing behaviors with the assistance of mobile applications has been popularized. However, most of the participants are unable to persist in participating in behavior-changing activities for a long time. Some researchers have studied what factors motivate people to maintain behaviors-changing actions. There has been controversy about whether the commonly used triggers, negative results or competitions, could motivate behavior changes. In the meantime, the main methodology these researchers have been using is to conduct experiments, from which data was collected from subjects’ recalling previous behavior changing. The experiments are time-consuming, and the results can be unreliable. To resolve this problem, the Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) was developed to record real-time feedback. However, the EMA unavoidably increases the workload of the subjects. OBJECTIVE This study investigated the factors affecting behavior change, especially from the motivation aspect. Additionally, this paper attempted to identify a way to record human behavior changes without increasing the subjects’ workload. METHODS The methodology of “self-report” was adopted to report how people’s views regarding the behavior-changing intervention. To achieve a balance between workload and being timely, the self-reporting data was recorded once a day. After the 28-day “self-report” experiment, the “focus group” method was used to gather people’s feedback on behavior changing process. RESULTS This paper identified 9 factors: cooperation, competition, award, understandable graphic, reminder and alarm, trust and willing, gender, relation with disease and environmental factors). These factors could affect motivation of behavior changing. Besides, we found that negative results could be a motivation for behavior changing. In the experiment, we also found that a small number of subjects tended to cheat for a more “beautiful” result. The last part of the paper has presented possible implications for technology design to facilitate behavior-changing. CONCLUSIONS In particular, (i) the research promoted the possibility of cheating when recording data which is ignored by existing research and will make the digital applications less useful; (ii) the results show that not all cooperation is needed to lead to a positive effect; (iii) the research identified the negative results caused by over-competition in behavior change. Finally, the paper proposes technology design directions should focus on giving motivation through keeping dairy, negative results feedback and avoid cheating.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3943
Author(s):  
Aurelija Burinskienė ◽  
Edita Leonavičienė ◽  
Virginija Grybaitė ◽  
Olga Lingaitienė ◽  
Juozas Merkevičius

The new phenomenon called sharing or collaborative consumption emerged a decade ago and is continuously growing. It creates new possibilities for society, and especially for business, is beneficial for the environment, makes more efficient use of resources, and presents a new competitive business model. The scientific literature lacks a more in-depth analysis of the factors influencing sharing activity growth; therefore, the paper’s authors attempt to fill this gap. The authors aim to identify the factors affecting the use of sharing platforms. To reach the goal, the authors developed a regression model and constructed a list of 71 variables. The study used monthly United States data from January 2017 to June 2020 from the publicly available Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED)and Google trends databases. The comparison to other indexes proves that the proposed index, representing the number of visits to sharing platforms (SEP), is a unique one. The first index allowed us to revise the sharing activity monthly. The authors identified that variables such as wage level, social network users, import level, and personal consumption are critical in affecting the number of visits to sharing platforms. The presented framework could be helpful for practitioners and policymakers analysing the stimulation of sharing or collaborative consumption. It includes indicators representing different areas, such as society, technology, and country, and allows for monthly investigations. Such activity was evident for a long time when online platforms contributed to its wider accessibility. The results help to forecast the number of visits monthly. Sharing is still an emerging area for research; thus, the authors tried to explore the phenomenon of sharing to expand the conceptual level of knowledge.


Author(s):  
Raymond E. Schneider ◽  
Srinivasa Visweswaran ◽  
John Fluehr ◽  
H. Alan Hackerott

For many years external flooding hazards have been recognized as significant contributors to plant risk. However, it was not until the events at Fukushima that there was a concerted effort on the part of the utilities to reassess the plant external flood design basis, identify external flood vulnerabilities and take actions to address them. For many plants, resolution of low probability high consequence floods will likely be addressed by a combination of actions involving enhancements to flood protection and hazard mitigation strategies. Over time, as plants decide on which strategies to apply there is an expectation that the most effective way to develop and justify these strategies will involve probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) concepts. The PRA framework is well suited for performing a human reliability analysis (HRA). Within that framework, HRA evaluations focus on operator and plant staff actions taken in response to plant initiating events (e.g., loss of offsite power, etc.). For many external floods, advance warning of an impending external flood event provides the trigger for pre-emptive manual actions to potentially reconfigure the plant through temporary installation of flood barriers. Unlike the post-initiator actions which tend to be more narrowly focused, these pre-emptive actions are taken in a less controlled environment, may be ad hoc, and may potentially be in competition with site investment protection activities, site evacuation, etc. The purpose of this paper is to define the challenges in defining an approach for treating external flood actions, identifying external flood timelines, identifying the manual actions/organizational environment during external flooding scenarios and proposing an integrated strategy for quantifying those actions. The proposed quantification process is rooted in management science concepts for evaluating project reliability. The overall methodology identifies flood significant performance shaping factors, and identifies three (3) factors, namely time available for flood mitigation, proper access to plant site following flood and environmental factors, as having an overarching impact on the performance shaping factors affecting each of the flood mitigation tasks.


Author(s):  
Kabiru Ishola Genty ◽  
Foluso I. Jayeoba ◽  
Mike O. Aremo ◽  
Tinuke M. Fapohunda ◽  
Rafiu A. Bankole

The onset, spread, control measures, and the behaviour of society, government, and businesses have far reaching implications—social, economic, and legal—for the immediate and future of employment relations and human resource management in Nigerian organisations. This chapter, drawing from available COVID-19 literature, ILO, and WHO protocols, examined various concerns and challenges posed by ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the regimes of measures which are modeled after developed economies of the world but are at best ad-hoc, panicky, ill-digested and their operations execution not based on empirical/objective assessment. COVID-19 has evidently brought job losses and unprecedented changes in work modes and some of the lessons and fallouts may live with us for a long time. Post-COVID-19 economic recovery though expected to be slow will leave the workplace and society with routines and rituals, lessons to learn and corrections to be made, not to avert future pandemics but to manage it in more precise manner with less panic and greater forthrightness.


2008 ◽  
Vol 65 (6) ◽  
pp. 946-952 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel E. Duplisea ◽  
Dominique Robert

Abstract Duplisea, D. E., and Robert, D. 2008. Prerecruit survival and recruitment of northern Gulf of St Lawrence Atlantic cod. – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 65: 946–952. Recruitment (R) of exploited marine fish populations is usually modelled exclusively as a function of spawning-stock biomass (SSB). A problem arising when modelling over long time-series is that the nature of the R–SSB relationship is unlikely to be stationary. Changes are often interpreted as productivity regime shifts and are linked to alterations in prerecruit survival rate. We examine the role of environment and predation by fish and harp seals as factors affecting the R–SSB relationship in the northern Gulf of St Lawrence cod, by fitting linear models using combinations of covariates to explain cod prerecruit survival. The most parsimonious model (based on a Bayesian Information Criterion, BIC) included cod, mackerel, and temperature, whereas redfish and seals did not appear in any of the best-fit models. Recruitment models derived from this analysis could be used in operating models for management strategy evaluation simulations for northern Gulf cod, so one could develop harvest control rules that are robust to changes in recruitment productivity regimes.


2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. M. Vasyliūnas

Abstract. The conventional equations of ionospheric electrodynamics, highly succesful in modeling observed phenomena on sufficiently long time scales, can be derived rigorously from the complete plasma and Maxwell's equations, provided that appropriate limits and approximations are assumed. Under the assumption that a quasi-steady-state equilibrium (neglecting local dynamical terms and considering only slow time variations of external or aeronomic-process origin) exists, the conventional equations specify how the various quantities must be related numerically. Questions about how the quantities are related causally or how the stress equilibrium is established and on what time scales are not anwered by the conventional equations but require the complete plasma and Maxwell's equations, and these lead to a picture of the underlying physical processes that can be rather different from the commonly presented intuitive or ad hoc explanations. Particular instances include the nature of the ionospheric electric current, the relation between electric field and plasma bulk flow, and the interrelationships among various quantities of neutral-wind dynamo.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenji Yamanishi ◽  
Linchuan Xu ◽  
Ryo Yuki ◽  
Shintaro Fukushima ◽  
Chuan-hao Lin

AbstractWe are concerned with the issue of detecting changes and their signs from a data stream. For example, when given time series of COVID-19 cases in a region, we may raise early warning signals of an epidemic by detecting signs of changes in the data. We propose a novel methodology to address this issue. The key idea is to employ a new information-theoretic notion, which we call the differential minimum description length change statistics (D-MDL), for measuring the scores of change sign. We first give a fundamental theory for D-MDL. We then demonstrate its effectiveness using synthetic datasets. We apply it to detecting early warning signals of the COVID-19 epidemic using time series of the cases for individual countries. We empirically demonstrate that D-MDL is able to raise early warning signals of events such as significant increase/decrease of cases. Remarkably, for about $$64\%$$ 64 % of the events of significant increase of cases in studied countries, our method can detect warning signals as early as nearly six days on average before the events, buying considerably long time for making responses. We further relate the warning signals to the dynamics of the basic reproduction number R0 and the timing of social distancing. The results show that our method is a promising approach to the epidemic analysis from a data science viewpoint.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (HTCS6) ◽  
pp. 40-47
Author(s):  
Kien Trung Nguyen ◽  
Thang Kim Nguyen ◽  
Ha Quang Ta ◽  
Huy Quang Dang ◽  

Static liquefaction of soil is a hazard that has caused a lot of damage to humans. Therefore, this phenomenon has been studied for a long time over the world, nevertheless, research on this issue in Vietnam is still limited. This paper presents the results of several triaxial tests under undrained conditions to evaluate the influence of some fundamental factors on the static liquefaction of Fontainebleau sand. The results show that the relative density and the confining pressure have a significant influence on the static liquefaction of the sand. When the density of the sand increases, the liquefaction resistance of the sand increases, until a certain limit, the sand changes from liquefaction behavior to dilatancybehavior with a decrease in pore pressure and an increase in mean effective stress. When the test is carried out at different confining pressures, the greater the confining pressure, the higher the liquefaction resistance.


Author(s):  
Jeta Ajasllari

There is an ever increasing number of studies on the experience of pediatric patients suffering with Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) resulting in the conclusion that chronic kidney disease affects the development of these patients, their behavior, emotions and social relations, causing a series of psychological reactions. The aim of this study was to make a review of the existing literature on psychological experience of patients with chronic kidney disease and their adjustement. The study findings are in the context of previous research and existing theories. Research was made in professional literature related to Chronic Kidney Disease in children and adolescents, selecting works published betwen years 1981 and 2014, using key terms such as children, adolescent, chronic kidney disease, in different combinations. Children starting from school age and later in their adolescence are in constant change, not only as regards their physical growth but also their emotional and sexual growth and coexistance for a long time with such a problem as kidney disease is very difficult and affects their lives in many ways. Simultaneously, CKD causes grave psychological damages. Survival to the disease is not satisfactory so deepening on desease perception, social and psychological factors affecting patients, are very important elements to improve the quality of life of these patients. Comprehension of their experiences is very important in order to decrease the effect of CKD on their lives and for them to receive the most effective treatment. Nephrologists andpsychologist can work together by helping make the connections between psychosocial and biological factors.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jianghong Zhu ◽  
Zhenyan Su ◽  
Huyuan Zhang

Abstract The bentonite pellet-contained material (PCM) is a feasible material for the joint sealing of high-level radioactive waste repository. During the operation of the repository, the PCM will be unsaturated for a long time, and its water retention and permeability directly affect the buffer barrier seepage, nuclide migration, and joint healing. Moreover, the particle size of bentonite pellets and dry density are important factors affecting the performance of PCM. In this work, the pressure plate method and vapour equilibrium technique were utilized to test the soil-water characteristic curves (SWCCs) of the PCMs with different particle sizes and dry densities. The unsaturated hydraulic conductivity of the PCMs was predicted by combining the SWCC model and saturated hydraulic conductivity. The results showed that in the low suction range (20–1150 kPa), the dry density and particle size had a negative correlation with the water content at the same suction. In the high suction range (4200–309000 kPa), the dry density and particle size had little effect on the SWCC. The Gardner model was appropriate for describing the SWCC of PCM. In addition, the hydraulic conductivity of the PCM decreased with the increase in dry density, while increased with the increase in particle size. The influence mechanism of the SWCC and hydraulic conductivity was further discussed based on the scanning electron microscopy images and pore size distribution curves.


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