EXPRESS: Default Effects of Credit Card Minimum Payments

Credit card minimum payments are designed to ensure that individuals pay down their debt over time, and scheduling minimum automatic repayments helps to avoid forgetting to repay. Yet minimum payments have additional, unintended psychological default effects by drawing attention away from the card balance due. First, once individuals set the minimum automatic repayment as the default, they then neglect to make the occasional larger repayments they made previously. As a result, individuals incur considerably more credit card interest than late payment fees avoided. Using detailed transaction data, the authors show that approximately 8% of all of the interest ever paid is due to this effect. Second, manual credit card payments are lower when individuals are prompted with minimum payment information. Two new interventions to mitigate this effect are tested in an experiment, prompting full repayment and prompting those repaying little to pay more, with large counter effects. Hence, shrouding the minimum payment option for automatic and manual payments and directing attention to the full balance may remedy these unintended effects.

Clicks-and-bricks: a case study of the Amaro brand

The rise of e-commerce has dematerialized retail shopping locations, transposing them to the digital layer in the so-called 'brick-to-click' movement. However, the opposite path, 'click-and-brick', arouses curiosity for the re-association of the physical store with e-commerce, directing attention to new meanings of materiality in fashion retail. In this context, this paper discusses the multidimensional materiality of fashion retail within the e-commerce theme from two main movements: the emergence of physical spaces that complement online stores and the orientation of e-commerce operations towards big data. To illustrate the concepts and reflection on these themes, the authors carry out a case study on the omnichannel operations of a brazilian fashion brand called AMARO.

Broad attention uncovers benefits of stimulus uniformity in visual crowding

Crowding is the interference by surrounding objects (flankers) with target perception. Low target-flanker similarity usually yields weaker crowding than high similarity (‘similarity rule’) with less interference, e.g., by opposite- than same-contrast polarity flankers. The advantage of low target-flanker similarity has typically been shown with attentional selection of a single target object. Here, we investigated the validity of the similarity rule when broadening attention to multiple objects. In three experiments, we measured identification for crowded letters (Experiment 1), tumbling Ts (Experiment 2), and tilted lines (Experiment 3). Stimuli consisted of three items that were uniform or alternating in contrast polarity and were briefly presented at ten degrees eccentricity. Observers reported all items (full report) or only the left, central, or right item (single-item report). In Experiments 1 and 2, consistent with the similarity rule, single central item performance was superior with opposite- compared to same-contrast polarity flankers. With full report, the similarity rule was inverted: performance was better for uniform compared to alternating stimuli. In Experiment 3, contrast polarity did not affect performance. We demonstrated a reversal of the similarity rule under broadened attention, suggesting that stimulus uniformity benefits crowded object recognition when intentionally directing attention towards all stimulus elements. We propose that key properties of crowding have only limited validity as they may require a-priori differentiation of target and context.

An Examination and Categorical Analysis of Squamous Cell Carcinoma

This article discusses the compository nature and hierarchical metastatic proliferation of Squamous Cell Carinoma. Discussion ranges from the effects of the disease from the cellular level all the way to entirety of the body, including the impact of UV radiation and mutation on cells such as melanocytes and congruent epithelia. Current and potential future cures for the disease, such as immunotherapy and Mohs' Surgery are explained in application to the disease, along with the history behind each practice and how it came into use by physicians. Lastly, hopes for effective recognition and continued research of Squamous Cell Carinoma are laid out, stressing the importance of directing attention to the second most common skin cancer in the medical-research community.

CNMF: A Community-Based Fake News Mitigation Framework

Fake news propagation in online social networks (OSN) is one of the critical societal threats nowadays directing attention to fake news mitigation and intervention techniques. One of the typical mitigation techniques focus on initiating news mitigation campaigns targeting a specific set of users when the infected set of users is known or targeting the entire network when the infected set of users is unknown. The contemporary mitigation techniques assume the campaign users’ acceptance to share a mitigation news (MN); however, in reality, user behavior is different. This paper focuses on devising a generic mitigation framework, where the social crowd can be employed to combat the influence of fake news in OSNs when the infected set of users is undefined. The framework is composed of three major phases: facts discovery, facts searching and, community recommendation. Mitigation news circulation is accomplished by recruiting a set of social crowd users (news propagators) who are likely to accept posting the mitigation news article. We propose a set of features that identify prospect OSN audiences and news propagators. Moreover, we inspect the variant properties of the news circulation process, such as incentivizing news propagators, determining the required number of news propagators, and the adaptivity of the MN circulation process. The paper pinpoints the significance of facts searching and news propagator’s behavior features introduced in the experimental results.

GASP: Gated Attention for Saliency Prediction

Saliency prediction refers to the computational task of modeling overt attention. Social cues greatly influence our attention, consequently altering our eye movements and behavior. To emphasize the efficacy of such features, we present a neural model for integrating social cues and weighting their influences. Our model consists of two stages. During the first stage, we detect two social cues by following gaze, estimating gaze direction, and recognizing affect. These features are then transformed into spatiotemporal maps through image processing operations. The transformed representations are propagated to the second stage (GASP) where we explore various techniques of late fusion for integrating social cues and introduce two sub-networks for directing attention to relevant stimuli. Our experiments indicate that fusion approaches achieve better results for static integration methods, whereas non-fusion approaches for which the influence of each modality is unknown, result in better outcomes when coupled with recurrent models for dynamic saliency prediction. We show that gaze direction and affective representations contribute a prediction to ground-truth correspondence improvement of at least 5% compared to dynamic saliency models without social cues. Furthermore, affective representations improve GASP, supporting the necessity of considering affect-biased attention in predicting saliency.

Working the urban assemblage: A transnational study of transforming practices

This article places those working for change in urban neighbourhoods at the centre of debates on urban transformation, directing attention to the importance of human agency in the work of assembling urban transformation. Drawing on cross-national qualitative fieldwork undertaken over 30 months shadowing 40 urban practitioners in neighbourhoods across four European cities – Amsterdam, Birmingham, Copenhagen and Glasgow – our research revealed the catalytic, embodied roles of situated agents in this assembling. Through exemplar vignettes, we present practices in a diverse range of socio-material assemblages aimed to address complex problems and unmet needs in the urban environment. The practices we studied were not those of daily routines, but were instead a purposeful assembling that included nurturing and developing of heterogeneous resources such as relationships, knowledges and materials, framed through an emerging vision to inform, mobilise and channel action. This article brings together assemblage-theoretical and practice-theoretical ideas, with rich empirical insight to advance our understanding of how the city may be re-made.

More than just managerial self-efficacy: conceptualizing and predicting top managers' means efficacy about the organization under extreme events

PurposeThis study extends the concept of managerial efficacy to include managerial means efficacy (MME) attributed to the utility and quality of means external to managers for performing a task. Focusing on its antecedents, the authors theorize and empirically test MME sourced from the organization (MMEO) and situate the examination under extreme events.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses a 2016 national survey of 892 top managers in 273 US largest transit agencies covering 82% of the entire population. Participants report their confidence for their organization to perform effectively under various extreme events. The survey data are matched with data from various institutional data sources to capture organizational characteristics, operations and experience with extreme events.FindingsFindings suggest that organizational-level factors influence MMEO. Specifically, organizational slack and relationship management of key jurisdictional stakeholders positively predict MMEO, whereas political fragmentation is negatively associated with MMEO.Practical implicationsOrganizations can bolster MMEO, hence, managerial efficacy through developing organizational slack and engaging in relationships building with jurisdictional stakeholders. Those initiatives have particular importance for those with boundary-spanning service areas.Originality/valueThe study advances understanding of managerial efficacy by directing attention to means external to managers' self. It also brings clarity to the notion of “confident managers” or “managerial confidence” broadly applied in previous studies. Findings provide insights about capacity-building interventions to build managerial efficacy through improving external means, circumventing the need to alter self-efficacy that is typically stable and resistant to change.

Anthropological Dimension of Commemorative Practices: The Phenomenon of Bodily Memory

Purpose. The article is aimed to analyse the phenomenon of bodily memory in the context of commemorative practices. The commemorative practices are a social instrument known since archaic times, which had different ways of use in different epochs. In totalitarian societies, officially organized commemorative practices are frequently used for propaganda and manipulation. For most people, their mechanism remains unconscious, as bodily memory plays a leading role there. The density of a modern social world actualises the ability to observe own changes and regulate the processes of their flow. This updates an exploration of the bodily memory phenomenon. Theoretical basis. The classification of forms of bodily memory is carried out in the article: genetic (cellular memory, heredity), psychophysical (memory for different types of sensations, skills, muscle tone, etc.), psychoenergetic (emotions, mental states, mood, unconscious action, etc.), mental (knowledge of the rules of social games, attitudes, stereotypes, thoughts, memories, ways of our detection, behaviour, etc.). It has been revealed that the systemic openness of bodily memory is the fundamental basis of commemorative practices. Originality. The term "conscious commemoration" is proposed to denote the anthropological process associated with self-knowledge, self-construction and co-creation, which requires a distinction between forms of bodily memory, understanding of its structural features and functional capabilities. Conclusions. The phenomenon of bodily memory reveals the anthropological potential of commemorative practices. It can manifest itself as an independently organized body-spiritual practice of self-construction (harmonization of the architecture of one’s own body and individuality) on the basis of self-knowledge and self-observation (directing attention to one’s movements, reactions, behaviour, honest recognition of one’s attitudes). The latter is the foundation of conscious co-creation. The phenomenon of bodily memory reveals the secret of spiritualization in the process of approaching a person to his body.