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Affective features drive human representations of social touch expressions during naturalistic viewing
Get PDFTouch is a potent communication tool. It has been suggested that a wide range of factors impact how we perceive social touch. No study has investigated which features we attend to when observing complex, naturalis-tic social touch expressions. To address this question, we curated 125 video clips showing a wide range of social interactions from the American TV series, Modern Family. Eighty participants watched 45 pseudo-randomly selected videos and performed a multiple arrangement task. This procedure produced the group-averaged pair-wise similarity judgments for social touch expressions. Visual, social, and affective features were extracted from each video clip using artificial neural networks (ANN), behavioural experiments, and human annotations. The combination of multiple regression and variance partitioning analyses revealed that selected affective, social, high-level visual, and ANN features collectively explained 52% of the variance in the perception of social touch expressions. Among these, affective features uniquely accounted for 33% of the variance. The current findings suggest that affective features, specifically whether the touch is used to convey positive or negative emotions, drive human perceptions of social touch during naturalis-tic viewing. Conversely, ANN features explained the least variance, suggesting that the models, trained on action perception and facial expression recognition, may not be sufficient to decode social touch expressions
Nineteenth‐Century Watercolour Reproductions of Old Masters in the Ruskin Teaching Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: Materials and Techniques of ‘Heaven‐Borne’ Copyist Charles Fairfax Murray
Get PDFThis study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the pigments and techniques used by Charles Fairfax Murray (1849–1919), a leading expert in Italian Renaissance attribution, influential art collector and primary copyist for John Ruskin. Using a multidisciplinary approach combining MA-XRF, single-point XRF and XRD, FORS and advanced imaging techniques, this research identifies the materials Murray employed while replicating works by Italian Old Masters, including Tintoretto and Botticelli, during the Italian Renaissance revival of the 19th century. This study examines eight artworks from the Ruskin Teaching Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, identifying the use of both traditional pigments, such as vermillion and red, yellow and brown ochres, and newer, industrially produced pigments including cobalt blue and Prussian blue-based greens. XRF mapping reveals localized use of chrome, zinc and cadmium-based pigments, suggesting later modifications. Created between circa 1870–1881, these works demonstrate Murray's application of traditional artistic teachings and colour theory used during the Renaissance in the scope of pigment innovations during the Industrial Revolution. Multispectral imaging and infrared reflectography reveal the preparatory underdrawings made of each work, including the use of the grid technique to ensure accuracy and proportion. This research underscores the importance of interdisciplinary scientific analysis in exploring the Victorian-era art of replication, a practice that elevated copying to a celebrated artistic pursuit. It reveals the profound influence of John Ruskin's teachings and Pre-Raphaelite ideals on Charles Fairfax Murray's material choices and artistic approach, particularly his emphasis on authenticity, fidelity to historical methods and the use of lightfast, durable materials. Furthermore, it highlights the pivotal role of the Ruskin Teaching Collection in art education and demonstrates how industrial advancements in pigment technology not only enhanced artistic production and longevity but also broadened public access to the visual language of the Italian Renaissance
New insights into gas-driven phase segregation in andesitic enclaves from Mt. Mazama (Crater Lake), USA
Get PDFA key process in active magmatic systems is the “recharge” of deep-sourced mafic magma into cooler, more evolved, and crystal-rich shallow reservoirs; recharge may be the cause of, or response to, eruptive activity. Although compositional evidence for recharge has been extensively documented, physical models of recharge are limited, particularly processes that separate exsolving volatiles and melts from rapidly growing crystals. To improve constraints on phase separation behaviors, we re-examine andesitic enclaves in silicic andesite lava flows of Mt. Mazama (Crater Lake), USA, that provided early evidence of gas-driven filter pressing (Bacon, 1986). 2D and 3D imaging shows that enclaves have a sample-spanning crystal framework that is disrupted by melt patches, indicating that initially deformable crystal networks were subject to early phase reorganization. Small enclaves are poorly vesicular and require early gas loss. Large enclaves have porous cores with angular (diktytaxitic) voids that are well-connected in 3D and denser rinds with isolated pores. Large enclave rinds have similar bulk compositions to small enclaves but their less evolved cores require ~ 20% melt removal. In the large enclave, diktytaxitic core textures and gas fingering structures at the core–rind boundary suggest relatively slow late-stage outward gas migration. Both scaling arguments and evidence of outward gas/melt migration require a resistant rind. Rind formation is best explained by differential cooling and demonstrates the importance of thermal gradients for gas-driven filter pressing. A corollary is a limited time scale of recharge, enclave formation, and vesiculation to produce diktytaxitic textures, suggesting that recharge was (near) synchronous with eruption
Dynamic pharmaceutical product portfolio management with flexible resource profiles
Get PDFThe pharmaceutical industry faces growing pressure to develop innovative, affordable products faster. Completing clinical trials on time is crucial, as revenue strongly depends on the finite patent protection. In this paper, we consider dynamic resource allocation for pharmaceutical product portfolio management and clinical trial scheduling, proposing a modelling framework, where resource profiles for ongoing clinical trials are flexible, with the possibility to add additional resources, thereby accelerating the completion of a clinical trial and enhancing pipeline profitability. Specifically, we treat both resource profiles and clinical trial scheduling as decision variables in the management of multiple pharmaceutical products to maximise the expected discounted profit, accounting for uncertainty in clinical trial outcomes. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process and design a Monte Carlo tree search approach that can identify the best decision for each state by utilising a base policy to estimate value functions. We significantly improve the algorithm efficiency by proposing a statistical racing procedure using correlated sampling (common random numbers) and Bernstein’s inequality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on a pharmaceutical drug development pipeline problem, finding that the proposed modelling framework with flexible resource profiles improves the resource efficiency and profitability, and the proposed Monte Carlo tree search algorithm outperforms existing approaches in terms of efficiency and solution quality
Interpreting statistical significance in hominin dimorphism: Power and Type I error rates for resampling tests of univariate and missing-data multivariate size dimorphism estimation methods in the fossil record.
No full textThe degree of sexual size dimorphism in fossil hominins is important evidence for the evaluation of evolutionary hypotheses, but it is also difficult/impossible to measure directly. Multiple methods have been developed to estimate dimorphism in univariate and multivariate datasets, including when data are missing. This paper introduces 'dimorph', an R package that implements many of these methods and associated resampling-based significance tests and evaluates their performance in terms of Type I error rates and power. Tests evaluated here are those that appear most commonly in the hominin literature: testing whether a fossil sample is significantly more dimorphic than a comparative sample of known dimorphism. Univariate and multivariate methods are applied to metric data from four extant hominoid species: Gorilla gorilla, Homo sapiens, Pan troglodytes, and Hylobates lar. Each species is represented by 47 female and 47 male adult individuals, from which 10 linear postcranial measurements are collected. Data are resampled at a broad range of sample sizes (n = 4 to n = 82), sex ratios (proportion of females range from 0 to 1), and in the case of missing-data methods, proportions of missing data (0–0.9). Type I error rates and power are evaluated by the proportion of tests correctly or incorrectly rejecting null hypotheses regarding dimorphism difference within pairs of samples drawn from these four species, in which one sample stands in for a fossil sample. Results indicate low Type I error rates for all methods, whereas power is variable across methods but often low at sample sizes common to fossil analyses. Recommendations are made for the best significance tests. Additionally, previous work using lack of significant difference as evidence for similarity in dimorphism between fossils and extant species should be re-examined to determine whether those studies have enough power to detect known differences among extant taxa
Corporate Hiring under Uncertainty
Get PDFUsing granular data on job postings and employee flows, we examine how firms adjust human capital investments during periods of uncertainty brought on by gubernatorial elections. We find that firms reduce job postings in the 6 months leading up to an election, particularly advertisements for more costly to reverse positions (highly skilled, less flexible, or unionized). We also explore the sources of election uncertainty and find stronger effects in elections where public interests more heavily focus on labor issues. Our results are consistent with the real options framework, where firms adopt a “wait and see” approach in response to uncertainty. (JEL J2, G3
How Does Economic Uncertainty Affect the Financial Performance and Stability of Islamic and Conventional Banks in Hydrocarbon- Based Rentier Economies?
No full textThis study investigates whether Islamic banks are more resilient to uncertainties than their counterparts. Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are included in the sample, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which are heavily dependent on oil revenues and therefore affected by the current global and local crisis. Therefore, it would make sense to analyse hydrocarbon-based rentier economies which are directly affected by uncertainties and have a large amount of global Islamic finance assets. From this point of view, this chapter aims to analyse how rentier economies’ state fragility and governance indices impact the financial stability and performance of Islamic banks and conventional banks. In addition, this chapter argues that Islamic banks respond to uncertainties similarly to conventional banks
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