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Loot box purchases and their relationship with internet gaming disorder and online gambling disorder in adolescents: a prospective study
Get PDFIn recent years, the video game industry has introduced Loot Box (LB), a new type of microtransaction in which a gamer uses real currency to purchase a random virtual item within a video game. Recently, LBs became more widespread and there is evidence suggesting their similarity to online gambling. Although some studies have investigated the association between LBs with disordered gaming and disordered gambling, very few have done so with clinical indicators of these problems. Furthermore, to the best of our knowledge no longitudinal evidence of such relationships currently exists in the literature. Therefore, the present study aimed to 1) ascertain the stability of LB purchasing in minors and 2) investigate the associations between LB purchasing with gambling online and online gambling disorder within six months. A prospective cohort study was conducted at two time points six months apart. In total, 2.213 Spanish adolescents (1.067 [48.9%] boys) aged between 11 and 17 years participated in both waves. The purchase of LBs was prevalent and stable in the sample across the six months. While a positive relationship was found between purchasing LBs and online gambling six months later, the relationships between purchasing LBs and the presentation of online gambling disorder and gaming disorder require further study
Civic engagement and socio-economic proximity in urban areas
Get PDFDiversity boosts innovation and creativity in urban contexts, but it can also undermine civicness by negatively impacting individuals’ trust of other citizens, also hampering economic and institutional performance. By employing a spatial analysis approach using geocoded data from 5,776 residents in three major urban Italian areas, we explore whether sharing geographical space in a context of socio-economic difference (in terms of income and education), affects individuals’ choices to be civically engaged. The evidence reveals that the geographical proximity of an individual to others with different socio-economic characteristics decreases their civic engagement (CE). A key challenge when designing urban policies is to reconcile the positive effects of diversity as it influences different economic-societal aspects, with the associated social tensions
Public-sector employment, wages and education decisions
Get PDFWe set up a search and matching model with a private and a public sector to understand the
effects of employment and wage policies in the public sector on unemployment and education
decisions. The effects on the educational composition of the labor force depend crucially on the
structure of the labor market. An increase of skilled public-sector wages has a small positive
impact on educational composition and larger negative impact on the private employment of
skilled workers, if the two sectors are segmented. If there are movements across the two sectors,
it has large positive impacts on education and on skilled private employment. We highlight the
usefulness of the model for policymakers by calculating the value of public-sector job security
for skilled and unskilled workers
Sobolev Spaces, Kernels and Discrepancies over Hyperspheres
Get PDFThis work extends analytical foundations for kernel methods beyond the usual Euclidean manifold. Specifically, we characterise the smoothness of the native spaces (reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces) that are reproduced by geodesically isotropic kernels in the hyper- spherical context. Our results are relevant to several areas of machine learning; we focus on their consequences for kernel cubature, determining the rate of convergence of the worst case error, and expanding the applicability of cubature algorithms based on Stein’s method. First, we introduce a characterisation of Sobolev spaces on the d-dimensional sphere based on the Fourier–Schoenberg sequences associated with a given kernel. Such sequences are hard (if not impossible) to compute analytically on d-dimensional spheres, but often feasi- ble over Hilbert spheres, where d = ∞. Second, we circumvent this problem by finding a projection operator that allows us to map from Hilbert spheres to finite-dimensional spheres. Our findings are illustrated for selected parametric families of kernel
Sensory modality and perceptual reasons
Get PDFPerception can provide us with a privileged source of evidence about the external world – evidence that makes it rational to believe things about the world. In Reasons First, Mark Schroeder offers a new view on how perception does so. The central motivation behind Schroeder's account is to offer an answer to what evidence perception equips us with according to which it is what he calls world-implicating but non-factive, and thereby to glean some of the key advantages of both externalism and internalism, respectively. He answers this motivation by developing a more specific view that he calls the Apparent Factive Attitude view, which pairs an answer to what evidence is provided by a perceptual experience with an answer to why having that perceptual experience provides you with that evidence. In this paper, we advance two interconnected problems for Schroeder's Apparent Factive Attitude view. A traditional intuitive judgment that often motivates internalists is the idea that internal duplicates must necessarily be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. Schroeder's arguments rely on a weaker claim – that people who are both internal and historical external duplicates but differ only in the veridicality of a single perceptual experience must be equally rational in whatever beliefs they have. In this way he preserves what he argues to be a more compelling internalist intuition. But our arguments will show that Schroeder's view is committed to denying an even more compelling internalist intuition yet – that internal duplicates must have the same phenomenology
Musical experience is linked to enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch and increased primary weighting during suprasegmental categorization
Get PDFSpeech perception requires the integration of evidence from acoustic cues across multiple dimensions. Individuals differ in their cue weighting strategies, i.e. the weight they assign to different dimensions during speech categorization. In two experiments, we investigate musical training as one potential predictor of individual differences in prosodic cue weighting strategies. Attentional theories of speech categorization suggest that prior experience with the task-relevance of a particular dimension leads that dimension to attract attention. Experiment 1 tested whether musicians and non-musicians differed in their ability to selectively attend to pitch and loudness in speech. Compared to non-musicians, musicians showed enhanced dimension-selective attention to pitch but not loudness. Experiment 2 tested the hypothesis that musicians would show greater pitch weighting during prosodic categorization due to prior experience with the task-relevance of pitch cues in music. Listeners categorized phrases that varied in the extent to which pitch and duration signaled the location of linguistic focus and phrase boundaries. During linguistic focus categorization, musicians upweighted pitch compared to non-musicians. During phrase boundary categorization, musicians upweighted duration relative to non-musicians. These results suggest that musical experience is linked with domain-general enhancements in the ability to selectively attend to certain acoustic dimensions in speech. As a result, musicians may place greater perceptual weight on a single primary dimension during prosodic categorization, while non-musicians may be more likely to choose a perceptual strategy which integrates across multiple dimensions. These findings support attentional theories of cue weighting, which suggest attention influences listeners’ perceptual weighting of acoustic dimensions during categorization
Does corporate governance affect the performance and stability of Islamic banks?
Get PDFThis paper aims to investigate the impact of corporate governance practices on cost efficiency and financial stability for a sample of Islamic and conventional banks. In the analysis, the author uses a set of corporate governance variables that include, the board size, board independence, director gender, board meetings, board attendance, board committees, chair independence and CEO characteristics
How do firms reach out to foreign universities? Inventors’ personal characteristics and the multinational structure of firms
Get PDFWe analyze the determinants of firm-based inventors’ collaborations with universities abroad, comparing them with collaborations with national universities. We propose a micro-founded theoretical framework that introduces the role of personal linkages and global organizational pipelines as drivers of international academic collaborations, and we empirically investigate collaborations with national and international universities in a sample of inventors in Italy. We find that in general international collaborations depend positively on inventors working for multinational enterprises (MNEs). Instead for collaborations with national universities, the personal local linkages of the inventors play a large role. However, we also find that for collaborations with very distant universities abroad, such as US ones, working for an MNE is less crucial and the personal linkages of inventors become more important. In this case being an inventor with a network of foreign colleagues and with greater acquaintance with the norms of open science facilitates the interaction. This applies also to inventors who work for MNEs. The results point to a hybrid model of global linkages in the case of collaborations between firms and universities, in which both the personal international linkages of the inventors and the global organizational pipelines of MNEs play an important role
Becoming-lithic: elemental utopian possibility in the contemporary ecocatastrophe
Get PDFThis article explores an emerging cluster of ecocatastrophe narratives that locate utopian possibility within the Earth’s sub-crustal lithosphere. Texts such as N. K. Jemisin’s “Broken Earth” trilogy (2015–2017), J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966), Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011), Irene Solà’s Catalan novel When I Sing, Mountains Dance (2019), and the first season of the Icelandic TV series Katla (Netflix, June 2021) uncover an inhuman ecology whose vibrant, lively agency can be discerned within the geologic temporalities of deep time. Unlike their “Hollow Earth” precursors (a late nineteenth-century subgenre of the literary utopia), in which human protagonists ventured below the Earth’s surface to discover rich worlds of utopian alterity, these contemporary lithic texts revoke their characters’ human sovereignty in images of encroaching human-lithic intimacy: a process that I call becoming-lithic. In conveying the lively potentialities of geological processes such as the rock cycle, plate tectonics, continental drift, orogenesis and subduction, igneous activity, these lithic texts encourage readers and viewers to reconsider our relationship between the geosphere and the biosphere. I trace their emerging elemental aesthetics, asking how we might parse their inhuman moments of possibility and, in the process, undertake the urgent task of decolonising utopian studies
The impact of changes in mental health legislation on Psychiatry trainee stress in Victoria, Australia
No full textIn Victoria, Australia, the introduction of a new state Mental Health Act (MHA) in 2014 resulted in changes to the workload and type of work undertaken by trainee psychiatrists. In addition to long working hours, workload intensity is most often cited by trainees as a factor that leads to fatigue, with trainees often taking work home or doing overtime in order to fulfill work responsibilities and satisfy training requirements. This administrative burden is compounded by the high emotional burden associated with the practice of psychiatry, including patient suicides, aggression, and threats. This study aimed to explore the impact of these legislative changes on psychiatry trainees’ stress and well-being, using a qualitative research methodology involving semi-structured interviews. Despite reporting that the length and number of reports they were preparing under the new MHA had increased, as had the amount of time spent at Tribunal hearings, psychiatry trainees were understanding of the necessity of MHA changes in improving patient rights. The trainees did not express a desire for the MHA changes to be reversed, but rather recognition by their workplaces that changes are also needed at a ground level—such as an increase in staff numbers—to accommodate for these. While mental health legislative changes are designed to improve the system and better protect patient rights, measures must also be taken to ensure that any policy-level changes are adequately adjusted for in hospital staffing levels
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