Navigating Social Class Roles in Community Research

This paper describes the first author's attempt to collect data in a homeless shelter without attending to her role in the social class hierarchy of the organization. The author's egalitarian approach towards the homeless clients, and her lack of involvement in "staff-only" activities, transgress the social class norms within the organizational structure. While the author is successful in gaining the trust of the homeless clients, her approach alienates shelter staff, especially those in the higher echelons of the social hierarchy. The concepts of classism, world views, and Social Identity Theory, are utilized to discuss the dilemma faced by researchers who want to challenge, or work outside, a setting's status quo.     

Effects of prosodically modulated sub-phonetic variation on lexical competition

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., Put the cap next to the square) or utterance-final position (e.g., Now click on the cap). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a monosyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a cat), a polysyllabic competitor picture (e.g., a captain) and a distractor (e.g., a beaker). The relative proportion of fixations to the two types of competitor pictures changed as a function of the position of the target word in the utterance, demonstrating that lexical competition is modulated by prosodically conditioned phonetic variation.     

Postmodernist thought of the late Soviet period: three profiles

Studies in East European Thought - This article introduces postmodernist trends in late Soviet thought through the prism of the three generations: the philosopher and writer Aleksandr Zinoviev...     

From contexts to circumstances of evaluation: is the trade-off always innocuous?

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the two approaches is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives.     

Compliance with requests by children with autism: the impact of sentence type

This study assesses the extent to which children with autism understand requests performed with grammatically non-imperative sentence types. Ten children with autism were videotaped in naturalistic conditions. Four grammatical sentence types were distinguished: imperative, declarative, interrogative and sub-sentential. For each category, the proportion of requests complied with significantly exceeded the proportion of requests not complied with, and no difference across categories was found. These results show that children with autism do not rely exclusively on the linguistic form to interpret an utterance as a request.     

Analysis of a two-alternative force-choice signal detection theory model

A basic problem in psychophysics is recovering the mean internal response and noise amplitude from sensory discrimination data. Since these components cannot be estimated independently, several indirect methods were suggested to resolve this issue. Here we analyze the two-alternative force-choice method (2AFC), using a signal detection theory approach, and show analytically that the 2AFC data are not always suitable for a reliable estimation of the mean internal responses and noise amplitudes. Specifically, we show that there is a subspace of internal parameters that are highly sensitive to sampling errors (singularities), which results in a large range of estimated parameters with a finite number of experimental trials. Four types of singular models were identified, including the models where the noise amplitude is independent of the stimulus intensity, a situation often encountered in visual contrast discrimination. Finally, we consider two ways to avoid singularities: (1) inserting external noise to the stimuli, and (2) using one-interval forced-choice scaling methods (such as the Thurstonian scaling method for successive intervals).     

Reduced electroencephalographic coherence asymmetry in the Chernobyl accident survivors

An electroencephalograph (EEG) study was carried out from 1990 to 2006, using power spectra, averaged coherence, and integral EEG coherence asymmetry coefficients to compare 189 clean-up workers of the Chernobyl accident with 63 age-matched healthy controls. Most of the Chernobyl workers showed three abnormal EEG patterns, as indicated by EEG power mapping. The higher power, most prominent in slow alpha and theta bands, or in fast alpha frequencies, were observed in persons 3-5 years after the clean-up works (the early stage). The lower EEG power in alpha band was found in Chernobyl workers 10 or more years after the accident (the late stage). EEG coherence analysis revealed the existence of two stages in EEG alterations following the Chernobyl clean-up. In the early stage, an increase of EEG coherence in the central brain areas was observed, whereas at the later stage, a decrease of EEG coherence, most prominent in the frontal brain areas, and reduced brain asymmetry prevailed. These results allow us to propose that the described EEG signs may be a reflection of radiation-induced brain dysfunction at the late period after the Chernobyl clean-up and were similar to the EEG markers of brain ageing. The results, in comparison to data of the literature, provide additional support to the premature brain ageing hypothesis in Chernobyl survivors as a result of the radiation brain damage after-effect.     

Visions of the future: social processes and terrorism in Europe1

Abstract: When we think of terrorism, we tend to think of Islamic terrorism but in fact most of the violent happenings in our societies are caused by ‘domestic terrorism’ and it has been suggested by authors such as Twemlow that there is a developmental continuum between social activism and terrorism. The generalized rise in what the author terms ‘a terrorist worldview’ has been linked to many different social, political, economic and psychological conflicts but the present paper suggests that this is not sufficient and that in order to understand it it is necessary to take into consideration certain processes in contemporary civilization. At present, I am suggesting that Western civilization is characterized by the generalized breakdown of values and of signifying structures and by the gradual weakening of the models of state power and institutions that previously guaranteed the unity and security of our societies. The result is a crisis of identity which is particularly evident among the youth of today and when this is exasperated by the failure of authority to provide an adequate explanatory system of contemporary reality and by the tendency to resort to repressive mechanisms, all too often the result is the degeneration of social activism into social violence. It is becoming urgent that our societies reflect on more efficient ways of preventing social activism degenerating into terrorism, both internationally and domestically.     

A Logic for Information Systems

A conception of an information system has been introduced by Pawlak. The study has been continued in works of Pawlak and Orlowska and in works of Vakarelov. They had proposed some basic relations and had constructed a formal system of a modal logic that describes the relations and some of their Boolean combinations. Our work is devoted to a generalization of this approach. A class of relation systems and a complete calculus construction method for these systems are proposed. As a corollary of our main result, our paper contains a solution of a Vakarelov's problem: how to construct a formal system that describes all the Boolean combinations of the basic relations.