What to expect from the future leaders of Bogotá and Curitiba in terms of public transport: Opinions and practices among university students

Only a minority of young people in developing countries goes to university. Those who do will probably be the future leaders of their society. Bogotá and Curitiba are known worldwide for their public transport systems based on buses, which introduced unprecedented quality standards for transport in the developing world. But these systems depend on continuous technical improvements and, in particular, backing from political leaders as they compete with other modes of transport for infrastructure and funding. This is especially critical in societies experiencing rapid growth in personal motorized transport, such as Brazil and Colombia. This paper analyses the opinions of university students in Bogotá and Curitiba about their famous public transport systems, and compares their opinions with their current mobility practices. The aim was to shed light on the challenges concerning the future status of public transport the two cities are likely to face, which to a certain extend can be considered a forewarning for other cities in developing nations.     

What to Say to an Online Support‐Seeker? The Influence of Others' Responses and Support‐Seekers' Replies

Research on online support forums has largely overlooked the quality of support provision. The present experiment examined how others' responses and a support-seeker's reply can influence action‐focused supportiveness, emotion‐focused supportiveness, and politeness of readers' support messages. Results showed that the supportiveness of others' comments was associated with subsequent readers' perceptions of public opinion toward the support‐seeker and readers' liking of the support‐seeker, which in turn influenced the quality of readers' support messages.     

A license to speak up: Outgroup minorities and opinion expression

Four studies examined the relationship between outgroup minority status, defined as both belonging to a different social category and holding a different opinion than other group members, and opinion expression. Specifically, it was hypothesized - and results confirmed - that outgroup minorities would be more willing to express their opinions on an issue when their social category membership granted them psychological standing (i.e., a subjective sense of entitlement to act) than when it did not. Implications for the roles of social category membership and psychological standing in opinion expression, and for how to encourage diverse viewpoints to emerge in group contexts, are discussed.     

Prediction and classification in nonlinear data analysis: Something old,something new,something borrowed,something blue

Prediction and classification are two very active areas in modern data analysis. In this paper, prediction with nonlinear optimal scaling transformations of the variables is reviewed, and extended to the use of multiple additive components, much in the spirit of statistical learning techniques that are currently popular, among other areas, in data mining. Also, a classification/clustering method is described that is particularly suitable for analyzing attribute-value data from systems biology (genomics, proteomics, and metabolomics), and which is able to detect groups of objects that have similar values on small subsets of the attributes.This article is based on the Presidential Address Jacqueline Meulman gave on July 9, 2003 at the 68th Annual Meeting of the Psychometric Society held near Cagliari, Italy on the island of Sardinia.—Editor     

小学生羞怯特质预测及语言风格模型构建

收集在线教学平台上1306名小学生的作文、日记及评论, 采用自然语言处理技术进行文本分析, 并应用机器学习模型实现对羞怯特质的自动预测, 构建小学生羞怯行为、认知和情绪的语言风格模型。研究发现：(1)扩充的心理词典适合分析小学生文本; (2)分别存在羞怯行为、认知和情绪问题的学生其日常用语既有共性也有特性, 且与普通学生存在差异; (3)羞怯各维度在不同分类器上达到较好的预测效果, 其中随机森林模型的整体表现相对最好。     

我国大陆地区网络心理咨询现状和伦理议题：“大数据”视角及伦理评估

随着计算机的发展,网络心理咨询受到越来越多的关注。本研究搜索和爬取网络心理咨询网站及咨询师信息,并采用16项伦理清单对其伦理规范进行评估。结果显示(1)网络心理咨询服务网站不断增多,网络心理咨询师数量逐年升高,但实际活跃数相对较少;(2)24个望网络心理咨询网站对咨询师的信息要求较为严格,对来访者信息要求模糊,且注意事项呈现不够充分。我国的网络心理咨询正在慢慢壮大,但是需要进一步加强伦理规范。     

Real-time detection of drivers’ texting and eating behavior based on vehicle dynamics

With rapid advancement in cellphones and intelligent in-vehicle technologies along with driver’s inclination to multitasking, crashes due to distracted driving had become a growing safety concern in our road network. Some previous studies attempted to detect distracted driving behaviors in real-time to mitigate their adverse consequences. However, these studies mainly focused on detecting either visual or cognitive distractions only, while most of the real-life distracting tasks involve driver’s visual, cognitive, and physical workload, simultaneously. Additionally, previous studies frequently used eye, head, or face tracking data, although current vehicles are not commonly equipped with technologies to acquire such data. Also those data are comparatively difficult to acquire in real-time during traffic monitoring operations. To address the above issues, this study focused on developing algorithms for detecting distraction tasks that involve simultaneous visual, cognitive, and physical workload using only vehicle dynamics data. Specifically, algorithms were developed to detect driving behaviors under two distraction tasks – texting and eating. Experiment was designed to include the two distracted driving scenarios and a control with multiple runs for each. A medium fidelity driving simulator was used for acquiring vehicle dynamics data for each scenario and each run. Several data mining techniques were explored in this study to investigate their performance in detecting distraction. Among them, the performance of two linear (linear discriminant analysis and logistic regression) and two nonlinear models (support vector machines and random forests) is reported in this article. Random forests algorithms had the best performance, which detected texting and eating distraction with an accuracy of 85.38% and 81.26%, respectively. This study may provide useful guidance to successful development and implementation of distracted driver detection algorithms in connected vehicle environment, as well as to auto manufacturers interested in integrating distraction detection systems in their vehicles.     

The Semantic Drift of Quotations in Blogspace: A Case Study in Short‐Term Cultural Evolution

We present an empirical case study that connects psycholinguistics with the field of cultural evolution, in order to test for the existence of cultural attractors in the evolution of quotations. Such attractors have been proposed as a useful concept for understanding cultural evolution in relation with individual cognition, but their existence has been hard to test. We focus on the transformation of quotations when they are copied from blog to blog or media website: by coding words with a number of well‐studied lexical features, we show that the way words are substituted in quotations is consistent (a) with the hypothesis of cultural attractors and (b) with known effects of the word features. In particular, words known to be harder to recall in lists have a higher tendency to be substituted, and words easier to recall are produced instead. Our results support the hypothesis that cultural attractors can result from the combination of individual cognitive biases in the interpretation and reproduction of representations.     

眼动追踪技术与婴幼儿研究:程序、方法与数据分析

眼动技术在婴幼儿研究中成为一种流行的研究工具。如何合理地选择和使用眼动仪进行数据收集及分析,是婴幼儿眼动研究者需要考虑的重要问题。本文从眼动仪使用的流程出发,主要对婴幼儿眼动研究过程中所涉及的四个方面的问题进行了梳理和分析:(1)正确选择仪器;(2)合理校准;(3)提高数据质量;(4)有效分析和挖掘数据。同时,针对这些方面提出了相应的操作性建议。     

Future prediction with automatically extracted morphosemantic patterns

In the following paper, we investigated the usefulness of future reference sentence patterns in the prediction of the unfolding of future events. To obtain such patterns we first collected sentences that have any reference to the future from newspapers and Web news. Based on this collection, we developed a novel method for automatic extraction of frequent patterns from such sentences. The extracted patterns, consisting of multilayer semantic information and morphological information, were implemented in the formation of a general model of linguistically expressed future. To fully assess the performance of the proposed method we performed a number of evaluation experiments. In the first experiment, we evaluated the automatic extraction of future reference sentence patterns with the proposed extraction algorithm. In the second set of experiments, we estimated the effectiveness of those patterns and applied them to automatically classify sentences into future referring and other. The final model was then tested for performance in retrieving a new set of future reference sentences from a large news corpus. The obtained results confirmed that the proposed method outperformed state-of-the-art method in fully automatic retrieval of future reference sentences. Lastly, we applied the method in practice to confirm its usefulness in two tasks. The first is to support human readers in the everyday prediction of unfolding future events. In the second task, we developed a fully automatic prototype method for future prediction and tested its performance using the tasks included in the official Future Prediction Competence Test. The results indicate that the prototype system outperforms natural human foreseeing capability.