A Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Children's Television Advertisements

Two sets of television advertisements were video-recorded from weekend children's television in London and New York and were coded by two white women in terms of their gender-role portrayals. The advertised products covered by this analysis included snack and fast food, toys and breakfast cereal. Each advertisement was coded according to nine criteria including the ethnicity and gender of the people appearing, gender of central figure and of any voice over in the commercial, presence or absence of music, and other sales-related content. In general, males were more numerous than females in both American and British advertisements. There were more similarities than differences between the two national markets in terms of the nature of gender-role portrayals, with males generally occupying more central and authoritative positions. Only two analyses yielded significant differences. Girls outnumbered boys in American commercials, but the opposite was true of British commercials. Hispanic males were present in American commercials but not in British commercials.     

Masking of and by tactile pressure stimuli

Masking of and by tactile pressure stimuli was investigated in six Ss as a function of stimulus intensity (force) and stimulus onset asynchrony. Increase in the force of the masked stimulus and decrease in the force of the masking stimulus were inversely related to the magnitude of masking, as defined by either a relative or an absolute decrease in sensitivity. The introduction of stimulus onset asynchrony produced both forward and backward masking, the latter being of somewhat larger magnitude. Comparisons are made with results obtained in visual metacontrast masking.     

Big toy models

We pursue a model-oriented rather than axiomatic approach to the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, with the idea that new models can often suggest new axioms. This approach has often been fruitful in Logic and Theoretical Computer Science. Rather than seeking to construct a simplified toy model, we aim for a ??big toy model??, in which both quantum and classical systems can be faithfully represented??as well as, possibly, more exotic kinds of systems. To this end, we show how Chu spaces can be used to represent physical systems of various kinds. In particular, we show how quantum systems can be represented as Chu spaces over the unit interval in such a way that the Chu morphisms correspond exactly to the physically meaningful symmetries of the systems??the unitaries and antiunitaries. In this way we obtain a full and faithful functor from the groupoid of Hilbert spaces and their symmetries to Chu spaces. We also consider whether it is possible to use a finite value set rather than the unit interval; we show that three values suffice, while the two standard possibilistic reductions to two values both fail to preserve fullness.     

Relational Hidden Variables and Non-Locality

We use a simple relational framework to develop the key notions and results on hidden variables and non-locality. The extensive literature on these topics in the foundations of quantum mechanics is couched in terms of probabilistic models, and properties such as locality and no-signalling are formulated probabilistically. We show that to a remarkable extent, the main structure of the theory, through the major No-Go theorems and beyond, survives intact under the replacement of probability distributions by mere relations.     

Object relations and defense mechanisms of a psychopathic serial sexual homicide perpetrator: a TAT analysis

The case of a 24-year-old African American man who committed serial sexual homicide and who met criteria (Hare, 1991) for psychopathy is presented. His Thematic Apperception Test (Murray, 1943) responses were used to code key aspects of personality organization--object relations and defense mechanisms--via the Social Cognition and Object Relations Scale (Westen, Lohr, Silk, & Kerber, 1989) and the Defense Mechanisms Manual (Cramer, 1991), respectively. Severe object relations pathology and a reliance on the defense mechanism of immature projection and immature denial are noted. Findings are relatively consistent with previous psychodynamic Rorschach studies of psychopathic sexual homicide perpetrators (Gacono, Meloy, & Bridges, 2000; Meloy, Gacono, & Kenney, 1994).     

From IF to BI

We take a fresh look at the logics of informational dependence and independence of Hintikka and Sandu and Väänänen, and their compositional semantics due to Hodges. We show how Hodges’ semantics can be seen as a special case of a general construction, which provides a context for a useful completeness theorem with respect to a wider class of models. We shed some new light on each aspect of the logic. We show that the natural propositional logic carried by the semantics is the logic of Bunched Implications due to Pym and O’Hearn, which combines intuitionistic and multiplicative connectives. This introduces several new connectives not previously considered in logics of informational dependence, but which we show play a very natural rôle, most notably intuitionistic implication. As regards the quantifiers, we show that their interpretation in the Hodges semantics is forced, in that they are the image under the general construction of the usual Tarski semantics; this implies that they are adjoints to substitution, and hence uniquely determined. As for the dependence predicate, we show that this is definable from a simpler predicate, of constancy or dependence on nothing. This makes essential use of the intuitionistic implication. The Armstrong axioms for functional dependence are then recovered as a standard set of axioms for intuitionistic implication. We also prove a full abstraction result in the style of Hodges, in which the intuitionistic implication plays a very natural rôle.