Violations of dominance in pricing judgments

The dominance principle states that the judged price of gamble A should be equal to or greater than the judged price of gamble B whenever A's outcomes are equal to or better than the corresponding outcomes of B, holding everything else constant. Subjects often violate the dominance principle by assigning a higher price to a gamble with some probability of winning a positive amount, Y, otherwise zero, than to a superior gamble with the same chances of winning Y, otherwise winning X. Violations also occur with losses. Results are consistent with a configural-weight theory in which the decision weight for each outcome depends on the rank of the outcome with respect to the other outcomes in the lottery and the value of the outcome (zero vs. nonzero).The authors thank Shi-jie Chang, Duncan Luce, and Lisa Ordóñez for comments on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a National Science Foundation grant to the first author (BNS-8451368). Requests for reprints should be sent to Barbara Mellers, Dept. of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.     

用于分散电压控制的规则库法

电力系统正常运行时,无功/电压控制目的是安全经济供电.而在紧急情况下,首要目标是运行的安全性,其次才是经济性.本文提出的局部网概念及其灵敏度矩阵,以及对电压违限严重性的分级和控制战略,使控制更为快速有效.此法更适用于当事故引起全系统运行数据不全时对局部网的电压控制.     

First Nations and community economic development: a case study

A training project in a northern Canadian community providedan opportunity to examine participatory planning approachesand the meaning of work in First Nations communities. Focusgroups conducted three years after the unsuccessful interventionof a community economic development (CED) project suggest thatcomplex factors such as lack of support from community leadersand rate of pay for workers determine whether CED is alwaysappropriate in northern, First Nations contexts.     

The humorous construction of disability: 'stand-up' comedians in the United States

We examine how stand-up [sic] comedy constructs, circulates, perpetuates and/or disrupts stereotypical images of disabled persons in the United States. We use disabled people, rather than people-first language, to remind readers that disability is an ill-defined, culturally imposed attribute. Although humor is culturally specific, we draw on works of an international cadre of humanities scholars and social scientists to ground our analyses. We conclude that disability humor constitutes an emerging, liberatory art form. Disabled and non-disabled comedians elicit thought-provoking laughter and present disability as an interesting way to live. However, disabling humor still perpetuates stereotyping and isolation.     

Four‐Month‐Olds' Discrimination of Voice Changes in Multimodal Displays as a Function of Discrimination Protocol

Past studies have found equivocal support for the ability of young infants to discriminate infant‐directed (ID) speech information in the presence of auditory‐only versus auditory + visual displays (faces + voices). Generally, younger infants appear to have more difficulty discriminating a change in the vocal properties of ID speech when they are accompanied by faces. Forty 4‐month‐old infants were tested using either an infant‐controlled habituation procedure (Experiment 1) or a fixed‐trial habituation procedure (Experiment 2). The prediction was that the infant‐controlled habituation procedure would be a more sensitive measure of infant attention to complex displays. The results indicated that 4‐month‐old infants discriminated voice changes in dynamic face + voice displays depending on the order in which they were viewed during the infant‐controlled habituation procedure. In contrast, no evidence of discrimination was found in the fixed‐trial procedure. The findings suggest that the selection of experimental methodology plays a significant role in the empirical observations of infant perceptual abilities.     

Welfare inequalities and Rawlsian axiomatics

This paper is concerned with ordinal comparisons of welfare inequality and its use in social welfare judgements, especially in the context of Rawls' difference principle. In Section 1 the concept of ordinal inequality comparisons is developed and a theorem on ordinal comparisons of welfare inequality for distributional problems is noted. Section 2 is devoted to Harsanyi's (1955) argument that a concern for reducing welfare inequalities among persons must not enter social welfare judgements. In Section 3 an axiomatic derivation of Rawls' lexicographic maximim rule is presented; this relates closely to results established by Hammond (1975), d'Aspremont and Gevers (1975) and Strasnick (1975). In the last section the axioms used are examined and some alternative axioms are analysed with the aim of a discriminating evaluation of the Rawlsian approach to judgements on social welfare.Based on the text of a lecture delivered at the International Congress of Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science in London, Ontario, Canada, on August 29th, 1975. Thanks are due to Peter Hammond and Kevin Roberts for helpful comments and criticisms.     

基于iCARE理论的《大学英语》课程定位研究与教改实践

《大学英语》是高校一门重要的公共基础课,厘清课程性质是推进教学改革的基础。在梳理不同时期《大学英语》教学大纲有关规定,借鉴国外高校现代语言课程定位基础上,提出《大学英语》课程定位是EGP,提高"交互密度"是保证学习效率和效果的关键。河北科技大学在多年教改实践基础上,创建了iCARE教学理论,并从六个方面推进《大学英语》课程改革,形成具有校本特色的《大学英语》教学模式,取得良好教改成效。     

Accounting for Uncertainty in Heteroscedasticity in Nonlinear Regression

Toxicologists and pharmacologists often describe toxicity of a chemical using parameters of a nonlinear regression model. Thus estimation of parameters of a nonlinear regression model is an important problem. The estimates of the parameters and their uncertainty estimates depend upon the underlying error variance structure in the model. Typically, a priori the researcher would not know if the error variances are homoscedastic (i.e., constant across dose) or if they are heteroscedastic (i.e., the variance is a function of dose). Motivated by this concern, in this paper we introduce an estimation procedure based on preliminary test which selects an appropriate estimation procedure accounting for the underlying error variance structure. Since outliers and influential observations are common in toxicological data, the proposed methodology uses M-estimators. The asymptotic properties of the preliminary test estimator are investigated; in particular its asymptotic covariance matrix is derived. The performance of the proposed estimator is compared with several standard estimators using simulation studies. The proposed methodology is also illustrated using a data set obtained from the National Toxicology Program.