An empirical investigation of human dyadic systems in the time and frequency domains

This paper presents time and frequency domain analyses of psychotherapy data drawn from a unique dyadic system--the patient/therapist (P/T) system. The data are constituted by a time series defined by which member of the P/T system held the speaker role at each second of ten recorded psychotherapy consultations. The series reflects a specific property of communication within the dyad. Each series significantly followed a first order autoregressive model. That is, each was highly sensitive to the prior state of the system, or equivalently, the system showed feedforward of its prior state. These models became more significant after intervention analysis further clarified the underlying autoregressive structure. The histograms of the frequency of the length of each utterance indicated an underlying Poisson model for the emergence of speech. The parameters of the Poisson and autoregressive models were used to determine blindly which of four pairs of interviews involved the same therapist with two different patients. The method correctly identified three of the therapist four pairs but failed to identify different interviews with the same patient, a significantly negative result. These results suggest that certain time domain measures are therapist-dominated, so that the therapist drives change in these areas within the P/T system more strongly than the patient. In the frequency domain, the coherency between each of the 45 pairs of speaker series was used in an attempt to identify which time series corresponded systematically to the same therapists or patients. This proved futile because no two pairs of series--no P/T system--showed significant non-zero coherency. This result suggests that the harmonics of the switching of the speaker role are not determined by the therapist or patient alone but by the P/T system as an entity. We conclude that human dyadic systems may show predominant influence of one member or jointly determined patterns that are highly distinctive.     

Aquatic landscape change,extirpations, and introductions in the Chicago Region

Urban Ecosystems - Prior to European settlement, swamps, marshes, lakes, and streams were the major landscape features of the Chicago region. Much of this has been altered or lost in the past...     

Occupations,Human Capital and Skills

Economists have long recognized that occupations can be used as proxies for skills in wage regressions. Yet the potential existence of non-market factors such as discrimination and occupational choice (sorting) on the basis of job attributes that are separate from, but potentially correlated with, wages makes occupations an imperfect control for skills. In this paper, we consider whether inter-occupational wage differentials that are unexplained by measured human capital are indeed due to differences in unmeasured skill. Using the National Compensation Survey, a large, nationally-representative dataset on jobs and ten different components of job requirements, we compare the effects on residual wage variation of including occupation indicators and these skill requirements measures. We find that although these skill requirements vary across 3-digit occupations, occupation indicators decrease wage residuals by far more than can be explained by skill alone. This indicates that “controlling for occupation” does not equate to controlling for only these skill measures, but also for other factors. Additionally, we find that there is considerable within-occupation variation in skill requirements, and that the amount of variation is not constant across skill levels. As a result, including occupation indicators in a wage model introduces heteroskedasticity that must be accounted for. We suggest that caution be applied when using and interpreting occupation indicators as controls in wage regressions.     

Nuclear Risk Management on Stage: A Decision Analysis Perspective on the UK's Committee on Radioactive Waste Management

In 2003, the UK government set up a broad-based Committee on radioactive waste management (CoRWM) to look at the UK's policy on radioactive waste management with a view to jumpstarting a stalled policy process. The committee's brief was to come up with a set of recommendations that would protect the public and the environment, and be capable of inspiring public confidence. After consulting widely with the public and stakeholders, and drawing on advice from scientists and other experts, CoRWM arrived at a remarkably well-received set of recommendations. On the basis of our experiences of working on CoRWM's multi-criteria decision analysis of different management options, study of CoRWM documentation, and interviews with committee members, we describe the explicit and implicit principles that guided CoRWM. We also give an account of the process by which CoRWM arrived at its conclusions, covering four phases: framing, shortlisting, option assessment, and integration; and four cross-cutting activities: public and stakeholder engagement (PSE), science and engineering input, ethics and social science input, and learning from overseas practice. We finish by outlining some of the key developments in the UK's radioactive waste management process, which followed on from the publication of CoRWM's report, and present our reflections for the benefit of the risk and decision analysts of future committees that, like CoRWM, are charged with recommending to government on the management of technically complex and risky technologies, drawing on extensive public and stakeholder consultation.     

Depression,emotional states,and the experience of binge-watching narrative television

Terms like “binge-watching” and the “showhole” suggest a relationship between binge-watching and emotional health. This study sought to understand the relationship between binge-watching, unhealthy emotional traits, and regular emotional states such as sadness. The study found that emotional states experienced after binge-watching had implications for entertainment gratifications. However, the study did not find a conclusive connection between binge-watching and unhealthy emotional traits.     

Enclosure,writing, and resistance: revisiting the prose of Daniil Kharms

The author argues that discipline – operating through the distribution of individuals by means of enclosure and surveillance – is crucial to understanding Daniil Kharms’s prose of the 1930s. The author focuses on three of his mini-stories, first looking at mechanisms of surveillance in “Dream,” examining their effects upon the psyche that have material impacts on the body of the individual. Then he turns to a trajectory of enclosure that operates from the urban commons (“Trial by Lynching”) to the home (“An Unexpected Drinking Party”). The centripetal trajectory of enclosure ends in all cases at the body as the endpoint of discipline and, ultimately, the site of Kharms’s “grotesque resistance,” challenging the enclosure of the body from the point of its confinement. He also looks to how paper – as theme in and medium of Kharms’s work – operates within these spatial dynamics. He draws upon Harold Innis, who associated the rise of print in the United States with the “space bias” of communication. Reading Foucault and Innis together, Kharms’s short prose works can be understood as a contestation of the space bias of print media in the Stalinist era, prompting Kharms’s retreat to the contours of the body as a site of struggle.     

An extended Gaussian max-stable process model for spatial extremes

The extremes of environmental processes are often of interest due to the damage that can be caused by extreme levels of the processes. These processes are often spatial in nature and modelling the extremes jointly at many locations can be important. In this paper, an extension of the Gaussian max-stable process is developed, enabling data from a number of locations to be modelled under a more flexible framework than in previous applications. The model is applied to annual maximum rainfall data from five sites in South-West England. For estimation we employ a pairwise likelihood within a Bayesian analysis, incorporating informative prior information.     

How Do We Assess How Agentic We Are? A Literature Review of Existing Instruments to Evaluate and Measure Individuals' Agency

Social Indicators Research - The importance and centrality of the construct of agency is wellknown amongst social scientists. Yet, there is still little agreement on how this construct should be...