OBJECTIVE We investigated elementary school children's ability to use a variety of Likert response formats to respond to concrete and abstract items. METHODS 111 children, aged 6-13 years, responded to 2 physical tasks that required them to make objectively verifiable judgments, using a 5-point response format. Then, using 25 items, we ascertained the consistency between responses using a "go...

We investigated the temporal properties of the red - green, blue-yellow, and luminance mechanisms in a contour-integration task which required the linking of orientation across space to detect a 'path'. Reaction times were obtained for simple detection of the stimulus regardless of the presence of a path, and for path detection measured by a yes/no procedure with path and no-path stimuli random...

Dear Editor, We are writing to respond to Dr. Schachar's letter (Schachar, 2007) regarding our study (Kasthurirangan & Glasser, 2006). The issues raised by Schachar are either founded on improper analysis or are already addressed in the article. Schachar has made assertions regarding analysis from just three subjects. In the original paper, trends in the changes in accommodative dynamics with a...

The workshop's website raises the interesting question of whether the original "No Silver Bullet" article [2] was optimistic, pessimistic, or sadly, realistic. This position paper follows the direction presented in David Harel's paper [3]: although we agree with many of its individual points, the paper present a far gloomier assessment of the situation than seems appropriate. In other words, we...

IT-enabled administrative innovation has been increasingly important to managers, both in the private and public sectors, as it is considered the “silver bullet” to revive organizations out of poor performance or turbulent times. This review article examines four alternative diffusion theories of administrative innovation, namely, the performance-and-then-legitimacydriven theory, the diminishin...

A longstanding puzzle in the semantics/pragmatics of questions has been the subtle differences between positive (e.g. Is it . . . ? ), low negative (Is it not . . . ? ), and high negative polar questions (Isn’t it . . . ? ). While they are intuitively ways of asking “the same question”, each has distinct felicity conditions and gives rise to different inferences about the speaker’s attitude tow...

We study the covering radius of sets of permutations with respect to the Hamming distance. Let f(n, s) be the smallest number m for which there is a set of m permutations in Sn with covering radius r ≤ n − s. We study f(n, s) in the general case and also in the case when the set of permutations forms a group. We find f(n, 1) exactly and bounds on f(n, s) for s > 1. For s = 2 our bounds are line...

Reproduction and immunity are fitness-related traits that trade-off with each other. Parasite-mediated theories of sexual selection suggest, however, that higher-quality males should suffer smaller costs to reproduction-related traits and behaviours (e.g., sexual display) from an immune challenge because these males possess more resources with which to deal with the challenge. We used Gryllus t...

Following Brooks and Vokey (1991), we show that positive transfer to new items generated from an artificial grammar in which the vocabulary has been changed from training to test can be based on "abstract analogy" to specific training items (specific similarity) rather than abstraction of a grammar and symbol remapping rules, even with remapping unique to each test item. The results confirm tha...

This paper analyzes how low-income fathers allocate their resources across complex parenting situations, and why some fathers provide no support at all to their non-custodial children. Data come from the Time, Love, and Cash among Couples with Children (TLC3) project, a longitudinal, qualitative study of 75 romantically involved parents who have just shared a birth. One possible explanation for...