A Behavioral and Neural Evaluation of Prospective Decision-Making under Risk

Making the best choice when faced with a chain of decisions requires a person to judge both anticipated outcomes and future actions. Although economic decision-making models account for both risk and reward in single-choice contexts, there is a dearth of similar knowledge about sequential choice. Classical utility-based models assume that decision-makers select and follow an optimal predetermined strategy, regardless of the particular order in which options are presented. An alternative model involves continuously reevaluating decision utilities, without prescribing a specific future set of choices. Here, using behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, we studied human subjects in a sequential choice task and use these data to compare alternative decision models of valuation and strategy selection. We provide evidence that subjects adopt a model of reevaluating decision utilities, in which available strategies are continuously updated and combined in assessing action values. We validate this model by using simultaneously acquired fMRI data to show that sequential choice evokes a pattern of neural response consistent with a tracking of anticipated distribution of future reward, as expected in such a model. Thus, brain activity evoked at each decision point reflects the expected mean, variance, and skewness of possible payoffs, consistent with the idea that sequential choice evokes a prospective evaluation of both available strategies and possible outcomes

Workforce Development in the South West Voluntary and Community Sectors:Skill Shortages Study

The Voluntary Sector National Training Organisation, now the National  Workforce Development Hub, describes the Voluntary and Community  Sector  as  diverse  and  covering  a  variety  of  different  organisations.  Organisations range from traditional charities, to companies that trade to  support their social aims, through to informal community organisations.  The sector also includes federations, or networks of local groups working  under national umbrellas.  Voluntary and community sector organisations  provide  a  wide  range  of  services  and  activities  and  many  of  the  organisations are involved in the delivery of learning, whether through  accredited training or informal learning.  The Government has increasingly recognised the importance of Voluntary  and  community  sector  organisations  and  the  key  role  that  they  play  nationally,  regionally  and  locally.    Initiatives  to  support  the  sector,  underpinned by funding, have been undertaken and the Government has  been  active  in  encouraging  and  commissioning  research  and  strategic  planning  in  the  sector,  in  particular  emphasising  the  importance  of  developing the skills, capacities and potential of the workforce.  Sector organisations generally display a strong commitment to training  and workforce development.  However, in spite of this commitment and  the presence of a high proportion of well‐qualified workers, skills gaps,  that is skills lacking in the current workforce, and skills shortages caused  by recruitment difficulties, are present in the sector.  There are also skills  gaps and shortages in the volunteer workforce

Using Smart Grid Technologies To Protect Human Health In Water Distribution Systems

Since the introduction of the Safe Drinking Water Act, there has been marked reduction in the number of water-borne disease outbreaks attributed to water treatment systems. Over the same period, however, the percentage of disease outbreaks attributable to defects in the distribution system has increased exponentially. Interestingly, as a result of the continuous aging infrastructure employed by our water utilities, the number of water-borne disease cases has increased in the last decade. The smart grid for water can be used to significantly improve both the utility\u27s understanding of water quality in the distribution system, but can dramatically increase the response and provide the means to ensure public health protection. By combining customer input via call centres, highly granular consumption data from the Customer Information System, operational information from Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems, hydraulic modeling data and geo-referenced spatial asset management data, a rapid, visual identification of water distribution system health can be built allowing operations staff to immediately respond to any potential issue. Further, leak detection flags and reverse flow flags from Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) metering systems can be employed to both identify potential ingress of contaminants, and where hydraulic conditions exist that promote reverse flows. This paper will present the use of the Analytical Water Quality Assurance Program developed to provide instantaneous water quality notifications throughout the utility organization

The Body Ecstatic: The Masochism of Devotion as Seen in Ritual Possession

Religious studies, insofar as it is a Western endeavor, largely suffers from separating body from mind. When adherents to this Enlightenment Era thinking focus only on theology or psychology as distinct from ritual studies, or consider ritual as merely tangentially or symbolically related to theology rather than an enactment of theology, it’s clear to me that religious studies struggles with an ignorance about bodies. Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling in their article “Reflexive Modernity and the Religious Body” attribute religious scholars’ ignorance in the past and present to a “new Protestant attitude” in the early modern period wherein “the Protestant Reformers problematized the individual’s relationship to the Church… by turning the Church into a disembodied idea… This Church was unknowable, invisible and thus purely an object of faith” (Mellor and Shilling 30). They impress upon the student of religion, their primary audience, that the separation of valid, conventional religious experience from the body is not an inherent part of faith but a modern invention: “Here we can observe the psychologization of Christianity… and an attendant reduction of it to what is subjectively and psychologically sustainable, rather than it being a taken-for-granted part of one’s embodied reality” (Mellor & Shilling 30). They write from 1994; writing from 2019, I believe it is time to abandon the arbitrary division of body and mind in religious studies as well as larger Western culture. The phenomenology of religion offers a great many useful things, but a study of religious experience cannot be complete without an equally rigorous study of religious bodies—since, even the most ardent believer in the supremacy of mind over matter will agree, the body is the experiencer. To some, all the body does is experience. I aim to formulate a theory of the religious body: what is it? how does it function in ritual and mundane contexts? how can a scholar’s understanding of the religious body enhance their work

An Impossible Standard: The Virgin Mary and the Construction of Southern Womanhood

This paper examines Southern literature about white women in its religious and cultural contexts to illuminate the deeply embedded connections between the figure of the Virgin Mary and the archetypes of the white Southern Belle and Dixie Madonna, and reveal both a complex web of cultural constructions designed to control, critique, and constrain Southern women, and how women use those constructions to free themselves

The Western, Violence, and Queer Expression in Red River, Brokeback Mountain, and Thelma & Louise

Of all the tools the film industry has used in the past and present to contribute to American myth-making, the Western is the most iconic. If, as critic J. Hoberman argues in a Village Voice article, “the Western has always been the most idyllically homosocial of modes,” and, as film scholar Erika Spohrer writes in her article about genre and Brokeback Mountain (2005, dir. Ang Lee), “by inserting Brokeback Mountain into the Western canon, critics force a re-vision, a re-seeing of all Westerns that have preceded it,” then I argue for the necessity of pursuing that critical work and analyzing gay- or lesbian-coding in Westerns, traditional and revised (Spohrer 5). Like Alexander Doty, I don’t present my comments as “alternative” readings, “against the grain” of the film’s true, heterosexual mission; instead, I agree with Doty’s suggestion that “within cultural production and reception, queer erotics are already part of culture’s erotic center” (3). My mission isn’t to apply “queer theory” to a text as if gayness were something foreign to that text that needed to be introduced—but rather to elucidate the gayness already within the text at every level

Validation of T2* in-line analysis for tissue iron quantification at 1.5 T.

BACKGROUND: There is a need for improved worldwide access to tissue iron quantification using T2* cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR). One route to facilitate this would be simple in-line T2* analysis widely available on MR scanners. We therefore compared our clinically validated and established T2* method at Royal Brompton Hospital (RBH T2*) against a novel work-in-progress (WIP) sequence with in-line T2* measurement from Siemens (WIP T2*). METHODS: Healthy volunteers (n = 22) and patients with iron overload (n = 78) were recruited (53 males, median age 34 years). A 1.5 T study (Magnetom Avanto, Siemens) was performed on all subjects. The same mid-ventricular short axis cardiac slice and transaxial slice through the liver were used to acquire both RBH T2* images and WIP T2* maps for each participant. Cardiac white blood (WB) and black blood (BB) sequences were acquired. Intraobserver, interobserver and interstudy reproducibility were measured on the same data from a subset of 20 participants. RESULTS: Liver T2* values ranged from 0.8 to 35.7 ms (median 5.1 ms) and cardiac T2* values from 6.0 to 52.3 ms (median 31 ms). The coefficient of variance (CoV) values for direct comparison of T2* values by RBH and WIP were 6.1-7.8 % across techniques. Accurate delineation of the septum was difficult on some WIP T2* maps due to artefacts. The inability to manually correct for noise by truncation of erroneous later echo times led to some overestimation of T2* using WIP T2* compared with the RBH T2*. Reproducibility CoV results for RBH T2* ranged from 1.5 to 5.7 % which were better than the reproducibility of WIP T2* values of 4.1-16.6 %. CONCLUSIONS: Iron estimation using the T2* CMR sequence in combination with Siemens' in-line data processing is generally satisfactory and may help facilitate global access to tissue iron assessment. The current automated T2* map technique is less good for tissue iron assessment with noisy data at low T2* values