The Relationships Between Paranormal Belief, Creationism, Intelligent Design and Evolution at Secondary Schools in Vienna (Austria)

The present study is the first to investigate the relationships between a multiple set of paranormal beliefs and the acceptance of evolution, creationism, and intelligent design, respectively, in Europe. Using a questionnaire, 2,129 students at secondary schools in Vienna (Austria) answered the 26 statements of the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (R-PBS) and three statements about naturalistic evolution, creationism and intelligent design (ID). The investigated Austrian students showed an average R-PBS score of 82.08, more than 50% of them agreed with naturalistic evolution, 28% with creationism, and more than a third agreed with ID, the latter two closely correlated with each other. Females generally showed higher belief scores in the paranormal, creationism and ID. The agreement with naturalistic evolution correlated negatively with religious belief, but not with other paranormal beliefs, whereas the two non-scientific alternatives to evolution significantly correlated with both traditional and paranormal beliefs. Religious belief showed a significant positive correlation with other paranormal beliefs. All subscales of paranormal belief decreased during the eight grades of secondary school, as did acceptance of creationism and ID. However, the acceptance of naturalistic evolution did not correlate with age or grade. Possible reasons and implications for science education and the biology curriculum at Austrian secondary schools are discussed.     

A longitudinal perspective on inductive reasoning tasks. Illuminating the probability of change

Cognitive scientists have studied internal cognitive structures, processes, and systems for decades in order to understand how they function in human learning. Nevertheless, questions concerning the diagnosis of changes in these cognitive structures while solving inductive reasoning tasks are still being scrutinized. This paper reports findings from an experimental study in which 64 participants in three experimental groups solved tasks at ten measurement points. We were able to illuminate changes of cognitive structures and found significant differences between the treatments. The results also indicate that supportive information is an important aid for developing cognitive structures while solving inductive reasoning tasks.     

Human handedness in interactive situations: Negative perceptual frequency effects can be reversed!

Left-handed performers seem to enjoy an advantage in interactive sports. Researchers suggest this is predominantly due to the relative scarcity of left-handers compared with right-handers. Such negative frequency-dependent advantages are likely to appear in inefficient game-play behaviour against left-handed opponents such as reduced ability to correctly anticipate left-handers' action intentions. We used a pre-post retention design to test whether such negative frequency-dependent perceptual effects can be reversed via effective training. In a video-based test, 30 handball novices anticipated the shot outcome of temporally occluded handball penalties thrown by right- and left-handed players. Between the pre- and post-tests, participants underwent a perceptual training programme to improve prediction accuracy, followed by an unfilled retention test one week later. Participants were divided into two hand-specific training groups (i.e. only right- or left-handed shots were presented during training) and a mixed group (i.e. both right- and left-handed shots were presented). Our results support the negative frequency-dependent advantage hypothesis, as hand-specific perceptual training led to side-specific improvement of anticipation skills. Similarly, findings provide experimental evidence to support the contention that negatively frequency-dependent selection mechanisms contributed to the maintenance of the handedness polymorphism.     

Themenheft: Digitale Bibliotheken

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Editorial

Ohne Zusammenfassung

---

Editorial

     

Book selection strategies in university libraries of Pakistan: An analysis

University libraries in Pakistan spend a large portion of their funds on buying books and these are still the most important part of libraries' collections. Selection policies and practices play fundamental role in developing a strong book collection. This study aims to explore the policies, methods and procedures of selecting books in the university libraries of Pakistan. Data for the study were collected following multi-method approach, through questionnaires and unstructured interviews with the university librarians and faculty members for the doctoral research by the present author during 2003 to 2004. The analysis of data shows that the factors affecting successful execution of the practice of effective selection include: overly dependence on the faculty for selection, constraints of faculty members as selectors, non-availability of selection aids, lack of awareness regarding online resources available for selection, etc. The study suggests some feasible ways to improve the situation. The findings and suggestions may be of value to the countries with similar situations in the developing world.     

Retrieval quality vs. effectiveness of specificity-oriented search in XML collections

Content-only queries in hierarchically structured documents should retrieve the most specific document nodes which are exhaustive to the information need. For this problem, we investigate two methods of augmentation, which both yield high retrieval quality. As retrieval effectiveness, we consider the ratio of retrieval quality and response time; thus, fast approximations to the 'correct' retrieval result may yield higher effectiveness. We present a classification scheme for algorithms addressing this issue, and adopt known algorithms from standard document retrieval for XML retrieval. As a new strategy, we propose incremental-interruptible retrieval, which allows for instant presentation of the top ranking documents. We develop a new algorithm implementing this strategy and evaluate the different methods with the INEX collection.     

WHAT RESPONDENTS LEARN FROM SCALES: THE INFORMATIVE FUNCTIONS OF RESPONSE ALTERNATIVES

Survey respondents are often asked to report the frequency withwhich they engage in a certain behavior by checking the appropriatealternative from a list of response categories provided to them.A psychological research program, reviewed in the present paper,indicates that response alternatives are not only measurementdevices but constitute a source of information for the respondent.Specifically, respondents assume that the average or typicalbehavior is reflected by values stated in the middle range ofthe response alternatives and that the extremes of the listreflect the extremes of the distribution. This assumption affectstheir own responses in various ways. First, respondents usethe range of the response alternatives as a frame of referencein estimating their own behavioral frequencies and report higherfrequencies on scales that present high rather than low frequencyresponse alternatives. Second, respondents extract comparisoninformation from their own location on the response scale anduse this information in making comparative judgments. Finally,if the target behavior is open to interpretation, as is oftenthe case when subjective experiences are assessed, respondentsuse the response alternatives to determine the exact referenceof the question. Accordingly, the same question in combinationwith different response alternatives is likely to assess differentexperiences. Implications for questionnaire construction arediscussed.     

Generierte DB-Aufrufschnittstellen – Anwendungsspezifische Zugriffsoptimierung durch Bindungsflexibilit?t

Jede Datenbankprogrammierschnittstelle mu? sich daran messen lassen, inwieweit sie die Vorteile der durch sie integrierten Sprachen (Datenbank- und Programmiersprache) erh?lt. Neben dieser allgemeinen Zielsetzung müssen heutzutage neuere Konzepte in den Bereichen Programmiersprachen und Datenbanksysteme sowie die Anforderungen komplexer Anwendungsbereiche (z. B. CAD oder Software-Entwicklung) beachtet werden. Unser Ansatz der generierten Aufrufschnittstellen soll dazu beitragen, Datenmodelle objekt- relationaler Datenbanksysteme und Typsysteme objektorientierter Programmiersprachen n?her zusammenzurücken. Er erlaubt neben der Schnittstellengenerierung ihre anwendungsspezifische Konfigurierung, um die DB-Verarbeitung spezieller Anwendungen gezielt optimieren zu k?nnen. Wir werden neben Aspekten der Generierung/Konfigurierung die Nutzung von generierten Aufrufschnittstellen beschreiben und Experimente vorstellen, die den durch diesen Ansatz erzielbaren Leistungsgewinn verdeutlichen. Letzterer kann durch gezielten, auf die jeweilige Anwendung zugeschnittenen Einsatz von frühen Bindungen für Datenmanipulationsoperationen sowie von Pointer-Swizzling-/Prefetching-Mechanismen erreicht werden.