Do Students' Religion and School Absences Moderate the Effect of Ethnic Stereotypes on School-Placement Recommendations?

The results of two experiments demonstrate that preservice teachers made biased school-placement recommendations depending on student's ethnicity, which on average penalized students from an ethnic minority. Moreover, additional information that was supposed to disconfirm ethnic stereotypes (religious affiliation in Experiment 1, number of missed school days in Experiment 2) led to more high-track recommendations for low-achieving minority students and to fewer high-track recommendations for high-achieving minority students. Conversely, stereotype-disconfirming information exerted little or no influence on the recommendations for high-achieving native students but worsened recommendations for low-achieving students. The results were interpreted as being based either on subtyping (predominantly for minority Turkish students) or subgrouping (predominantly for majority German students) of ethnic stereotypes.     

For Oscar Glory Or Oscar Money?

This paper investigates the effect of Oscar nominations and awards on movies’ financial success by estimating the impact on weekly returns and on movies’ survival time. Our findings suggest that nominations for Oscars generate substantial extra revenues, while winning an award contributes only little to this extra rent.     

Disposition-Content Congruency and the Negation of Media Stereotypes

A critical assessment of mass-mediated stereotypes by media users can be deemed as beneficial for an open and humane society. One important concept in this regard is negation, which refers to an internal attempt to negate newly encountered stereotypic media content. This study predicted that disposition-content congruence moderates the negation process. In fact, it investigated whether those whose prejudicial dispositions are congruent with the stereotypic content negate less. An experiment (N = 245) using a quota-based sample was used to test the hypothesis. Participants read stereotypic crime texts including the “criminal foreigner”-stereotype or matched control texts. As hypothesized, unprejudiced readers who held favorable attitudes toward the social minority group negated the stereotypic information. Conversely, highly prejudiced individuals showed even less negation when exposed to the stereotypic versions of the crime texts. Highly prejudiced readers might have viewed exposure to criminal foreigners as a confirmation of their attitudinal predispositions.     

Sharpen their skills

Early Childhood Education Journal - With the end of summer's carefree days, children (and parents too) are anxious for the first day of school. The projects and activities listed here will help...     

An industrial application of symbolic model checking The TWIN elevator case study

Model checking techniques are recognized to provide reliable and copious results. Instead of examining a few cases only – as it is done in testing – model checking includes the whole state space in mathematical proofs of correctness. Yet, this completeness is seen as a drawback as the state explosion problem is hard to handle. In our industrial case study, we apply automated model checking techniques to an innovative elevator system, the TWIN by ThyssenKrupp. By means of abstraction and nondeterminism, we cope with runtime behaviour and achieve to efficiently prove our specification’s validity. The elevator’s safety requirements are exhaustively expressed in temporal logic along with real-world and algorithmic prerequisites, consistency properties, and fairness constraints. Beyond verifying system safety for an actual installation, our case study demonstrates the rewarding applicability of model checking at an industrial scale.