ASU Scholarship Showcase

This article develops a welfare theoretic framework for interpreting evidence on the impacts of public programs on housing markets. We extend Rosen's hedonic model to explain how housing prices capitalize exogenous shocks to public goods and externalities. The model predicts that trading between heterogeneous buyers and sellers will drive a wedge between these “capitalization effects” and welfare changes. We test this hypothesis in the context of changes in measures of school quality in five metropolitan areas. Results from boundary discontinuity designs suggest that capitalization effects understate parents’ willingness to pay for public school improvements by as much as 75%.

Stone-tipped weapons were a significant innovation for Middle Pleistocene hominins. Hafted hunting technology represents the development of new cognitive and social learning mechanisms within the genus Homo, and may have provided a foraging advantage over simpler forms of hunting technology, such as a sharpened wooden spear. However, the nature of this foraging advantage has not been confirmed. Experimental studies and ethnographic reports provide conflicting results regarding the relative importance of the functional, economic, and social roles of hafted hunting technology. The controlled experiment reported here was designed to test the functional hypothesis for stone-tipped weapons using spears and ballistics gelatin. It differs from previous investigations of this type because it includes a quantitative analysis of wound track profiles and focuses specifically on hand-delivered spear technology. Our results do not support the hypothesis that tipped spears penetrate deeper than untipped spears. However, tipped spears create a significantly larger inner wound cavity that widens distally. This inner wound cavity is analogous to the permanent wound cavity in ballistics research, which is considered the key variable affecting the relative ‘stopping power’ or ‘killing power’ of a penetrating weapon. Tipped spears conferred a functional advantage to Middle Pleistocene hominins, potentially affecting the frequency and regularity of hunting success with important implications for human adaptation and life history.

The Middle Stone Age (MSA) is associated with early evidence for symbolic material culture and complex technological innovations. However, one of the most visible aspects of MSA technologies are unretouched triangular stone points that appear in the archaeological record as early as 500,000 years ago in Africa and persist throughout the MSA. How these tools were being used and discarded across a changing Pleistocene landscape can provide insight into how MSA populations prioritized technological and foraging decisions. Creating inferential links between experimental and archaeological tool use helps to establish prehistoric tool function, but is complicated by the overlaying of post-depositional damage onto behaviorally worn tools. Taphonomic damage patterning can provide insight into site formation history, but may preclude behavioral interpretations of tool function. Here, multiple experimental processes that form edge damage on unretouched lithic points from taphonomic and behavioral processes are presented. These provide experimental distributions of wear on tool edges from known processes that are then quantitatively compared to the archaeological patterning of stone point edge damage from three MSA lithic assemblages—Kathu Pan 1, Pinnacle Point Cave 13B, and Die Kelders Cave 1. By using a model-fitting approach, the results presented here provide evidence for variable MSA behavioral strategies of stone point utilization on the landscape consistent with armature tips at KP1, and cutting tools at PP13B and DK1, as well as damage contributions from post-depositional sources across assemblages. This study provides a method with which landscape-scale questions of early modern human tool-use and site-use can be addressed.

We formulate an in silico model of pathogen avoidance mechanism and investigate its impact on defensive behavioural measures (e.g., spontaneous social exclusions and distancing, crowd avoidance and voluntary vaccination adaptation). In particular, we use SIR(B)S (e.g., susceptible-infected-recovered with additional behavioural component) model to investigate the impact of homo-psychologicus aspects of epidemics. We focus on reactionary behavioural changes, which apply to both social distancing and voluntary vaccination participations. Our analyses reveal complex relationships between spontaneous and uncoordinated behavioural changes, the emergence of its contagion properties, and mitigation of infectious diseases. We find that the presence of effective behavioural changes can impede the persistence of disease. Furthermore, it was found that under perfect effective behavioural change, there are three regions in the response factor (e.g., imitation and/or reactionary) and behavioural scale factor (e.g., global/local) factors ρ–α behavioural space. Mainly, (1) disease is always endemic even in the presence of behavioural change, (2) behavioural-prevalence plasticity is observed and disease can sometimes be eradication, and (3) elimination of endemic disease under permanence of permanent behavioural change is achieved. These results suggest that preventive behavioural changes (e.g., non-pharmaceutical prophylactic measures, social distancing and exclusion, crowd avoidance) are influenced by individual differences in perception of risks and are a salient feature of epidemics. Additionally, these findings indicates that care needs to be taken when considering the effect of adaptive behavioural change in predicting the course of epidemics, and as well as the interpretation and development of the public health measures that account for spontaneous behavioural changes.

Increasing levels of financial inequality prompt questions about the relationship between income and well-being. Using a twins sample from the Survey of Midlife Development in the U. S. and controlling for personality as core self-evaluations (CSE), we found that men, but not women, had higher subjective financial well-being (SFWB) when they had higher incomes. This relationship was due to ‘unshared environmental’ factors rather than genes, suggesting that the effect of income on SFWB is driven by unique experiences among men. Further, for women and men, we found that CSE influenced income and SFWB, and that both genetic and environmental factors explained this relationship. Given the relatively small and male-specific relationship between income and SFWB, and the determination of both income and SFWB by personality, we propose that policy makers focus on malleable factors beyond merely income in order to increase SFWB, including financial education and building self-regulatory capacity.

The debate about representation in the brain and the nature of the cognitive system has been going on for decades now. This paper examines the neurophysiological evidence, primarily from single cell recordings, to get a better perspective on both the issues. After an initial review of some basic concepts, the paper reviews the data from single cell recordings – in cortical columns and of category-selective and multisensory neurons. In neuroscience, columns in the neocortex (cortical columns) are understood to be a basic functional/computational unit. The paper reviews the fundamental discoveries about the columnar organization and finds that it reveals a massively parallel search mechanism. This columnar organization could be the most extensive neurophysiological evidence for the widespread use of localist representation in the brain. The paper also reviews studies of category-selective cells. The evidence for category-selective cells reveals that localist representation is also used to encode complex abstract concepts at the highest levels of processing in the brain. A third major issue is the nature of the cognitive system in the brain and whether there is a form that is purely abstract and encoded by single cells. To provide evidence for a single-cell based purely abstract cognitive system, the paper reviews some of the findings related to multisensory cells. It appears that there is widespread usage of multisensory cells in the brain in the same areas where sensory processing takes place. Plus there is evidence for abstract modality invariant cells at higher levels of cortical processing. Overall, that reveals the existence of a purely abstract cognitive system in the brain. The paper also argues that since there is no evidence for dense distributed representation and since sparse representation is actually used to encode memories, there is actually no evidence for distributed representation in the brain. Overall, it appears that, at an abstract level, the brain is a massively parallel, distributed computing system that is symbolic. The paper also explains how grounded cognition and other theories of the brain are fully compatible with localist representation and a purely abstract cognitive system.

The estimation of energy demand (by power plants) has traditionally relied on historical energy use data for the region(s) that a plant produces for. Regression analysis, artificial neural network and Bayesian theory are the most common approaches for analysing these data. Such data and techniques do not generate reliable results. Consequently, excess energy has to be generated to prevent blackout; causes for energy surge are not easily determined; and potential energy use reduction from energy efficiency solutions is usually not translated into actual energy use reduction. The paper highlights the weaknesses of traditional techniques, and lays out a framework to improve the prediction of energy demand by combining energy use models of equipment, physical systems and buildings, with the proposed data mining algorithms for reverse engineering. The research team first analyses data samples from large complex energy data, and then, presents a set of computationally efficient data mining algorithms for reverse engineering. In order to develop a structural system model for reverse engineering, two focus groups are developed that has direct relation with cause and effect variables. The research findings of this paper includes testing out different sets of reverse engineering algorithms, understand their output patterns and modify algorithms to elevate accuracy of the outputs.

Small and medium office buildings consume a significant parcel of the U.S. building stock energy consumption. Still, owners lack resources and experience to conduct detailed energy audits and retrofit analysis. We present an eight-steps framework for an energy retrofit assessment in small and medium office buildings. Through a bottom-up approach and a web-based retrofit toolkit tested on a case study in Arizona, this methodology was able to save about 50% of the total energy consumed by the case study building, depending on the adopted measures and invested capital. While the case study presented is a deep energy retrofit, the proposed framework is effective in guiding the decision-making process that precedes any energy retrofit, deep or light.

Neuropharmacological effects of psychedelics have profound cognitive, emotional, and social effects that inspired the development of cultures and religions worldwide. Findings that psychedelics objectively and reliably produce mystical experiences press the question of the neuropharmacological mechanisms by which these highly significant experiences are produced by exogenous neurotransmitter analogs. Humans have a long evolutionary relationship with psychedelics, a consequence of psychedelics' selective effects for human cognitive abilities, exemplified in the information rich visionary experiences. Objective evidence that psychedelics produce classic mystical experiences, coupled with the finding that hallucinatory experiences can be induced by many non-drug mechanisms, illustrates the need for a common model of visionary effects. Several models implicate disturbances of normal regulatory processes in the brain as the underlying mechanisms responsible for the similarities of visionary experiences produced by psychedelic and other methods for altering consciousness. Similarities in psychedelic-induced visionary experiences and those produced by practices such as meditation and hypnosis and pathological conditions such as epilepsy indicate the need for a general model explaining visionary experiences. Common mechanisms underlying diverse alterations of consciousness involve the disruption of normal functions of the prefrontal cortex and default mode network (DMN). This interruption of ordinary control mechanisms allows for the release of thalamic and other lower brain discharges that stimulate a visual information representation system and release the effects of innate cognitive functions and operators. Converging forms of evidence support the hypothesis that the source of psychedelic experiences involves the emergence of these innate cognitive processes of lower brain systems, with visionary experiences resulting from the activation of innate processes based in the mirror neuron system (MNS).

Commercial buildings’ consumption is driven by multiple factors that include occupancy, system and equipment efficiency, thermal heat transfer, equipment plug loads, maintenance and operational procedures, and outdoor and indoor temperatures. A modern building energy system can be viewed as a complex dynamical system that is interconnected and influenced by external and internal factors. Modern large scale sensor measures some physical signals to monitor real-time system behaviors. Such data has the potentials to detect anomalies, identify consumption patterns, and analyze peak loads. The paper proposes a novel method to detect hidden anomalies in commercial building energy consumption system. The framework is based on Hilbert-Huang transform and instantaneous frequency analysis. The objectives are to develop an automated data pre-processing system that can detect anomalies and provide solutions with real-time consumption database using Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition (EEMD) method. The finding of this paper will also include the comparisons of Empirical mode decomposition and Ensemble empirical mode decomposition of three important type of institutional buildings.