Modern cultures are deeply imbued with notions of measurement. Nearly all scientific disciplines depend heavily on mathematics, and the social sciences in particular have seen a rapid recent development of quantitative methodology and accompanying measurement regimes. Political debate also involves the use of measurements of all kinds and it is often assumed that the introduction of new measure...

This note revisits the concepts of task and difficulty. The notion of cognitive task and its use for the evaluation of intelligent systems is still replete with issues. The view of tasks as MDP in the context of reinforcement learning has been especially useful for the formalisation of learning tasks. However, this alternate interaction does not accommodate well for some other tasks that are us...

Background: Safety climate assessment is increasingly recognized as an important factor in healthcare quality improvement, especially in operating rooms (OR). One of the most commonly used and rigorously validated tools to measure safety culture is the Safety Attitudes Questionnaire (SAQ). This study presents the validation of the Operating Room Version of the SAQ (SAQ-OR) for use in Portuguese...

Within the debate on the structure of affect, a consensus began emerging in the last decade regarding the bipolarity of happiness–sadness. We argue that this consensus is premature. Focusing on the psychometrics of momentary affect, particularly happiness and sadness, and using a simulation study, a large-scale data set, and 2 experiments manipulating affect, we plot a map of affective space th...