The study of topological band structures have sparked prominent research interest the past decade, culminating in recent formulation rather prolific classification schemes that encapsulate a large fraction phases and features. Within this context we recently reported on class unexplored thrive concept {\it sub-dimensional topology}. Although such trivial indicators representations when evaluate...

In studies of subjective well-being, economists and other researchers typically use a fixed or random effect estimation to control for unobservable heterogeneity across individuals. Such individual heterogeneity, although substantially reducing the estimated effect of many characteristics, is little understood. This paper shows that personality measures can account for 20% of this heterogeneity...

We discuss the use of fixed and random effects models in the context of educational research and set out the assumptions behind the two modelling approaches. To illustrate the issues that should be considered when choosing between these approaches, we analyse the determinants of pupil achievement in primary school, using data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. We conclude...

An alternative to the classical mixedmodel with normal random effects is to use a Dirichlet process to model the random effects. Such models have proven useful in practice, and we have observed a noticeable variance reduction, in the estimation of the fixed effects, when the Dirichlet process is used instead of the normal. In this paper we formalize this notion, and give a theoretical justifica...

In this paper I discuss economic processes that may give rise to spatial patterns in data, and explore the relative merits of alternative modeling approaches when data are spatially correlated. Specifically, I present an estimation scheme that allows for spatial random effects, and focus attention on cases in which such a framework may be preferred to the more general fixed effects framework th...

The present study investigated the reasons for inconsistent findings concerning birth-order effects and extraversion. According to Sulloway (1995, 1996), one would expect first-born siblings to rate higher on one of the facets, dominance, and later-born siblings to rate higher on the other facet, sociability. In a within-family design, 96 undergraduate and graduate students rated themselves and...

In the SerboCroatian language, the relative order of subject (S), verb (V), and object (a) is flexible. All six of the pe1'mutations of those elements have identical words, meaning, and voice, and all six are grammatically acceptable. Nonetheless, sva is the dominant form. The psychological reality of this dominance was assessed in three tasb. S va was associated with the shortest latencies (an...

The contingent attentional capture hypothesis proposes that visual stimuli that do not possess characteristics relevant for the current task will not capture attention, irrespective of their bottom-up saliency. Typically, contingent capture is tested in a spatial cuing paradigm, comparing manual reaction times (RTs) across different conditions. However, attention may act through several mechani...

In same-different discrimination tasks employing isolated vowel sounds, subjects often give significantly more "different" responses to one order of two stimuli than to the other order. Cowan and Morse [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 79, 500-507 (1986)] proposed a neutralization hypothesis to account for such effects: The first vowel in a pair is assumed to change its quality in memory in the direction of...

Australia was one of the first countries to introduce random ballot ordering, and is one of the few democracies to make voting compulsory. Using all federal election results since the introduction of random ballot ordering in 1984, we estimate the magnitude and correlates of the ballot position effect in Australia. We find that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate’s voteshare ...