Search

This study documents the results of a controlled experiment designed to quantify the abilities of forensic document examiners ( FDEs) and laypersons to detect simulations in handwritten documents. Nineteen professional FDEs and 26 laypersons (typical of a jury pool) were asked to inspect test packages that contained six (6) known handwritten documents written by the same person and two (2) questioned handwritten documents. Each questioned document was either written by the person who wrote the known documents, or written by a different person who tried to simulate the writing of the person who wrote the known document. The error rates of the FDEs were smaller than those of the laypersons when detecting simulations in the questioned documents. Among other findings, the FDEs never labeled a questioned document that was written by the same person who wrote the known documents as 'simulation.' There was a significant statistical difference between the responses of the FDEs and layperson for documents without simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creativity support tools is a research topic with high risk but potentially very high payoff. The goal is to develop improved software and user interfaces that empower users to be not only more productive but also more innovative. Potential users include software and other engineers, diverse scientists, product and graphic designers, architects, educators, students, and many others. Enhanced interfaces could enable more effective searching of intellectual resources, improved collaboration among teams, and more rapid discovery processes. These advanced interfaces should also provide potent support in hypothesis formation, speedier evaluation of alternatives, improved understanding through visualization, and better dissemination of results. For creative endeavors that require composition of novel artifacts (e.g., computer programs, scientific papers, engineering diagrams, symphonies, artwork), enhanced interfaces could facilitate exploration of alternatives, prevent unproductive choices, and enable easy backtracking. This U.S. National Science Foundation sponsored workshop brought together 25 research leaders and graduate students to share experiences, identify opportunities, and formulate research challenges. Two key outcomes emerged: (a) encouragement to evaluate creativity support tools through multidimensional in-depth longitudinal case studies and (b) formulation of 12 principles for design of creativity support tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of programmed culture training upon the performance of volunteer medical teams in Central America. Living and working in a foreign culture is notoriously difficult for a large number of people. One phenomenon, frequently observed in newcomers, is the culture shock syndrome which has been extensively described in the psychological literature. Self-instructional culture training programs, called Culture Assimilators, have been developed for Iran, Thailand, and Honduras. A number of laboratory studies have shown that programmed culture assimilators lead to improved adjustment, although not to improved productivity on the part of those who have read the assimilator programs prior to working in heterocultural group. The present study was designed specifically to investigate the effects of a task-related assimilator on the productivity of groups working for a considerable period of time. During the summer of 1967, 91 teams went to Honduras and Guatemala as voluntary public health workers. The results show that groups where the majority of members were culture assimilator trained had overall higher levels of productivity than groups containing a minority of, or no assimilator trained members.