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Previous work suggests that unexpected and surprising experiences (e.g., living in another culture or looking at surreal images) promotes creative thinking. This targeted literature review examines whether the inherent cognitive disruption associated with experiencing the seemingly impossible has a similar effect. Correlational and experimental research across six domains (entertainment magic, fantasy play, virtual reality and computer gaming, dreaming, science fiction/fantasy, and anomalous experiences) provided consistent support for the hypothesis. In addition, anecdotal evidence illustrated the possible impact that the creative output associated with each of these areas may have had on technology, science, and the arts. It is argued that impossible experiences are an important driver of creative thinking, thus accounting for reports of such experiences across the lifespan and throughout history. The theoretical and practical implications of this work are discussed, along with recommendations for future research.

Additional file 1. Paranormal and Supernatural Beliefs Scale.

Controlled research into alleged psychic functioning can aid our understanding of the nature and limits of consciousness. Some commentators have suggested that the decline in positive results from dream precognition studies might be due to the early experiments being carried out in sleep laboratories whilst later studies tested participants in their own homes. The present study assessed this argument. Twenty participants were selected for prior precognitive dream experience, and were invited to a sleep laboratory. Participants were asked to dream about a target video they would later view. A judge rated participants' dreams against the target and decoys. No evidence was found for dream precognition. The study also tested the hypothesis that precognitive dream experiences may occur when a person subconsciously incorporates sensory information into their dream. A sound clip was played to sleeping participants and a judge rated the target and decoy clips against the participants' dream transcripts. The correlation between degree of sensory incorporation and prior precognitive dream experience was non-significant. Suggestions for future research in this area are discussed.

InFuse (infuse.mimas.ac.uk) provides easy access to aggregate data from the UK's 2011 and 2011 censuses based on a fundamental remodelling of the thousands of disparate aggregate datasets produced by the three UK census agencies into a single, integrated, standards-compliant dataset suitable for global and automated operations. To date, efforts have mainly been focussed on the enormous task of data processing. This presentation will outline the next phase of development aimed at enhancing users' experiences of InFuse. It will include details of user experience research already carried out, and the ways in which results have guided current development, as well as describing future plans, challenges and opportunities.

Batıl inançların kaynağı ve işlevi hakkında bu inançların psikolojik temelleri bazında teori geliştirmeye yönelik hatırı sayılır miktarda araştırma yapılmıştır. Bu çalışmaların çoğunda batıl inançlar Paranormal İnanç Ölçeği (PBS) ile ölçülmüştür. Ancak bu ölçek yalnızca olumsuz batıl inançlarla ilgili olup (örn: ayna kırmak kötü şans getirir), olumlu batıl inançlarını (örn: şanslı bir takı taşımak iyi şans getirir) atlamıştır. Burada bahsedilen iki çalışmada, olumlu ve olumsuz batıl inançlar ile birçok bireysel farklılık ölçekleri arasında anlamlı ilişki bulunmuştur. Bu bulgular, Paranormal İnanç Ölçeği’nin batıl inançların ölçümü için yeterli olmadığını ve olumlu batıl inançlarla ilgili maddeleri de içeren yeni ölçeklere ihtiyaç olduğunu ortaya koymakta ve böylece teori gelişimi için önemli sonuçlar içermektedir.

The UK Data Service is a resource funded to support researchers, teachers and policymakers who depend on high-quality social and economic data. It is made up of the former services ESDS, Census.ac.uk and the Secure Data Service. With the birth of the new service, we set about repurposing, as well as creating new content that met the needs of the UK Data Service. This presentation will discuss our approach to supporting our users with high quality and relevant materials within our website. These materials include dataset guides, videos, and slide-packs for teaching, as well as other web resources. In addition, we discuss how we have repurposed materials from webinars to reach a larger audience. We also discuss the steps taken to create these materials, practicalities and the lessons learnt, as well as our future plans.

In this presentation we will introduce 'UKDS.Stat' the new data delivery platform for international macrodata at the UK Data Service. We will describe the exciting new features of UKDS.Stat including: fully integrated metadatadata visualisationsearch across all datasets in one platformsave and share data subsets as queriescombine data from different datasets We will then describe how we have made it possible for users to access both Open and protected data within the same platform. Finally we will illustrate how our implementation of authentication for UKDS.Stat was shared with the Statistical Information Systems Collaboration Community (SIS-CC) – a group of organisations co-developing '.Stat'. The OECD led SIS -CC was set up so that members could benefit from a broad collaboration, sharing of experiences, knowledge and best practices, and to enable cost-effective innovation in a minimal time. Members include the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, Australian Bureau of Statistics and UNESCO.

As part of the new UK Data Service, a fresh and innovative platform for disseminating country-level international data has now been released. The new interface, UKDS.Stat, uses OECD data warehousing technology and the Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange (SDMX) standard to provide an enhanced user experience with the additional benefit of improvements to the hidden task of data ingest and processing. This presentation sets out the approach taken to choose the new DotStat software; the process of requirements gathering, assessing contenders and finally signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the OECD to work alongside other members of the Statistical Information Systems Community Collaboration team to help develop this non-commercial product. The characteristics and features of the DotStat software will be described, particularly integrated metadata, visualization and searching capabilities. We shall also mention some of the ups and downs we've encountered working with a non-commercial, community based platform. Finally we will set out a possible vision for the future for the UKDS.Stat platform whereby intergovernmental data delivered in SDMX format can be ingested and checked with a minimum of manual intervention enabling the UK Data Service to make available a huge amount of freely available country-level international data.

One of the key features of the global financial crisis was its unexpected nature. This was a paradox as extensive data is collected from around the world with the primary aim of maintaining global financial stability. This failing of our current socioeconomic data framework, combined with a more widespread dissatisfaction with the present state of statistical information on economies and societies, prompted French president Nicholas Sarkozy to set up a commission designed to identify the limits of GDP as an indicator of economic performance. In this talk, we discuss the outcomes and likely impact of the commission which reported in 2009. We also consider the production of more relevant indicators of social progress, assess the feasibility of alternative measurement tools and discuss the likelihood of their adoption. International data are also widely used by the research community, and we also present here the results of a preliminary analysis of the ESDS International web server logs showing the countries and indicators preferentially chosen by academics when looking for data to support their research. These results tell us about the kind of data researchers choose when looking for data to support their research and the future directions we should consider as providers and facilitators of cross-national data.

The Census Dissemination Unit at the UK national data centre based at the University of Manchester has been delivering Census Aggregate Statistics over the web to academics for over 10 years. The tool used to deliver it - Casweb - was once-upon-a-time innovative. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. The tool 'does the job' but users (say they) are looking for more interactivity, improved ease of use, and better ways to combine data. Achieving this is not easy given a small team whose remit is to support tens of thousands of users, as well as keeping up with changing user expectations and undertaking in-house development. And all this when the data delivery methods are changing too. Still, never ones to turn down a challenge, the team at Manchester has undertaken to update the data access system in-line with user requirements. A separate paper discusses the underpinning technology (the InFuse project based on SDMX and a data feed approach). This paper/presentation shows how we are engaging directly with users - both face to face and using social software - to get them to tell us what they really really want.

The social networking site ‘Twitter’ was used to conduct a mass participation remote viewing ESP study. The easy accessibility of Twitter made it possible to recruit and engage a large number of participants, and to give them almost immediate feedback. A majority voting technique was used to combine participants’ calls, to avoid stacking effects and to detect any group-level psi effect. For each trial an experimenter visited the target location. Blind judging was conducted with photographs of the target location and four decoy locations. Over five thousand responses were gathered over five trials. The first trial employed a non-blind judging procedure to test the hypothesis that believers would be especially likely to exhibit confirmation bias. As predicted, a significant relationship was found between belief in psychic ability and level of perceived correspondence between the participants’ impressions and the target location. The following four trials used blind judging. On each trial the group failed to identify the correct target. There was no significant relationship between belief in psychic ability and choice of target on any of the trials. Participants reporting a strong belief in psychic ability identified the correct target on one trial (exact binomial p = .41). Those participants who reported that they believed they were psychic and were confident of their response failed to identify the correct target on any trial.

http://archive.org/details/resonancesincapt1094514561 U.S. Navy (U.S.N.) authors.